The Best Shots of 2025

“The idea of photographing a cellphone is just death,” Robert Eggers said earlier this year, and as long as he keeps making portentous horror period pieces (next up: 13th-century werewolves!), he should be able to keep his lunch down. Scrolling through my picks for the most arresting and affecting cinematic images of 2025, though, I couldn’t help but notice how many of them involved cellphones, computer screens, and other pieces of consumer-grade technology—a sign of filmmakers doing their best not to turn a blind eye to the times, but to meet the multimedia gaze head-on. As usual with this annual project, the goal isn’t so much to choose the most beautiful or most “perfect” frames of the year as to spotlight moments that distilled something larger about either the movies they appeared in or the world beyond the frame.  I also tried to create at least a bit of variance between the selections here and the movies on my 10-be