It’s the middle of summer, and New York is following brutal, smelly heat wave with brutal, smelly heat wave. And the news—well, you know the news. But on the bright side … laughter! Yes, laughter. At the movies! I know, I know. It’s the middle of summer. Movies aren’t funny in the middle of summer. Well this year … they kind of are?!
I’ve been out here in the dark, chortling, chuckling, giggling, guffawing, and, yes, even doing a bit of tittering and tee-hee-ing. And I’ve got to tell you, whether it’s the simple belly laughs at the wonderfully ridiculous puns in The Naked Gun or the harder-edged cackles brought on by Eddington’s too-real satire, it feels great. And this month, the laughs will keep coming thanks to what may be my favorite movie of the year, the utterly bananas Splittsville, as well as the slyly funny Lurker.
There have also been some great recent flicks that are not so comical. Reid Davenport’s excellent new documentary, Life After, is a good reminder of what a cruel society we live in—as is Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby (which, granted, does have a bit of humor). And 28 Years Later might’ve made a zombie-movie fan out of me. Anyway, here are all my other favorite films of 2025 so far.
The Naked Gun
I’ll admit it: I did not expect the best studio comedy in years to star Liam Neeson in a reboot of the Naked Gun franchise. But here we are! And what a joy! Cowriter and director Akiva Schaffer brings the playful absurdity of Lonely Island sketches to a rather relentless send-up of policing, rich tech guys, and Hollywood clichés. The film hits all the right targets, and does so with perfect timing, but it’s its silliness that made me cackle—whether it was a bit involving chili dogs or an evil snowman.
Eddington
Ari Aster’s latest has been a massive commercial flop and has deeply polarized critics. It’s easy to understand why: Who wants to relive the relentless, crazed din of 2020? Eddington is a tough film to sit down for, but I found it to be a surprisingly fun watch—a genre exercise that cycles through comedy, conspiracy thriller, and action. Aster captures the toxic energy of the pandemic, poking fun at the excesses and hysteria of both Left and Right. But this isn’t an exercise in both-sides-ism. Aster has a bigger target in mind, and that is the Internet. Aster likes to say that Eddington is a movie about a data center getting built, and he’s not just being flip. This is a film about how the Internet broke—and continues to break—all of our brains. I’ve found myself thinking about it a lot since seeing it, and I imagine it will only become more powerful with time and greater distance.
28 Years Later
I’m typically not big on zombies, but it’s hard to deny the power, thrill, and bite of 28 Years Later. In reteaming 23 years after 28 Days Later, Alex Garland, who wrote the script, and Danny Boyle, who directed, are each operating at peak form. From its thorough world-building, to its visceral performances, to its tense and gruesome action sequences, 28 Years is a dynamic genre film. Remarkably, it’s also an incisive Brexit allegory.
Sorry, Baby
You can probably guess the horrible thing that happened to Agnes, who is played with easy humor, awkward charm, and flashes of raw pain by the film’s writer-director, Eva Victor. The film has a hard time naming the thing, but it’s always there in the back of your mind—anticipating it before it happens and casting a large shadow afterwards. In this way, Sorry, Baby gets at how difficult it is to ever fully escape the cloud of trauma. But Victor’s film—which is easily one of the best directorial debuts of the year—is gentle and compassionate, too, and a testament to the beauty and power of friendship.
Life After
If you’d asked me if disabled people—or any person—should have the right to die before I watched Life After, I would’ve said yes. Reid Davenport’s powerful new documentary, though, forcefully challenges that belief. Davenport focuses much of the documentary’s attention on the person who kickstarted the debate, Elizabeth Bouvia. In 1983, at 26 years old, Bouvia, who had cerebral palsy, sought “the right to die.” But Davenport probes much deeper than the legal and media circus did at the time, questioning whether Bouvia actually wanted to die or wanted to die as an alternative to the inhumane care she was facing. Now, 40-plus years after Bouvia’s case, care for people like Bouvia has barely improved, and Davenport makes a strong case that the right to die is being used to encourage society’s most expensive citizens to end things.
No Sleep Till
Alexandra Simpson’s debut feature is about a small coastal Florida town that’s expecting a hurricane. But this isn’t your average disaster movie. Like other films that have come out of the Omnes Collective (most recently Eephus and Christmas Eve at Miller’s Point), this is a slow, atmospheric ensemble film. Simpson casts a spell in capturing the sounds and images of the calm before the storm—at once tinged with nostalgia and a sense of loneliness.
Friendship
If you were wondering if Tim Robinson’s antics could sustain a feature-length movie, the answer is a resounding—if profoundly uncomfortable—yes. Director Andrew Deyoung’s feature debut brilliantly subverts the bro-ish buddy comedies of the early aughts (even casting Paul Rudd in the new-friend role), foregrounding the fractures in modern masculinity. Beyond its incisiveness, Friendship is simply one of the funniest comedies in years.
The Shrouds
David Cronenberg wrote The Shrouds after his longtime wife died of cancer in 2017, and he has acknowledged that the film was inspired by his own experience of grief. But the film dwells less on the pain of losing a loved one and more on how people channel that pain. Karsh (a Cronenberg-styled Vincent Cassel), a wealthy “producer of industrial videos,” opens a cemetery that pioneers a technology called GraveTech. It allows loved ones to view the deceased decomposing in their graves through an app on their phone. Karsh claims it’s comforting to watch his wife decompose. But when the cemetery is vandalized, Karsh becomes consumed by conspiracies. If all of this sounds rather macabre, it is—but it’s also slyly funny and one of the truest portrayals of how grief tends to mutate.
Vulcanizadora
There’s a small, slowly growing genre of Loser Men Hiking in the Woods movies. And with all due respect to Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy and India Donaldson’s Good One, the men in those films don’t hold a candle to Derek (Joel Potrykus) and his best friend Marty (Joshua Burge), the leads of Potrykus’s raw, acidic Vulcanizadora. Here, past misdeeds beget horrific new ones. Though the film can be darkly funny, Potrykus largely treats these characters with objectivity and empathy.
Sinners
You’ve got to admire Ryan Coogler for absolutely going for it. His latest blockbuster follows a pair of gangster twins, Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan) as they prepare to host a party for the non-white community in Jim Crow Mississippi. Their young cousin Sammie (a terrific Miles Catton), a gifted singer and son of a preacher, joins to play the blues. But midway through the film—and the party—things take a dramatic turn. Coogler uses genre as racial metaphor, deploying it in a way that’s both highly entertaining and smart.
Pavements
Often, music documentaries emulate the style of the artist they seek to capture. Alex Ross Perry takes a different tack with his inventive portrait of the ’90s indie rock band Pavement: He gives maximal effort to these slacker icons. Perry’s take on the band, which he clearly loves dearly, is that it contains multitudes. He captures the various sides of Pavement by channeling a core part of the band’s spirit: irony. Within the documentary, Perry stages a real musical, a fake biopic, and a pop-up museum installation. He weaves the various pieces together with a structure he says he borrowed from Dunkirk. It’s an attempt to poke fun at the ways beloved artists—from Queen to Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen—cash in on hagiographic IP. But it also provides a funny, thoughtful study of the band.
Invention
Similar to The Shrouds, grief opens the door to conspiratorial searching in Courtney Stephens’s micro-budget narrative debut. The film was born out of a collaboration with actor and writer Callie Hernandez, who plays Carrie, the daughter of a conspiracy-minded alternative-health advocate. When Carrie’s father dies, she inherits a patent for an experimental healing device. In her search for answers about the device—and, really, about her father—she meets with various acquaintances of his (a who’s who of indie filmmakers) in his small northeastern town. The film, which includes footage of Hernandez’s actual late father, captures the slow, mundane pace of life following the death of a loved one, as well as the way grief begets magical thinking.
Familiar Touch
Sarah Friedland’s first feature, Familiar Touch, has a familiar premise: Ruth (Kathleen Chalfant), a retired cook, has dementia, and she and her family must cope as she adjusts to a new way of life. The film hits many of the beats you’d expect it to—with Ruth forgetting her son, staging minor revolts at her new senior-living facility, and also bonding with some of her caregivers. And yet Friedland’s film is so gentle and well observed, with superlative performances from Chalfant and H. Jon Benjamin (playing her son), that it feels new and fresh nonetheless.
The Phoenician Scheme
Wes Anderson is nothing if not consistent. His latest stars Benicio del Toro as a wealthy 1950s industrialist, Zsa-zsa Korda, whose close brush with death leads him to reconnect with his novitiate daughter and enlist her in his latest scheme. The film delivers everything you’ve come to expect out of Wes: impeccable compositions, clever jokes, a convoluted plot, superlative performances from an all-star cast, and a fractured family coming together. It’s also, though, the most violent and religious film in Anderson’s extensive oeuvre.
April
Many months after catching April, from director Dea Kulumbegashvili, at last year’s New York Film Festival, I can still feel its weight. The film centers on Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), an obstetrician at a hospital in rural Georgia (the country, not the state) who performs underground abortions in her off-hours. The film, which verges on the surreal at times, captures the emotional toll of such work—dark, lonely, at times harrowing.
Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning
Is this movie a bit of a mess for its first two and a half hours? Yes. Do the last 30 minutes involve Tom Cruise doing some of the most bananas amazing stunts ever captured on screen? Also yes!
Eephus
Eephus, the debut feature from director Carson Lund, is set on a crisp October afternoon in a small 1990s Massachusetts town. Two rec-league baseball teams are facing off for the final game at Soldier Field. A more conventional film might take one team’s side or pit the players against an evil developer. But here the field is giving way to a public school, and these two teams are united against a different, more universal foe: time. As the hours slowly pass, the umpires clock out and the sun goes down. To finish the game, the players have to get resourceful. Though one team does come away victorious, I couldn’t tell you which. Eephus is a movie about the little moments that make baseball—and, really, life—beautiful.
Hard Truths
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a character in a movie as unrelentingly angry as Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s Pansy in Hard Truths. The actor, who last worked with director Mike Leigh in 1996’s Secrets and Lies, snarls, seethes, and sulks throughout this brilliantly funny and affecting familial drama. Though the film alludes to Pansy having had a complicated relationship with her deceased mother, Leigh treads lightly on character backstory. We never fully find out what’s going on with Pansy or how she became the person she is. But the film is so well observed that, ironically, despite how dead inside Pansy is, she is one of the most thrillingly alive humans in recent cinema.
Mickey 17
Bong Joon-ho’s long-awaited follow-up to Parasite has more in common with his previous film Okja. It’s an absurdist comedy about stupid, powerful people and their disregard for the natural world—and, really, everything and everyone other than themselves. Robert Pattinson stars as Mickey, a nasally, down-on-his-luck man who flees his earthly problems by becoming an Expendable on a mission to colonize a faraway planet. As an Expendable, his role entails dying and being reprinted. Complications arise, though, when he survives a near-death experience and a new Mickey is still printed. The two Mickeys vie for survival until they become united against a greater enemy. Will Mickey 17 win an Oscar? Probably not, but it’s a highly enjoyable, frequently funny romp nonetheless.
Misericordia
Probably the horniest, most unexpected, and, yes, most French movie that will come out this year. Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia flirts with various genres—murder mystery, film noir, sex comedy, existential drama—but ultimately is too original and weird to easily categorize. It’s a film that requires abandoning preconceived notions of how people should act and how movies should operate. And if you can do that? Well, you might just dig the wild ride.
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl begins with its protagonist, Shula (Susan Chardy), driving down a quiet road in Zambia wearing a flamboyant party costume—when she comes across a dead body splayed out in the road. The body turns out to be her uncle Fred, who we soon learn abused Shula when she was a child. Shula’s costume is one of the few showy things in this film. Nyoni unravels new wrinkles in the story gradually and with little satisfaction, showing how cultural norms can stand in the way of catharsis and family secrets enable generational trauma.
One to One: John & Yoko
This often exhilarating new documentary from Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards follows John Lennon and Yoko Ono through their early New York days, culminating in a benefit concert they played at Madison Square Garden in 1972. The concert was in support of the children of Willowbrook State School, which had recently been the subject of a damning television report that exposed the grim conditions to which children with disabilities were subjected. The film is light on new information about Lennon and Ono, but it’s full of powerful, magnetic moments, both onstage and off. Macdonald and Rice-Edwards foreground the couple’s activism and the ways it intersected with their art. Lennon, in particular, burns bright. His passion and righteousness are captivating and contagious. More than 50 years later, Lennon and Ono’s political battles are still being fought—and Lennon’s enthusiasm still feels capable of igniting a revolution.
Presence
A dozen years after announcing a short-lived retirement, Stephen Soderbergh has emerged as America’s most prolific filmmaker. His first of two films this year is a ghost story predicated on a formal conceit: The camera takes the perspective of the ghost. The specter dwells in a beautiful suburban home that a family of four has just moved into. And though there is some suspense around the ghost’s identity and aims, the draw of the movie is the family drama. Lucy Liu and Chris Sullivan play the parents of two frequently bickering high-school-aged teenagers, Chloe (Callina Liang) and Tyler (Eddy Maday). And the family dynamics—the alliances, sources of conflict, and secrets—are vivid and intriguing. Each actor is smartly cast and gives a strong performance. I’m still not sure I liked the dramatic ending and climactic reveal, but the film’s clever conceit and rich characters make Presence a worthwhile watch.
Universal Language
One of several intertwined plots in director Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language involves a Winnipeg tour guide (Pirouz Nemati) who takes a rare group of visitors to some of the city’s cultural landmarks. This Winnipeg is an invention of Rankin and his cowriters (Nemati and Ila Firouzabadi), and it is one that is full of brown and beige brutalist buildings, roaming turkeys, and a Persian-speaking populace. It’s also one where the city’s landmarks are amusingly mundane. My favorite was the UNESCO-designated site where someone left a briefcase at a bus stop and no one touched it. It’s “a monument to absolute inter-human solidarity, even at its most basic and banal,” the tour guide explains. You could say the same for the film. Throughout Universal Language, Rankin and his collaborators are imaginative, playful, and quite witty, but the overarching goal of their project is to testify to humanity’s potential for care and exuberance, even in a bleak, beige world.
Warfare
Before seeing Warfare, I was warned that it is loud. Still, I wasn’t prepared for just how loud—body shaking—this thing would be. Fresh off his speculative American war film, Civil War, Alex Garland teamed up with Ray Mendoza (an Iraq-war vet and advisor on Civil War) to re-create a brutal battle that Mendoza’s platoon experienced in Ramadi in 2006. The film is drawn exclusively from the memories of Mendoza and his platoon, and it plays out over the course of a day. Ultimately, the film expresses the trauma of war as much as a film is capable of doing—thanks to the sound, yes, but also the subtly pathos-filled performances. It’s an incredibly intense watch and one that foregrounds the true horror of war.
