Favorite 2025 Movies, Pt. 1

Some notes before we dig in:

• Two movies I loved but wouldn't feel comfortable ranking, as I know people involved in their creation: Discount Funeral and Snake Oil Song.
  
  Discount Funeral is a narrative piece from Brett Whitcomb, who has directed or co-directed some of my favorite documentaries, and who I worked with on The Spirit of Halloweentown (now on VOD). It's 60 minutes long, which either means it's a long short or a short feature, though designations like that don't really matter.
  
  Snake Oil Song is a feature directed by Micah Van Hove (with a lot of other talented folks involved). I am about as uninvolved as a person can be while still showing up on the film's IMDb page, but that's still too involved for me to write "Snake Oil Song is one of the best movies I saw this year."
• It's possible some of the things listed here are not movies, but they definitely aren't TV, so this is the list they go in. One thing was broadcast in two parts, but that seemed to be more about marketing than anything.
• I didn't see a lot of things I wanted to, which makes this, as always, a list of the best new things I watched in 2025. Caught by Tides was the big one that hurt. I also didn't see the Q Lazarus doc or Blue Moon or The Mastermind or Eephus or Sentimental Value. That's just the way it goes when you don't have a lot of free time and you have a family you love and most of your money goes toward keeping your kid fed and in preschool. It's pretty nice, having a family you love. Wouldn't trade it for getting to see Caught by Tides in a theater. God damn did I want to see that Gallagher documentary, though.
• Mel Gibson's Flight Risk was the shittiest thing I saw this year. Absolute cat piss with noticeably clumsy editing and a fake moose that looks like it glitched in from a PlayStation 2 game. If Gibson had never said or done anything bigoted, if he'd dedicated his entire life to teaching marketable skills to disadvantaged teens, I would not like this movie any more than I do right now. That's the thing about being a bad person– people can mistakenly assume you're judging them and not their art. But Flight Risk is a cinematic jar of toenail clippings on its own merits.
• No number rankings this time. It can be fun, but it's also pointless and antithetical to how I want to think about art. But there's still a Number One, because I don't follow the rules, even when I'm the one who makes the rules. Especially when I'm the one who makes the rules. That's when I'm least likely to follow them.
• List is in two parts so as not to send you too long of an email

Two honorable mentions:

HonMen1: Train Dreams (directed by Clint Bentley, written by Bentley and Greg Kwedar, based on the book by Denis Johnson)

This one is here with a mild disclaimer: I don't think it earns its ending. This adaptation closes out very differently than the original Denis Johnson book did, and I get why you'd make that change: Johnson's end was elliptical and weird and may have seemed goofy on screen if everything didn't line up perfectly. I'm not holding it against movie Train Dreams that it differs from book Train Dreams.

The movie, obvious spoilers, ends on a beautiful note, with Joel Edgerton's Robert sitting in a plane, watching the world from a vantage point he's never previously had and couldn't have hoped to have at the story's onset. The narration, beautifully delivered by Will Patton, goes "When Robert Grainier died in his sleep sometime in November of 1968, his life ended as quietly as it had begun. He’d never purchased a firearm or spoken into a telephone. He had no idea who his parents might have been, and he left no heirs behind him. But on that spring day, as he misplaced all sense of up and down, he felt, at last, connected to it all."

Why did he finally feel connected to the world? The movie doesn't answer this question. I would have imagined he felt more connected to the world when he had a wife and toddler. "He felt, at last, connected to it all" after the film's previous hundred minutes have only defined Robert through his relationships with other people. The narration is like something you'd hear in a Terrence Malick movie, and Train Dreams is as dedicated to Malick worship as it is to Johnson's story, but it cheats here, forcing an epiphany that Malick would have slowly built to. Robert's built train tracks on the side of mountains– we've watched him watch the world from a distance. We've seen him open up and connect with people. We know he's haunted by the loss that followed that connection. I don't know that I can say it any other way: the film ends cheaply.

It left an especially bad taste in my mouth because it initially made me tear up. I thought "I find this so touching" and then, as the credits rolled and I thought about it for two seconds, realized I only had that thought because the narration was basically saying "You find this so touching." As crude an unearned shortcut as a the "The Big Ship" needle drops that somehow kept popping up in movies a few years ago, and a real "He lied to us through song" rug pull.

If you wanted to be uncharitable, you could point out that this is a movie distributed by Netflix that ends with a person finding inner peace by embracing shiny, new technology that makes his life's work obsolete. Maybe people who work in independent film and operate movie theaters can learn a lesson from the ol' Flix and buck up.

To end on a positive note, I thought the scene where Edgerton pretended to not know what happened to William H. Macy was beautiful and heartbreaking. If that was all Edgerton did in this movie, it would still be one of my favorite performances of the year.

HonMen2: The Elephant Graveyard's videos

The Elephant Graveyard finally blew up this year after "How Comedy Was Destroyed by an Anti-Reality Doomsday Cult" came out, and that video is great but his other 2025 opus, "How Comedy Became A Dystopian Imperial Hell World" was just as good, as were the Radio Hours, so I'm listing the entire channel here. They're all of a piece.

Even if I disagreed with Elephant Graveyard's politics, I'd probably have to appreciate his editing skill, his ability to make a series of wide-ranging arguments cohere, his love of Repo Man, etc. But this is all about something I care deeply about, comedy, getting cynically exploited by shrieking dumbasses. If Elephant Graveyard didn't exist, I would wish it did, but I also wouldn't be talented enough to make it myself. He's funnier than the hacks he's skewering and has resisted becoming to people like me what Austin comedians are to dumbasses who say they love philosophy and listen to five hours of podcasts every day, or tout the one or two progressive things Theo Von has said and then ignore all of his spiels about black on black crime. I respect The Elephant Graveyard with a love inverse to how much I hate most YouTube explainer videos.

Okay, my favorite movies of 2025, in no order:

Pipe Rock Theory (written and directed by Conner O'Malley):

I always get excited for the moment in Conner O'Malley videos when he goes to a second location. Things are weird and then he winds up in, say, an Eyes Wide Shut orgy with Tom Cruise. O'Malley treats everything like it's a loaded gun, like the most innocuous thing off in the corner can dramatically raise the stakes on a dime, and the transition to a second location is almost always a trigger for some ridiculous escalation. If I'm not mistaken, this was the first year in a while I didn't see O'Malley live. Pipe Rock Theory was a good way to get that fix.

Sinners (written and directed by Ryan Coogler):

Sinners was great but it really makes this list because of the big centerpiece sequence, where the characters time travel through hundreds of years of Black music. Coogler could have half-assed everything else and that scene would still stand as a brilliant piece of art.

In The Lost Lands (directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, written by Constantin Werner)

I was very high when I watched this.

Predators (directed by David Osit)

I'd been waiting for this movie for a while. In 2007, Esquire published a story, "Tonight On Dateline This Man Will Die" by Luke Dittirch, about the suicide of Bill Conradt during a To Catch A Predator sting. It shook me then and it shook me again when I reread the piece earlier this year, after hearing about this documentary Predators. Finally watching Predators in December, I realized Dittrich's story woke up some empathetic part of my brain. I had family who'd been in prison, I didn't think people who did bad things should rot, but you read that reporting, which is at times very clinical, and wonder how we're all laughing and cheering as people who want to abuse children get caught on Candid Camera.

After sitting through Predators, I read a few reviews and found some complaints that director David Osit didn't examine how To Catch A Predator got so big, how it managed to spawn so many YouTube imitators, etc. I think that's obvious from the second the movie opens, as we hear audio of a potential predator and a decoy. The stuff the older man says is disgusting and the decoy is presenting as a 14-year-old. To Catch A Predator got so big because it's impossible to hear the thing Predators immediately presents you with and not think "Please keep this man away from children." The segment's heirs proliferated on YouTube because everything proliferated on YouTube. Chris Hansen already laid out how to chat with a predator and lure them over to your house. When the tools to film and share that process became cheap enough, of course other people were going to do it. I don't think the schadenfreude inherent in the operation needs to be explained because you, the empathetic viewer, feel it right away.

In a movie whose main question is a blunt "What are we even trying to do here?" the darkest moment might actually be a Hansen-modeled YouTuber with an embarrassing beard, who is being filmed by a YouTuber with an even more embarrassing beard, declaring his catchphrase, "You've just been Skeeted," to a potential predator who seems like he might kill himself. This is followed by the film's most awkward moment, as Osit badgers the potential predator to sign a release. It's gross. I'm glad Osit kept it in. He said sitting in with the YouTubers made him feel complicit and then showed just how wrapped up in the whole process he got. It's a messy topic, it inspires messy feelings and Predators doesn't put on any pretense that it's above all of that.

Because we all gas each other up. Chris Hansen is emboldened by the ratings and the feeling he's doing something good, the police start listening to him because he's the good guy getting shit done, Hansen pushes the police to do things they shouldn't but which would make for better TV, the command of the police makes Hansen think he's more important than a TV personality, Hansen continues to make the same show for twenty years after it becomes his life's mission. Somewhere in there, an 18-year-old becomes a non-person for legally pursuing a 15-year-old.

It's important that Predators doesn't exonerate these men. That means you can't dismiss what it's saying. Osit wonders why they do what they do (Predators argues this is essentially unknowable) and how they could be rehabilitated (Predators argues we haven't put enough thought toward this question and probably aren't interested in its answer). But that 18-year-old was destroyed for ratings. And then you wonder what other context you've been missing. Read that story about Bill Conradt. Hansen and his people lied that he had child porn on his computer. They lied about him deleting information off a Myspace page. He didn't want to meet the decoy. He filled some airtime, though.

I wondered, as Predators showed raw footage of men begging Chris Hansen for therapeutic help, probably knowing they were about to have a half-dozen cops' guns shoved in their faces, what kind of cultural footprint To Catch A Predator would have made had we originally seen all of this. By the time Hansen rolled up to CrimeCon, I knew the answer was "the same one it already has." This was all an inevitability.

Jay Kelly (directed by Noah Baumbach, written by Baumbach and Emily Mortimer)

I've got some problems with Jay Kelly, namely that I wished it was longer. And this is, like Train Dreams, a Netflix movie that doesn't fully earn its beautiful ending. But I'm a sucker for watching Noah Baumbach's sad, self-pitying characters reflect on their failures. George Clooney and Adam Sandler are good enough here that the obvious running jokes they're made to deliver, like the cheesecake bit that wasn't funny the first time, kind of glided past me. I was just happy to watch them. I'm as sentimental as anybody.

When I say I wish it was longer, it's primarily because Riley Keough, always the secret weapon of whatever film she's in, fills her scenes with such a striking ambivalence toward Clooney's character. The Stacy Keach and Billy Crudup scenes felt the same way. I wanted the other sequences to hit those highs, and I think they could have if Clooney had more screen time with his other daughter character, with Sandler and with Laura Dern. I wanted the movie to stretch its legs, get a little more novelistic.

Clooney's been pussyfooting around Jay Kelly's themes for at least a decade, playing aging characters who can't coast on their charm anymore. It's nice to watch him actually play an actor, rather than a corporate guy or an astronaut or whatever who's clearly a stand-in for Clooney's real-world persona. That slight lack of pretense is very nice.