Popcorn Culture: 2025 Flashback: Movies

Well, folks. We've reached the end of another year. That means it's time to take a look back at the best and worst of movies, music, television, and books of 2025 in this blog's 13th yearly flashback! And I will say that 13 has indeed proven to be somewhat unlucky. At certain points in 2025, I was worried that it was an even worse year for movies than 2023, which was the worst for the cinematic art form since I was born (and I'm including 2020 in those calculations).

Thankfully, things didn't get quite that dire. But this year nevertheless presented us with an endless string of disappointments and desperately middling productions. However, it is my solemn duty to separate the wheat from the chaff, and there were some fertile stalks scattered throughout the year.

Some quick housekeeping before we get started. As usual, I remind you that nobody's taste is bad or wrong. There is no such thing as objective quality in art, and these lists are purely my opinion. I use words like "Best" and "Worst" because they're fun, not because they're legally binding across all people forever. If your opinion frequently differs from mine, maybe my "worst" lists will point you toward movies you'll enjoy more than my "best." It's all a matter of "looking at things another way," as Fiyero might say in one of the many movies that failed to make strong bids for my Top 10.

Also, there will be some mild spoilers on this list. It's unavoidable. But I've marked anything that is a major spoiler for the ending of a movie. Anyway, on with the show!

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MOVIES

2025 Movies I Missed That I Wish I Had Seen Before Compiling This List: The Ugly Stepsister, The Plague, The Conjuring: Last Rites, Together, Snow White, Lurker, One of Them Days

2025 Movies That I Missed, Don't Regret Missing, and Will Go Out of My Way to Continue Missing Until the End of Linear Time: The Electric State, Tron: Ares, A Minecraft Movie, Avatar: Fire & Ash, The Smashing Machine, F1 The Movie, Karate Kid: Legends, Eddington, Smurfs, Hurry Up Tomorrow

2025 Movies That I Have Removed From Top 10 Consideration Because I Personally Know People Involved in the Productions: Heart Eyes, Silent Night, Deadly Night

The Ten Best Movies of 2025

#10 100 Nights of Hero

100 Nights of Hero insists upon threading in themes about the power of storytelling that never really click with everything else, so I was a little disappointed by that. However, this caustic comedy of manners taking place inside a lightly fantastical, cartoonishly repressed world is hilarious no matter what subtext it pretends to have. Stars Maika Monroe, Emma Corrin, and Nicholas Galitzine ping off one another in an incredibly watchable parade of brittle, weird scenes.

#9 Queens of the Dead

Queens of the Dead, which is the feature directorial debut of Tina "Daughter of George" Romero, suffers from some of the narrative and visual limitations inherent to being a low-budget zombie movie. However, it makes up for those limitations with a talented cast jam-packed with an astonishing number of the leading lights of contemporary queer cinema. The performers absolutely nail the comedy, but they also get the opportunity to pour their skills into a group of exquisitely layered characters whose lives and deaths alike hold profound meaning.

Honestly, the first 20 minutes of this movie were so inherently interesting that I was almost dreading the arrival of the zombie apocalypse, because I was perfectly happy just to spend 100 minutes watching these characters put on a drag show in Bushwick.

#8 A Nice Indian Boy

I have a few quibbles with A Nice Indian Boy as it relates to the movie's genre. For instance, take the romance, which follows the blossoming love between Indian-American doctor Naveen Gavaskar (Karan Soni) and white photographer Jay Kurundkar (Joanthan Groff), who was adopted by Indian parents. It leans hard on its talented leads in order to paper over the fact that it is using rom-com tropes as a crutch to get away with a haphazard construction. And for a movie so indebted to Bollywood, it needs a more bombastic ending.

Regardless, it is such a delight to get a comedy movie in 2025 that has actual laugh-out-loud, capital-J Jokes, especially when they are delivered by this coterie of charming performers.

#7 Companion

Companion is a sci-fi thriller movie with enough twists and turns that you don't see all of them coming from a mile away, and it milks every aspect of its near-future premise to satisfying effect. Plus, you can't go wrong when you cast both of our most reliable rising genre movie stars, Sophie Thatcher and Jack Quaid.

#6 Borderline

It takes a lot to upstage Samara Weaving, who is the number one Scream Queen of the modern era, but Ray Nicholson manages to do it in Borderline, with his layered and fascinating performance of a stalker who is obsessed with a pop star in the 1990s. His final shot in the movie gives him just as much to chew on as Mia Goth gets in the end of Pearl, and he makes a meal out of every second of it.

The cat-and-mouse movie is relatively pared down, but it only has one major low (Grey's Anatomy star Eric Dane's performance is flatter than the drywall behind him) and quite a few extraordinary highs, both as an intense thriller and an off-kilter comedy.

#5 Weapons

I hope and pray that Zach Cregger's number one takeaway from this and Barbarian isn't that he should always stop his stories dead every twenty minutes or so and restart. I would like that to go away, please. But in spite of its flaws, Weapons is still an exhilarating ride, and the director continues to shine by elevating primordial domestic fears (shadowy basements, the other sides of doors, etc.) to operatically terrifying heights.

#4 Griffin in Summer

I will allow that I am predisposed toward liking queer coming-of-age stories. But it's not my fault that people keep making great ones in the 2020s! Like many of these movies, the plot treads pretty well-worn territory, but Griffin in Summer is an effortlessly endearing and well-performed exploration of how the early stirrings of sexual attraction can drive a freight train through one's life.

#3 28 Years Later

Director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland have made a lot of movies (both great and... otherwise) in the years since they last collaborated. So this could have gone in any direction. Do I wish it had tipped in a slightly scarier direction? Sure. But I'm nevertheless very grateful to have this superb, elegantly shot drama about the loss of innocence and the decay of national identity.

#2 Final Destination Bloodlines

Somehow, no matter how many new filmmakers they throw at this franchise, its (almost) unimpeachable record for delivering stellar sequels continues untarnished. Final Destination Bloodlines takes a risky approach (having Death target an entire family lineage) but somehow expertly weaves that into the pre-existing mythology of the series while still delivering the high-concept, Rube Goldbergian murder sequences that gorehounds have come to know and love.

#1 Twinless

I almost skipped Twinless because its logline (two men form a tight, codependent bond after meeting at a support group for people whose twin siblings have died) made it seem a bit too maudlin for me. I'm so happy I was convinced to give it a shot, because while it is indeed absolutely, unrepentantly sad, it is also a hilarious comedy, a nail-biting thriller, and a perfectly sweaty erotic drama. This level of deft genre-bending should not be possible in a sophomore feature, but James Sweeney nails the hell out of it. Plus he throws some of the most well-drawn characters of the year into the mix, just to show off a little bit.

Best 2024 Movie I Missed: Rachel Bloom: Death, Let Me Do My Special

OK, so this is technically not a movie. But it's a superb comedy special that expertly blends musical theater, raunchy jokes, and existential dread. It's heartfelt and funny, which is something I have come to expect from Rachel Bloom, who has so far never disappointed me. Her Crazy Ex-Girlfriend co-star David Hull is also superb as Death itself. His comic timing is almost impossibly precise and he is a spectacular second banana.

Best 2023 Movie I Missed: Birth/Rebirth

The reason it took me so long to watch this horror-adjacent movie about a nurse teaming with a mad scientist to try and resurrect her dead daughter is that I thought it was going to be... well, depressing. It's not not depressing, but it's also surprisingly funny, in a brittle and sardonic way. Plus, Judy Reyes really shines in what might actually be her first lead role since Scrubs. It certainly feels that way, at the very least. An underseen gem! Check it out!

The Five Worst Movies of 2025

#5 Champagne Problems

I watch a lot of Netflix's insipid holiday rom-coms, and they're usually generic enough to avoid ending up on this list. But Champagne Problems, about a young woman who falls in love with the scion of a champagne company while on a business trip in France, is an outright disaster. It's a collection of the most frustratingly tiresome tropes that completely fails to be buoyed by the charmless, vacant lead performance from Minka Kelly. Plus, this movie features some of the most hatefully front-and-center AI slop I've ever seen in an allegedly professional production.

#4 Good Fortune

I would like to formally submit a cease and desist to the online movement dedicated to reframing Keanu Reeves as a good actor in the wake of the John Wick movies. The man is a movie star. No doubt about that. He has many talents, but the delivery of dialogue is not chief among them. For Exhibit A, I would like to submit this comedy where he plays a bumbling guardian angel, which bets the farm on the idea that having him say absurd lines about "chicken nuggies" and the like will be inherently funny. Friends, it is not.

If I absolutely have to point to an external source for this pancake-flat, soul-draining performance, I can blame director and co-star Aziz Ansari, who shows no innate talent for guiding actors. As evidenced by the parade of unsettling supporting performances around the fringes of this inert, depressing, laugh-a-fortnight comedy.

#3 Fear Street: Prom Queen

Netflix's original Fear Street trilogy wasn't a masterpiece or anything, but at least it was fun. The standalone spinoff Prom Queen isn't remotely fun. It can't even manage to be a down-the-middle slasher movie. Boring, stupid characters bring an awful, stupid script to life amid a slew of bland murders on prom night. No, thank you.

#2 Love Hurts

Ke Huy Quan tries his best to bring some sparkle to these laborious dialogue scenes that are liberally sprinkled with tedious action sequences, but sometimes there's just no saving a bad movie from itself.

#1 Sweet Revenge

They started off on the wrong foot by deciding that the first official Friday the 13th film in 16 years should be a commercial for hard cider. But then they severed that foot entirely by making said hard cider shilling short into a hellaciously stupid riff on the Adam and Eve story with an ending that promises that whatever comes next will be even more stupid.

Best Worst Movie: The Strangers: Chapter 2

This insipid, perilously dumb, often boring sequel might not have prevailed if 2025 was a stronger year for bad-good cinema. However, in spite of how generic it feels on a scene-to-scene basis (killer shows up, girl hides, girl fights back but drops the weapon after one hit, repeat), there's a bit of oddball texture to a lot of it. I certainly can't say I expected the heroine of a home invasion trilogy to fight a wild boar at any point. Also, I do relish how Chapter 2 is actually the fourth installment in the overall franchise.

Worst 2024 Movie I Missed: Babygirl

I actually saw this on New Year's Eve, a few hours after posting my 2024 Flashback. I was viewing it with an eye toward sneaking back and amending my Top 10, but boy was I disappointed. This movie was billed as a saucy exploration of sexual boundaries, but let's just say that Babygirl lied on its Tinder profile.

It's too elliptical with its characterizations to properly dig deep into sexuality, and Harris Dickinson's mealy-mouthed performance as Nicole Kidman's hot intern makes their scenes together almost unbearable. Even as written, those scenes are a waste of time, portraying two people tentatively poking at BDSM like it's a dead squirrel on the side of the road, and then having vanilla intercourse over and over and over again.

Best Legacy Sequel: Final Destination Bloodlines

An absolutely perfect sendoff for late horror legend Tony Todd. No notes.

Worst Legacy Sequel: I Know What You Did Last Summer

The movie is fine, but the return of Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr. as Julie James and Ray Bronson is just a reminder of how thin this mediocre slasher franchise's legacy actually is.

Best Dramatic Actor: Dylan O'Brien, Twinless

It is so so easy to overpraise performers for crafting two distinct characters in a single movie (in this case, O'Brien plays both the co-lead and his late twin brother). However, he doubles down on that by shading his taciturn primary character so delicately that the moment when said character's foundations crack in an emotionally lacerating monologue, it hits with all the wallop of a cartoon anvil.

PS: His distinct characterizations of the two twins are really great, also. Just saying.

Best Comedic Actor: Milo Manheim, Z-O-M-B-I-E-S 4: Dawn of the Vampires

From the time when the first Z-O-M-B-I-E-S movie muddled its way onto the Disney Channel in 2018, it was obvious that the then 17-year-old Milo Manheim was a true blue star in the making. Since then, he has honed his raw charisma and showmanship into a sharp point. The Milo of Dawn of the Vampires expertly uses his impossibly long limbs to pull off impressive feats of choreography and physical comedy, making every moment sparkle. I dread the inevitable fifth movie, when his character will either be sidelined or absent. It just won't be the same.

Best Dramatic Actress: Radhika Apte, Sister Midnight

Sister Midnight, which is a lightly magical realist tale about a woman feeling trapped in the early days of her arranged marriage in Mumbai, doesn't quite come together as a successful allegory. However, it wouldn't get anywhere near as close as it got without Radhika Apte, who is in nearly every single frame of this movie and commands them all. Her character, Uma, isn't the talkative type. Nevertheless, Apte's expressive face and body force you into her discomfiting headspace.

Best Comedic Actress: Pamela Anderson, The Naked Gun

Pamela Anderson gets the assignment as much, or perhaps even more, than Liam Neeson does. Her straight-faced femme fatale approach to her role makes the zany comedy really sing. The best moment of the Naked Gun reboot by far is her sublimely ridiculous, deeply committed, scat performance at a jazz club, and it only succeeds because Anderson approaches it with absolutely no ego, letting pure comedy flow through her.

Best Dramatic Supporting Actor: Ben Wang, The Long Walk

With a premise so pared-down (50 teenagers compete in a deadly, dystopian walking competition), The Long Walk had no choice but to lean on its screenplay and its performances in order to deliver its biggest thrills. The entire cast (with the notable and unfortunate exception of Mark Hamill) delivers on this front, but Ben Wang is one of the biggest standouts, expertly spitting out corny Stephen King dialogue while forcing the audience through the harrowing ordeal of watching an exuberant spirit being slowly torn apart, splinter by splinter.

Best Comedic Supporting Actor: Billy Magnussen, Lilo & Stitch

Hollywood has spent the better part of a decade trying to figure out exactly what the hell to do with Billy Magnussen, and it's a shame because he can make even the most unforgiving roles sing. I only expected to experience abject misery during the misbegotten live-action Lilo & Stitch remake, and if I had anticipated being given one spark of joy, I would never have expected it to come from the Pleakley character. But there we go. Magnussen is effortlessly charming onscreen, and we all sin by underestimating him.

Best Dramatic Supporting Actress: Judy Greer, The Long Walk

It would be very easy to play a role like this very big (in fact, this is the route that Greer's co-star Mark Hamill chooses for playing the antagonist in The Long Walk). However, Greer goes small wherever possible, to make her big moments stand out. She is a woman so wracked with anxiety for her son that she has shattered into a million pieces. All her effort is going into holding those pieces together, but you can see the raw nerve pulsating underneath.

She has one or two deeply compelling dramatic outbursts throughout the movie, but my favorite moment is the tiny little move she makes when she thinks (incorrectly) that her son is about to kiss her goodbye. The crushing disappointment contained in that tiny little flicker of motion (which I can more or less guarantee wasn't in the script) has much more devastating power than an explosive screaming fit would have.

Best Comedic Supporting Actress: Zarna Garg, A Nice Indian Boy

Comedian Zarna Garg made her feature debut in A Nice Indian Boy, but you wouldn't know it. Her performance as a well-meaning, but ultimately clueless mother who is trying to support her gay son in all the wrong ways (including watching 2008's Milk, which she describes in what might just be the most hilarious scene of the movie) is absolute perfection. An actress with decades of onscreen performances under her belt couldn't have possibly made this role feel more lived-in and sharply funny.

Best Trans/Nonbinary Actor: Emma Corrin, 100 Nights of Hero

100 Nights of Hero is a deeply odd movie, but Corrin completely understands what energy it needs in order to thrive. They are a perfect fit for the stiff, caustic comedy of manners that dominates the first half, contorting their body and face into precise angles that accentuate the absurdity of the situation.

They also sell the hell out of the more serious moments, which is helpful, because in the hands of a lesser actor, those scenes simply wouldn't work at all. Instead, they feel emotionally real even though they never gel properly with the rest of the movie. And that's the single thing that most makes 100 Nights of Hero a charming, if flawed, movie and not a complete wreck.

Best Trans/Nonbinary Supporting Actor: Jack Haven, Queens of the Dead

I've previously highlighted Jack Haven's work elevating the mediocre horror movie Amelia's Children (in which they were credited under their former name). However, Queens of the Dead gives them a much better foundation from which to springboard their talents, and they seize the opportunity. Their character Kelsey is a high-femme kook who drives all of the most absurdly hilarious moments of the horror-comedy.

Haven (who at this point I'm convinced can do literally anything) dominates the screen in every moment, including the best scene of the movie, in which Kelsey is all alone on the dance floor, clutching a leg wound and nervously singing a song to herself about how everything is going to be just fine.

Best Child Actor: Everett Blunck, Griffin in Summer

Just like Elsie Fisher in Eighth Grade, Everett Blunck has a preternatural skill for depicting an adolescent character with all the subtlety of someone twice his age. Griffin is a character who is riddled with yearnings he doesn't quite understand and acts on them by pretending to be something he's not, without realizing how much he's failing.

I simply cannot understand how you pull of this layered character without having aged a decade or so beyond junior high and gained the ability to look back on your past actions with some measure of wisdom. It's a remarkable tightrope act, and Blunck is the best part of a movie that is almost entirely composed of best parts.

Best Ensemble: Everything's Going to be Great

This indie dramedy, about a family led by a patriarch who chases his Broadway dreams to the detriment of pretty much everyone, can't quite decide whether it's a heartwarming romp or a caustic satire. The script was super all over the place, but it was honestly difficult to notice that because the movie was held together by its stars and the perfect, hilarious, rat-a-tat way that they volleyed dialogue back and forth.

Bryan Cranston and Allison Janney are superb as a pair of mismatched parents, but Jack Champion (Scream VI) and Benjamin Evan Ainsworth (the upcoming Legend of Zelda movie) keep on their level the entire time as their pair of even more mismatched sons. The movie doesn't skimp on fleshing out any of its characters, and it was very right to do so, just settling in and letting the cast shine. The supporting characters are also phenomenally rendered thanks to stars like Chris Cooper and Simon Rex being willing to poke their heads in for a few scenes apiece.

Best Stunt Casting: Anthony Hopkins, Locked

Anthony Hopkins quite literally phones in the majority of his performance in Locked, in which he tortures Bill Skarsgård's petty thief Eddie by trapping him in a tricked-out SUV and torturing him remotely. Given the circumstances, there is really no practical reason for the octogenarian performance to be having so much fun with the role, imbuing it a liveliness and sense of wry humor. But he does so anyway, and the movie is very much the better for it.

2025 Breakout: Ray Nicholson

After bubbling under for a while, Jack Nicholson's son Ray got a tertiary role in 2024's Smile 2 that, if nothing else, landed him and his pearly whites on a bunch of movie posters. But nothing I'd seen from him before could have possibly prepared me for the one-two punch of his tremendous starring role in Borderline (as a pathetic weirdo) and his delectable supporting performance in Novocaine (as a charismatic, effortlessly sexy villain).

The cherry on top of all this is the fact that these two movies featuring Nicholson as totally opposite characters, both of which he brings to life perfectly, debuted on the same weekend.

Best Couple: Leah & Kai, Worth the Wait

You've probably not heard of Tubi's romantic ensemble movie Worth the Wait, and that's for a good reason. It's almost entirely bland and forgettable. But the storyline that centers on Lana Condor and Ross Butler's star-crossed lovers is elevated by their crackling chemistry, which can't even be lessened by the fact that they spend the majority of the movie video chatting with one another from opposite ends of the globe.

Worst Couple: Marvin & Rose, Love Hurts

Never mind the fact that Ke Huy Quan and Ariana DeBose have a 21-year age gap. That's not the problem here (though it doesn't help). The problem is that these two people don't even have the chemistry of total strangers exchanging insurance information after a fender bender. Let alone the chemistry required to pull off this film's misbegotten storyline about long-separated lovers finding their way back to one another.

Best Villain: Dave Crealy, The Rule of Jenny Pen

This twisted tale of an elderly tyrant torturing his fellow occupants of a nursing home could not work if its septuagenarian villain was anything less than perfect. Thankfully, they got John Lithgow, whose range is more or less unmatched in modern cinema. Lithgow crafts a flawed and deeply sinister character whose vitality is both electric and terrifying.

Worst Villain: Lex Luthor, Superman

Nicholas Hoult deserves something much meatier to play than "guy who shouts battleship moves at his minions while fighting Superman from a command center."

Best Cameo: Mom, Caught Stealing

I've decided not to spoil this reveal, because it comes as such a pleasant surprise in a mostly charming movie that was assuredly underseen. But trust me, it's a delight!

Worst Cameo: Skeet Ulrich, Five Nights at Freddy's 2

I knew better than to expect Skeet Ulrich and Matthew Lillard to share the screen in this alleged Scream reunion. However, couldn't we have found something better for him to do than exhaustedly deliver boring exposition in exactly one scene?

Best Costume: Olivia Colman's Wimple, Paddington in Peru

There is frequently something humorous about formal religious dress, but no nun costume has been put to better use than the one given to the always-stellar Olivia Colman. Her face is a heat-seeking missile of comedy as is, and the fact that this costume isolates it from any other part of her body puts a magnifying glass on every little hilarious twitch, to great effect.

Worst Costume: The Daywalker Uniforms, Z-O-M-B-I-E-S 4: Dawn of the Vampires

"OK, it's time to design the costumes for the daywalkers."

"Sure thing, boss. ...What are daywalkers?"

"The script never really explains. Vampires with sun powers or something."

"Uh... OK. Well, let's give them white bases, to contrast with the black of the vampires. Blood is red and the sun is yellow, so maybe I can pull out our boxes of yellow and red accent pieces... Eh, there are a few zippers and patches and random things, we don't have enough of the same items to make consistent costumes for the whole ensemble."

"You know what, fuck it, I don't want to drive out to the store again, just close your eyes, dump those boxes out, and glue the accent pieces on wherever they happen to fall."

"You got it, boss!'

Best Cinematography: Twinless

Twinless makes some big swings, cinematographically, including a splitscreen scene that imperceptibly changes into a single shot, but even when it's not showing off, it is simply a gorgeous movie,

Worst Cinematography: Wicked: For Good

This movie takes the desaturated sludge of the 2024 Wicked and multiples it tenfold. The night scenes are inscrutable, the day scenes are washed-out, and most of the best numbers are marred by punishingly ugly shot compositions. I'm sorry for having to drag your attention back to the above image, but who the fuck thought that this crowded, poo-brown, murky cataclysm of a shot was ready for the big screen?

Best Editing: 28 Years Later

Although it seems strange at first, the aggressive, collage-style editing that slams images of zombie brutality together with historical footage and clips from war movies is perhaps the most thematically potent element of the entire movie. It presents a fractured, kaleidoscopic view of a now long-dead Britain, bringing to life the last scraps of the barely-remembered history of a dying land. It's weighty stuff, let me tell you what.

Worst Editing: I Know What You Did Last Summer

This movie features the most egregious crossing of the 180-degree line that I've seen since, well... since 2021's I Know What You Did Last Summer series. So maybe the bad editing in this legacy sequel is another little franchise easter egg. It's still terrible, though.

Best CGI Creation: Toothless, How to Train Your Dragon

I was prepared to hate the live-action How to Train Your Dragon remake as much as Lilo & Stitch. While it has substantial flaws (including the copious underlit, low-contrast sequences that are the bane of modern filmmaking), those melt away whenever we get to spend time with this adorable dragon and his giant green eyes.

Worst CGI Creation: Boots, Dora and the Search for Sol Dorado

What's that on your shoulder, Dora? Do you see it too? Quick! Kill it before it sucks out your soul!

Best Post-Credits Scene: I Know What You Did Last Summer

I feel like the sequel promised in this post-credits scene is never going to happen, but it's still a hell of a lot of fun to have Brandy reprise her I Still Know What You Did Last Summer role, even for just a few minutes.

Worst Post-Credits Scene: Superman

I know the newly rebranded DCU doesn't want to follow in the footsteps of the DCEU and make promises it can't keep, like when the Black Adam post-credits scene famously brought back Henry Cavill's Superman. But when one of your post-credits scenes is just a useless shot that is literally on the IMAX posters for the movie, why bother putting it in there at all? Talk about giving the game away. I'd truly have rather had nothing.

Best Soundtrack: KPop Demon Hunters

It's hard enough to make one song for a fictional group that sounds like it would be a legitimate smash hit, but "Golden" and "Soda Pop" in particular are astoundingly good at evoking real-life KPop hits. And the movie truly put its money where its mouth is, what with smashing all those Billboard records.

Worst Soundtrack: Another Simple Favor

This isn't so much bad as it is disappointing. After the first movie was jam-packed with slinky, stylish French songs, it seemed like a no-brainer to get similarly enticing Italian tracks to score the Capri-set sequel. No such luck, I'm afraid. There's plenty of Italian music, but the vibes are thoroughly off.

Best Needle Drop: "Santa's Watching" Morgan Ames and Doug Thiele, Silent Night, Deadly Night

The faux Christmas songs that Ames & Co. provided for the original 1984 Silent Night, Deadly Night are the best thing about the movie, and I would have revolted if we had gotten a second remake of the iconic holiday horror movie that failed to acknowledge this.

Worst Needle Drop: "You Can Call Me Al" Paul Simon, A Merry Little Ex-Mas

The movie had a running gag where the main couple's nicknames are a reference to "You Can Call Me Al," so it makes sense that they would end the movie with this needle drop. However, they do a mighty disservice to one of my favorite songs of all time, chopping and screwing it into oblivion as if they're scared that playing an undiluted chunk of the song might accidentally bring the audience pleasure. (You might think that pleasure would be the primary goal of a Netflix Christmas rom-com, but having seen the preceding 87 minutes of A Merry Little Ex-Mas, I can guarantee you that this is not always the case.)

Best Original Song: "Kerosene" Z-O-M-B-I-E-S 4: Dawn of the Vampires

"Kerosene" still suffers from the Z-O-M-B-I-E-S movies' tendency toward awkward rhyming ("But I'm fightin' off my feelings 'cause I'm not sure if I'm strong enough/Then a voice inside my head says, 'You got this, bruh'" is already pretty bad, but "Keep your distance 'cause the pulse is gettin' dangerous/This could be your last day unless I'm saving us," is a nuclear disaster), but there is a compelling argument to be made that it's the best song in the entire Disney Channel musical franchise.

Milo Manheim's rapping has never been better, Meg Donnelly's singing has never been better, and they come together on a composition that is catchy and propulsive.

Worst Original Song: "Dream As One" Avatar: Fire and Ash

The genre of "song designed to play over the end credits of a blockbuster and earn an Oscar nomination" is home to all of the worst tracks you'll ever hear by every artist you'll ever love. So please don't mistake me for coming after Miley Cyrus, whose work I generally admire. "Dream As One" is simply par for the course, though it is incredibly random that she was picked for a James Cameron movie (Is Miley the Celine Dion of our times? I wouldn't say so, and I don't think she'd want me to).

The main thing that this song is treacly and boring. Yes, those are requirements of the genre, but I will continue to rail against it with every fiber of my being. Also, "Dream As One" feels like it was written for the opening sequence of a James Bond movie, rather than an epic sci-fi franchise. So there's a cognitive dissonance in addition to an auditory one.

Best Musical Sequence: Spirits, Sinners

This fantasy musical number about the power of music connecting the past and the future via the spirits it connects through space and time is elegant, gorgeous, and a profound shock to the system. After spending the first half of the movie locked specifically in a 1930s setting, the sudden appearance of costumes and musical elements from both the distant past and recent decades is a freeing, exhilarating experience.

Worst Musical Sequence: "For Good" Wicked: For Good

Jon M. Chu simply cannot stop himself from fumbling the bag. After ruining "Defying Gravity" in 2024, he tarnishes the best song of act two of Wicked by framing it in murky darkness with a ceaselessly spinning camera that shows off how much endless, plentiful, pathetic nothingness is surrounding these two well-wrought characters.

Best Monster: Willie, Screamboat

This Steamboat Willie-inspired slice of public domainsploitation is shockingly not a bottom-of-the-barrel effort, and that is almost entirely due to David Howard Thornton's performance as the homicidal mouse. He genuinely seems to have put a lot of thought into how a cartoon character might behave in a live-action slasher movie, and the results are delightful.

Worst Monster: The Unicorn, Death of a Unicorn

Death of a Unicorn wants its titular creatures to be cosmic and awe-inspiring, which really makes you wonder why they chose to render them so gray and lifeless.

Biggest Laugh: The Cackle, Wicked: For Good

Ariana Grande is somehow best in show again in a cast full of cinematic titans. One of the only fun parts of Wicked: For Good is Glinda mocking Elphaba's "wicked witch" laugh and hilariously failing to capture it thanks to her thin, warbly voice.

Biggest Cry: The Monologue, Twinless

I know I've talked about this already, but nothing else in 2025 got me choking and spluttering like a faulty garbage disposal in quite the same way.

Biggest Scream: Marcus Runs, Weapons

I might have been frustrated with Weapons' stop-start narrative, but Zach Cregger sure did find excellent ways to end each chapter with a major shock, and a bug-eyed Benedict Wong suddenly barreling in was perhaps the best.

Biggest Squirm: Weight Lifting, Clown in a Cornfield

No, I'm not talking about the grisly kill perpetrated by Frendo the Clown in this scene. I'm talking about this character's alarmingly terrible weight-lifting form. I had to watch this sequence from behind my fingers, because I was terrified he was going to snap his own spine in half before Frendo ever even got to him.

Biggest Thirst: Julius Existing, On Swift Horses

Jacob Elordi's character does whatever he wants in this otherwise mediocre LGBTQ+ historical drama, and those instincts are superb. Whether it's lounging on a car shirtless or making out with Diego Calva or literally anything else, he looks damn fine while doing it.

Biggest Scene Stealer: Glen Powell's Towel, The Running Man

This scene wasn't even a runner-up for Biggest Thirst, because my only thought for every second it was happening was "how on Earth is that towel staying on?"

Best Kill: The MRI Machine, Final Destination Bloodlines

How bad do you think an MRI moment is going to go in a Final Destination movie? This one goes worse.

Best Breakfast: French Toast, Oh, Hi!

This might be a one-off category that never comes back, but just one year after Strange Darling's arresting breakfast scene hit cinemas in 2024, we got Molly Gordon haphazardly making French toast with her fingers in order to feed her tied-up boyfriend, so we might have a trend of disturbing and compelling breakfast sequences on our hands. I sure hope we do.

Best Title: Spinal Tap II: The End Continues

First of all, RIP to cinema icon Rob Reiner. Second of all, I find that this title for the legacy sequel to his iconic mockumentary is both a fun jab at the state of modern IP filmmaking and a totally in-universe approach that evokes the somewhat muddled and self-serious thought processes of the members of the titular band.

Worst Title: A Merry Little Ex-Mas

It's the worst kind of pun, combining two things that have already been mutated beyond recognition. An "Ex-Mas" isn't a thing, and the forced wordplay doesn't properly indicate how exes might figure into the storyline. Then there's the issue that the song isn't called "Have Yourself a Merry Little Xmas" in the first place. It's a linguistic nightmare of ex-pic proportions.

Best Line: "Goodbye, Dorothy! Bye, Dodo!" Wicked: For Good

Hey look! Yet another place where Ariana Grande was the singular saving grace of this movie. Glinda passing herself off as a cheery Good Witch but unintentionally getting the name of Dorothy's dog wrong is an excellent start to a pretty charming running gag about how little the story of The Wizard of Oz actually matters to the main characters of Wicked and how they are feeling at any given moment.

Worst Line: "Prime Air!... It's the future of delivery. They've been training us for months." War of the Worlds

The power of Amazon delivery saving the day in an Amazon Prime movie? Honestly, maybe we need the data-eating aliens from this movie to come down from space and do us a favor.

Best Poster: Amarga Navidad

The teaser poster for Pedro Almodóvar's upcoming return to Spanish-language filmmaking (I can't wait!) is perfectly in line with his aesthetic sensibilities. It harnesses the bold color palette and collage aesthetic that he displayed so provocatively throughout the 1980s, but in a way that overwhelms and alarms, presumably evoking the "bitter Christmas" promised by the title.

Worst Poster: M3GAN 2.0

This aggressive collage of clashing hot pink and slate gray squares must have been a mockup some intern made, right? This can't have been the plan for the real official poster all along, right?!

Best Poster For a Bad Movie: Another Simple Favor

Another Simple Favor had its moments, but it was a disappointing followup to the very fun original movie. The poster at least captures some of the aesthetic sensibilities of the original hit. It's a little bit wry, a little bit chic, and those bold colors are divine.

Worst Poster For a Good Movie: The Running Man

Calling The Running Man "good" might be a bit of a stretch. It was fine. But this poster is certainly bad enough that there's still a good solid gulf of quality to work with here. Glen Powell clearly learned a lot from working with Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick, because on this poster he is running like he just had his limbs installed that morning. What, bless him, what is meant to be going on with the positioning of his hands?

Also, he's way too tiny on this poster. Foregrounding this shitty ring of clip art guns isn't helping matters whatsoever.

Top Five Movie Discoveries

#5 Villains

This taut thriller starring Bill Skarsgård and Maika Monroe should be on way more genre fans' radars than it is, based on that cast alone (Kyra Sedgwick and Jeffrey Donovan also star). It's a wonderfully tense and surprisingly funny cat-and-mouse story about two criminals on the run who hole up in a house owned by a couple who is significantly more dangerous.

#4 Rammbock: Berlin Undead (2010)

I'd been meaning to get around to this German zombie movie for the better part of the last decade and a half, and I'm glad I finally did. It's a short and sweet thrill ride that defies its small budget and limited location to craft a cleverly escalating series of setpieces.

#3 Love and Human Remains (1993)

This Canadian indie movie based on a stage play defies all genre classifications. It's a shaggy 1990s hangout movie that is also a contemplative New Queer Cinema arthouse piece about urban decay that is also a serial killer movie. It's got a lot going on, and all of those things are great.

#2 Something for Everyone (1970)

This proto-Saltburn movie about a charming bisexual sociopath insinuating his way into a rich family is a pure delight from start to finish. The real Austrian locations are gorgeous, you'll choke on all the sexual tension, and Angela Lansbury is in full grand dame mode as one of the greatest diva matriarchs of all time. This movie is criminally underrated, and I demand you seek it out right this second.

#1 Dinner in America (2020)

Speaking of criminally underrated, this punk rock story about the bond forged between two Midwestern misfits is a truly beautiful thing. It's got many taboo-busting, angry, shocking moments, but at its core it's always sweet and loving toward its lead characters. It shouldn't be possible for a movie this in-your-face to be so irresistibly lovable, but literally everyone I've recommended it to already has adored it.

2025 Movie Crush: Josh Heuston, Dangerous Animals