Favorite 2025 Movies, Pt. 2

Pee-Wee As Himself (directed by Matt Wolf)

I said there were no rankings, but this is the best movie I watched in 2025.

I was, as we all were, shocked when Paul Reubens died. I cried like a baby when director Matt Wolf ended Pee-Wee As Himself with a clip from Reubens' The Pee-Wee Herman Show HBO special, in part because this documentary pushed into a subtext behind the clip I hadn't previously considered. You can never know this stuff, but I have to believe that if I didn't know anything about Reubens, this documentary would still have brought me to that emotional place. It's astonishingly well-made.

Part of the reason I hadn't considered the subtext I'm talking about is because I didn't know to look for it. Reubens was intensely private and it's a miracle Wolf got as much out of him as he did. Everything about Reubens' pre-Pee-Wee romantic relationship, the biggest revelation here, destroyed me. The second Reubens' ex showed up and I heard the way Reubens was talking about him, it was clear where everything was headed. I wish every documentary about people who were gay and young in the 70s and 80s didn't have to feature a chapter on AIDS. The documentary isn't a tragedy, nor was Reubens' life, but the film gutted me there. If I never watch it again, that's why.

Hearing Reubens open up about that and everything else here, in what probably seemed to the filmmakers like a late-career retrospective that could have led to another comeback, but was actually punctuation at the end of an incredible life and body of work, is a privilege. I'm amazed he let the curtain fall at the end, after keeping it up his whole life, and that is, nakedly, due to Wolf's skill as an interviewer. You couldn't get this from somebody making a hagiography or, really, from anybody who wasn't willing to put in years of work patiently, carefully keeping a subject this private on track. In that way, Pee-Wee As Himself is the movie that impressed me most this year. This is not a flashy film but it was made on a Werner Herzog-like tightrope.

Lynne Marie Stewart, most famous for playing Miss Yvonne on Pee-Wee's Playhouse, died after this documentary made its festival premiere but before it was released on HBO. John Paragon, who played Jambi on that show and co-wrote and directed a bunch of its episodes, died in 2021. Phil Hartman was killed in 1998. Pee-Wee As Himself is about Reubens, but it's also about the circle of lifelong collaborators he created with, so many of whom died young. I don't think you're going to see a John Paragon documentary, as much as he deserves one. Maybe he and Stewart will pop up in an eventual Elvira doc or a Groundlings miniseries. I appreciated that Wolf gave some time to them.

While I said Pee-Wee As Himself wasn't made as a hagiography, it's the rare retrospective documentary where what everybody's saying about their art is true. The shows and movies these people made were and are punk rock. It really was all incredibly inclusive. It really was weird. Nobody's reaching when they praise this stuff. Pee-Wee's Playhouse was more diverse behind and in front of the camera than most things being made today. From what I've read, this was a hell of a lot of work for Wolf and his collaborators, but they made something that honors the staggering work Paul Reubens put together. Everybody deserves to be seen by somebody like Matt Wolf.

Roofman (directed by Derek Cianfrance, written by Cianfrance and Kirt Gunn)

I'd been waiting years for Derek Cianfrance's next movie and was so excited about this one that I read everything I could about its real-life inspiration. And then Roofman's first trailer came out, made it look like a hacky comedy, and I lost a little interest, while still believing Cianfrance was probably incapable of making the wacky hijinx film this new thing appeared to be. Maybe that's how Roofman was both one of my most anticipated movies of the year and the movie that most surprised me.

I regret doing that research into the real Jeffrey Manchester. I could have done that now that I've seen what the movie was going to do. I'd actually had the same impulse when Cianfrance made The Place Beyond the Pines. The movie before that one, Blue Valentine, was so good and the trailer for Pines was so intriguing that I wished Pines was based on a novel so I could experience the whole thing sooner. But it wasn't, and as I sat in the theater, watching its scope expand so far beyond what the (perfect) trailer had prepared me for, I was glad I had been able to go in clear. I imagine Roofman would have hit better if I thought it was about a guy robbing McDonald'seses and I wasn't prepared for him to live in a Toys 'R Us. Oh well. Even the trailer had to admit that much.

Roofman is actually a great follow-up to Pines. I say this because, 1) they're both crime stories about people just trying to get by, and 2) both have lead characters whose names I misheard (I thought Pines' Luke Glanton was named "Luke Lanton" and thought Roofman's John Zorin was named "John Zorn," like the avant-garde jazz megabrain).

I love the way Roofman handles its crime element, opening with a McDonald's heist and then casually informing us Channing Tatum's character, Jeffrey Manchester, has robbed forty-something other stores and restaurants using the same tactics. We see him steal Peanut M&Ms to eat and video games to pawn off and turn into money he needs. When Tatum finally takes down his home base Toys 'R Us, it's grimly thrill-less; the shot of Peter Dinklage's character stumbling out of his office, face covered in the remains of an exploded dye pack, is the most humanized he ever gets.

That isn't me saying I don't love a stylized crime spree and it doesn't mean Roofman's action scenes don't carry an impressive amount of tension, but that clumsiness drives home the crimes' necessity to Tatum's character in a way they might not otherwise. Tatum commits crimes when he has to and does his best to live like a regular person when he doesn't. It's thrilling for us to watch, but his only goal is to make a couple hundred bucks and then fade back into the scenery.

I liked, in retrospect, the decision to cast so many of the story's real players as small parts in the movie. The priest of the church the real Manchester attended works at a pawn shop, the cops are largely played by the real cops, etc. It's a little touch Tatum's buddy Steven Soderbergh would have brought to a similar story. I also like that we don't get that much of these people, either as actors or characters. I saw enough of Ben Mendelsohn's priest to want more, but the film didn't lose sight of its scope by actually giving it to me.

There are other interesting things going on here that are fun to think about, and maybe there's nothing deeper going on. It can't be a mistake that Tatum's character decorates his secret apartment's walls with merch from the then-huge Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies and quickly falls in love with Kirsten Dunst. And I liked the little detail, revealed in some stray dialogue, that Dunst's character has a master's. I don't know if her real-life inspiration did, too, but it's a small, cutting moment that reminds you how hard it is for all of these people to keep their heads above water. We don't just learn that so we can watch Dunst use it to turn her life around. She's already doing as much as she can with what she's got. It feels rare that, in a film with this many characters, we never meet anybody on stable financial footing. It's even more rare that that happens in a movie that isn't also poverty porn.

28 Years Later (directed by Danny Boyle, written by Alex Garland)

I don't know if this is the bravest movie of the year or the movie that gives the least shit about our preconceptions, but it was fascinating to wait this long for a "real" sequel and then have it look like 28 Years Later. I saw 28 Months Later in theaters and was disappointed, of course, but I held out hope for a third movie, with Boyle and Garland back at the helm. If Years had come out back then, I wouldn't have been ready for it. I would have wanted something more like Days, where Years takes on British identity in a way I find fascinating as an outsider. This movie sets aside twenty minutes to discuss palliative care. Everybody's trying to tackle masculinity and they always have been, but Years goes about it in a relatively novel way by making the strongest male character, Kelson, a person constantly putting himself in danger for his ideals, where the toxic dad character seems sincerely supportive of his son and is probably just doing what he has to do to survive. There's an ideal here, but it seems intentionally impossible to live up to and it fully takes advantage of the gonzo world these people have built. I'm excited to see how the Jimmy Saville gang's influence plays out in this movie's sequel because they'll present a clear evil that could play off the other two sides beautifully. And even if they don't, even if the next Years movie is trash, I believe this one will stand on its own as a thrilling adventure-horror movie where a zombie with a huge dick doesn't really seem that out of place.

I Accidentally Went To Work Dressed As Austin Powers (written and directed by Brendan O'Hare and Cory Snearowski)

Watch that gem here. This isn't the first video these guys have made about a person making a stupid mistake and then deciding it's best to just start over elsewhere, but that's such a brilliant premise for a comedy that I hope they make forty more.

Eddington (written and directed by Ari Aster)

I think the Daniel Clowes cameo is the key to this whole movie, in so much as it reveals Aster's tonal north star. If Beau is Afraid was Aster making his own Synecdoche, New York, then Eddington is his Ice Haven: an exploration of crime in a small town that goes in a dozen directions following a dozen characters and ultimately blows up in a sucker punch (granted, one of those sucker punches is an intentional dud and one sprouts from the most thrilling action sequence I watched this year). Maybe the antifa supersoldiers are the caveman and rabbit in this analogy. I don't know.

I love horror, but people can get so lazy with the genre, recycling tropes and pulling out references instead of making something somebody would want to reference. I'm always down to watch somebody who can make perfect horror go in a different direction while keeping the dread going. To me, Eddington is a horror movie, but it goes so far off in its own direction that I understand why it wouldn't be considered as such. Horror fans are so puritanical.

Eddington has that Coen brothers dread, the dread that comes from noir, the dread that comes from not knowing where a movie will go next because it's already shown you it can go anywhere. It doesn't transcend horror because horror can't be transcended– I don't think genre is limiting– but it's also so funny and so weird that I understand why it's hard to call it horror. Jeremy Saulnier is another guy making this stuff. I couldn't love it more.

Watching Eddington a second time recently, it felt like a cartoon in the same way something like Playtime does. Everything in a cartoon is intentional. Somebody had to draw every inch of that thing. In Eddington, every background joke, every anime sticker on a computer or comment on a social media page is something somebody put care into. It have a lot of time for any movie like that. Joaquin Phoenix falls through a roof into a display on Geronimo. Ari Aster wrote that an art department crafted it. This is true for any movie, but especially a movie this intentionally put together: Every time I watch it, I'll wish I was back in a movie theater, experiencing everything on a big screen.

Weapons (written and directed by Zach Cregger)

I liked Weapons a lot and then read Cregger talk about how parts were representative of growing up with an alcoholic parent and liked it even more. It's rare I see something that works as a metaphor without completely drowning the rest of the story in "OOOOOOH METAPHOR"-ness (i.e. The Babadook).

It's also rare I see something this exciting. I did not know what was going to happen but I knew, based on Barbarian and how strong Weapons opens, that I would probably enjoy it. Cregger keeps bringing in new characters, new facets to those characters, new twists on who seems safe and who doesn't, new threats. When you experience any kind of narrative art, you usually have a sense of where it's going to end. That isn't a bad thing– it usually means the writer is doing a good job laying out their themes and stakes, and that we can extrapolate the options they're presenting as to how the movie or book or whatever is going to explore them. And the range of possibilities in the spectrum of endings can be broad, but Weapons felt like it was expanding beyond its two clear possible endpoints (the children are recovered or they aren't). When Weapons introduces magic, and somehow introduces it well, in a way that doesn't break every other part of the story, and when it got me invested in so many little side threads, and when I cared as much about Julia Garner keeping her life together as I did all the magic stuff, the question of whether the kids would be recovered almost slid into the background. There were only a few ways Weapons could end, but the possibilities felt so numerous because the movie never stopped fleshing its world out. Which I guess is a way of saying "The real magic trick was making me believe in the endless possibilities of a well-told story ;) ;) ;)."

One Battle After Another (written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson)

Since everybody ranked PTA movies this year, here's one off the top of my head, in a way that feels honest:
1. The Master
2. Punch-Drunk Love
3. Boogie Nights
4. Phantom Thread
5. There Will Be Blood
6. Magnolia
7. One Battle After Another
8. Hard Eight
9. Licorice Pizza
10. Inherent Vice

And I'd say I love Hard Eight and above (and Licorice Pizza and Inherent Vice have great stretches). Don't take One Battle After Another's place in the bottom five as anything but a testament to the strength of the work that precedes it. I don't make movies and it's still hard for me to not have a Salieri complex with Anderson, who creates brilliantly whenever he wants to. He made There Will Be Blood when he was one year older than I am right now and I don't know what to do with that information. Ari Aster's doing similar work at a gut-punch of a young age. Kelly Reichardt made Old Joy when she 36 and that's the thing I am right at this moment! You can torture yourself with this shit all day.

Anyway, good movie, dude. Great job, jackass.