The Best Movies of 2025 (So Far)

Last summer, the big story of my halfway-mark honor roll was horror, elevated and otherwise: movies anxiously mapping our public and private twilight zones. Things are still plenty scary in 2025, but for my money, the smartest filmmakers are the ones using genre elastically, to stretch our ideas about fear to and past their breaking points. For example: The Shrouds is a comedy, and Friendship is a horror movie (and they’re both about app developers). What the best films of the year so far share is a tone of quiet, creeping uncertainty; they’re riddled with images wide open to interpretation and endings that leave loose ends dangling all over the place. This nagging sense of incompletion is all the more reason to consider my picks provisional—or maybe as a cliff-hanger before the impending award-season stampede brings us one auteur project after another.