[Editor’s note: To see our other selections for Best of 2025, see here]

Nearly five years on from the initial Covid outbreak, movies seem to be healing. For the past decade we’ve witnessed the exploits of newer talents like Greta Gerwig, Celine Sung, Jordan Peale, and Shawn Baker, among others who have delivered movies that have moved the industry forward. At the same time, more established talents like Ryan Coogler, Paul Thomas Anderson, David Fincher, Kathryn Bigelow, and Ava DuVernay have continued to cement their legacy while the old guard represented by folks like Spike Lee, Martin Scorsese, and Steven Spielberg never stopped cranking out work. With that in mind, The Metropole’s senior editors, who enjoy time in front of the silver screen as much as anyone offer up their favorite movies of the year. 

Ryan Reft

As a Spike Lee devotee, I thought Highest to Lowest, featuring Black capitalist and music mogul David King (Denzel Washington) trying to reclaim his record label Stackin’ Hits while recovering his kidnapped son, a bit of a high wire act, but one that worked. The twist being that King discovers it wasn’t his son who was nabbed, but rather that of his friend, confidante, and employee Paul Christopher (Jeffrey Wright), and the film revolves around the decisions King makes subsequently. It’s a worthy remake of the Akira Kurosawa classic of the same name even if it doesn’t offer the critique of American capitalism voiced by the original (a point Bomani Jones and Howard Bryant made in their discussion of the film in a recent podcast discussing it and One Battle After Another). It’s hard to beat Denzel and Spike (I’d argue their 2006 collaboration Inside Man is another one of the great films of the 21^st century.).

Highest to Lowest came out shortly after Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. Adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel about former 1960s Weathermanesque dissidents dealing with Reagan’s America, Vineland, (I found the book nearly impenetrable, even if Salman Rushdie thought it a triumph; no matter, Anderson largely abandons its plot except for its broadest strokes), the movie explores the travails of one-time political radicals from the early aughts who find themselves threatened by shadowy fascist forces in the modern day. PTA foregrounding Black revolutionary women at the center of the film has elicited very mixed responses which I won’t delve into here. If you want to read one critical take on the film and its racial politics, see Jason England’s deconstruction of the movie at Defector. I’ve long dug PTA. My now-wife and I saw There Will Be Blood on one of our early dates. At the time, she said she liked it, only to tell me a decade later she thought it was shit and that his films are like watching paint dry. Admittedly, while critics have praised the film as a generational accomplishment, I didn’t feel it’s in his top three, but even if one believes it fails in its dissection of racial politics and doesn’t measure up to his finest works, I found it a compelling three hours that still has me thinking. Plus, Benicio del Toro is excellent as an American dissident and karate instructor running an underground railroad for undocumented folks.

Finally, a short round up of other films worth mentioning. In I’m Still Here, Fernanda Torres manages to hold her family together after her husband is arrested, tortured, and eventually executed by the ruling authoritarian government of Brazil in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Considering the current moment, it’s obviously not the easiest watch but Torres’ Eunice Paiva remains steely while eschewing bitterness, as she fights for her family’s safety and later for the recognition of the government’s heinous acts. 

I still don’t know what exactly was going on in Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag, but count me in. At a lean ninety minutes, it’s a high-level spy noir that I need to watch again, so I can piece together the plot. Both Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender are darkly luminous in their roles as a married couple swimming in subterfuge. 

While I thought Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City was stunningly boring, I remain a big fan (see here), and thankfully enjoyed the The Phoenician Scheme. While he needs no further praise from me, Benicio del Toro excels as a less than transparent and morally questionable industrialist at once trying to reconnect with his estranged daughter (Mia Threapleton) while maintaining his controversial business empire. Ramell Ross’s Nickel Boys, based on the very good Colson Whitehead novel of the same title, is uniquely captured and worth a watch while A House of Dynamite – a movie in three parts depicting the same 18 minutes before a nuclear strike hits Chicago – by one of my favorites Kathryn Bigelow more than held my attention. Folks who have dinged the movie have focused on its third act, which isn’t as strong as the first two but isn’t bad by any stretch. Ultimately, it’ll make you think even if it won’t leave you feeling very good about the state of the world. I don’t need to tell you about Sinners, but I normally avoid horror/vampire films, which is why I haven’t recommended Weapons (if you are into horror check it out). But it was hard not to be entertained by the Ryan Coogler production. If you haven’t seen it, make sure you stick around for after the credits; the scene kind of ties everything together. 

Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck, adapted from a Stephen King short story, is told in three parts from the end to the beginning. It’s an existential journey that reveals itself slowly and leaves you pondering the proverbial big themes of life, like who we are and what do our lives mean. As my friend Alex Sayf Cummings wrote over at Tropics of Meta, the film’s strength lay in its “deep commitment to what is real, whether it’s as seemingly ironclad as mathematics or physics or if it’s as subjective as one being In an endless universe’s tiny meaning-seeking in the irrelevant blankness.” In the end, “you ought to enjoy life, in spite of its flaws and fears and embarrassments.”

Katie Uva

Admittedly this has been a year of very little moviegoing for me, but I did see several excellent documentaries that I would recommend: 

Shari & Lamb-Chop, which is a tribute to the warmth, the humor, the virtuosity, and the intensity of Shari Lewis. It takes us from Shari Lewis’ childhood as the daughter of Abraham Hurwitz, who was ceremonially named “New York City’s Official Magician” by Fiorello La Guardia, to her being mentored in ventriloquism by influential Black ventriloquist John W. Cooper, to her long career from the 1950s to the 1990s. She experienced the vagaries of show business, from her enormously successful tv show in the 1950s to unmoored years in the 1960s and 1970s that saw her performing on the late night circuit and in Branson Missouri, to her triumphant return to children’s television and hilarious guest role on The Nanny. 

Seeking Mavis Beacon, which came out in 2024 but is newly available on streaming services, is a quasi-documentary, quasi-art piece about two young women who explore the origins and significance of both Mavis Beacon, the fictional persona that guided millions of people through instructional typing games in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, and Renée L’Espérance, the Haitian woman who was the original model for the character. Jazmin Jones and Olivia McKayla Ross go on a multi-faceted journey to find out how the company decided on the character of a Black typing expert at a time of zero representation of Black women in tech, reflect on the character’s significance to them and other Black computer enthusiasts, and also brush up against questions about ethics and privacy when they confront how their own desire to meet Renée L’Espérance and “give her her flowers” conflicts with her desire to be left alone. It’s a film that is difficult to describe but funny, poignant, and fascinating.

Drop Dead City is a lively and informative account of the 1975 fiscal crisis in New York. It is a love letter to the resilience and grit of New York, a witty expose of the unstable municipal bond market and irresponsible bookkeeping that helped fuel the crisis, and an elegy for the heavily unionized, industrial, robustly funded city best described in Josh Freeman’s Working-Class New York. On an aesthetic level the footage of 1970s New York is endlessly engaging, the accents are incredible and make me nostalgic for departed family members, and the scenes of average New Yorkers just trying to get by make me mad at Gerald Ford all over again. A special highlight is a moment that comes early in the film where an elementary school-aged boy, when asked what he thinks of Mayor Beame, yells, “He’s a bum!”

Featured image (at top): The Fremont Theater is a historic movie theater in San Luis Obispo, California, Carol M. Highsmith, photographer, 2012, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.