It’s listing time again! In today’s entertainment consumption sphere, all experiences must be pitted against each other and assigned numeric values that are ultimately arbitrary to anyone except the writer themselves. It’s just this fun thing some of us love doing even though the rules are made up and the points don’t matter.

I saw 34 films in theaters in 2025 that were actually released in 2025, a 14.7% increase over 2024’s list, still climbing post-COVID. That number doesn’t include ten Academy Award nominees I caught in theaters in 2025 that were officially 2024 releases, but which I saw later outside the house as part of my annual Oscar Quest.

Of those 34 releases, 12 were sequels, prequels, or chapters in an ongoing universe or venerated popcorn-flick IP. 6 were reboots, remakes or do-overs. Only 4 were superhero films. 3 were Stephen King adaptations. 6 had scenes or noteworthy extras during or after the end credits. 7 were screenings at the 34th annual Heartland Film Festival, some of whose makers are still seeking an American distributor. 3 were primarily in languages other than English.

One shocking discovery when I tallied everything up: I saw zero animated feature films in a theater, which hasn’t happened since 1995. Even in 2020 when I only saw four total films on big screens, one of them was Pixar’s Onward. So that’s pretty disappointing. And I refuse to count the new Avatar just to make myself feel better.

Here’s the annual rundown of what I didn’t miss in theaters in 2025, for better or worse, starting as always at the bottom. This doesn’t include the 2025 films I watched on streaming services, which will receive their own listicle (and will include three animated films!). Links to past excessively wordy reviews and sometimes bizarrely construed thoughts are provided for historical reference. As a fun challenge, this year I tried something new: given how much I already overwrote about each of them throughout the year, this time I allowed myself just one sentence each. No parentheses, no em-dashes, no semicolons whatsoever, though obviously many are the same old run-on stream-of-consciousness so y’all know it’s still me typing and I’m not shelling out bottom-dollar for crappy AI to do my own amateur hobby-work for me.

On with the countdown!

34. Wicked: For Good. Sixty billion marketing dollars ballyhooed the movie musical sequel based on the already-lesser half of a stage musical based on a novel that’s a prequel to a movie based on a public-domain kids’ novel that literally anyone can legally co-opt, and yet no one else has ever, ever recaptured its magic.

33. The Running Man. The year’s weakest, tiredest Stephen King adaptation that frames average-Joe pushback against an evil regime within a mildly flamboyant reality-competition satire, which won’t inspire any new real-world rebellions.

32. Captain America: Brave New World. Anthony Mackie’s worthy legacy hero and President Harrison Ford deserved better than being assigned to thankless cleanup duty for other Marvel movies’ dangling plot threads.

31. Mickey 17. With Bong Joon-Ho’s very first nine-digit major-studio budget came the promise of a wacky Into the Pattinson-Verse clone comedy, but that was an hour-long front for a bloated remake of the Star Trek episode “Devil in the Dark” that should’ve just been a sequel called Okjas.

30. Tron: Ares. The listening party for the new Nine Inch Nails album comes with a free super awesome laser light show called Morbius vs. Space Invaders, but you have to bring your own Crow and Tom Servo.

29.Jurassic Park Rebirth. And by “Rebirth” the world’s most profitable natural-history museum roadshow means “grand reopening but we moved all the same old dinosaur statues six inches to the left, and lowered the qualifications for new curators”.

28. Christy. Sydney Sweeney undergoes the Serious Actress hazing ritual of Oscar-chasing deglamouring, likely a one-and-done dalliance now that The Housemaid has (so far) earned at least seventy times more than this and counting.

27. The Invisible Half. Quoth my son, who has a much broader basis for comparison than I do, “The least disturbing Japanese horror film I’ve ever seen.”

26. Wolf Man. If Vince Gilligan made a werewolf series, this would’ve been episode six, but the extremely process-oriented build-up would’ve felt worth the wait and our patience would be rewarded with three more killer episodes after it.

25. The Naked Gun. Akiva Schaffer’s heretical relaunch starts strong but runs down its batteries by the final act, though Weird Al’s scene after the end credits raises the assignment to a passing grade.

24. Marty Supreme. Post-WWII scheming narcissist drama, restless Jewish sports legend division, showcasing a previous Oscar nominee who frenetically overacts and out-acts everyone around him.

23. Nuremberg. Post-WWII scheming narcissist drama, methodical Nazi mass-murderer division, showcasing a previous Oscar winner who subtly underacts and outclasses everyone around him.

22. Thunderbolts*. Marvel’s Suicide Squad presents Black Widow: Legacy, exactly as fun as it sounds despite the ending leaving new plot threads dangling for some other movie to fix.

21. 28 Years Later. Danny Boyle and Alex Garland reunite for mature contemplation of life finding a way decades after the zombie apocalypse, up until its whiplash swerve into a Power Rangers cliffhanger ending that probably worked better for UK viewers who got its loopy homage.

20. Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale. The elderly demographic’s favorite IP that’d already gotten a fitting finale holds one last jolly afternoon of tea service and fan service, retroactively an apt eulogy for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

19. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. The ostensible denouement of Tom Cruise’s overextended action-star midlife crisis hums a happier swan song for Ethan Hunt than James Bond’s funeral dirge, if ultimately hollow unless he has truly, totally, at long last taken out all the six million IMF spies-gone-rogue.

18. Avatar: Fire and Ash. The Academy Award for Best Visual Effects goes yet again to James Cameron for Spider and His Amazing Friends and its ongoing celebration of Space Mother Nature and environmentally friendly EXPLOSIONS!, plus the affirmation that any Cousin Oliver can become the Chosen One if a director believes in them hard enough.

17. Ballerina. Ana de Armas’ brief gunplay audition in No Time to Die earned her admission into the Black Widow’s Red Room fight-finishing school, a plum starring role as John Wick’s father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former roommate, and an hour of off-the-wall stunt-Wick-tacular awesomeness worth fast-forwarding to get to at the end of your Blockbuster rental tape.

16. Novocaine. Now that movie magic can turn anyone into John Wick, the latest watchable bandwagon passenger is Jack Quaid’s Lieutenant Boimler acting like he’s Wolverine minus mutant healing factor, a tie-wearing white knight bleeding all over the friend-zoned crime-alleys in his noble-ish crusade.

15. The Fantastic Four: First Steps. The Year’s Best Marvel Film and The Greatest FF Film in World History thrives on an alternate Earth where Galactus didn’t suck and Matt Shakman didn’t have to worry whether his ’60s-appliance-ad aesthetic clashed with established MCU history-canon.

14. Predator: Badlands. Dan Trachtenberg yet again raises the bar for the Predalienator Cinematic Universe by exploring the aggro-buff royal-family culture of this decade’s most improved movie-monster, albeit as a pretext for letting the VFX crew run wild creating new alien super-creatures while he poses behind them like the Ken Watanabe “LET THEM FIGHT” meme.

13. One Battle After Another. Paul Thomas Anderson’s breathless thriller taps into my guilty affinity for the Bad Guys Vs. Worse Guys subgenre, though I’m not on board with social media’s OBAA-mania that idolizes its domestic-terrorist protagonists and has preordained that yea verily shalt yon holy and infallible cinema-writ become Winner of Sixty-Seven Academy Awards, including Best Blueprint for Taking Back America from Cartoon Nazi Overlords or whatever.

12. Bugonia. Trust Yorgos Lanthimos to take our ongoing wars between disconnected perceptions of truth and reality to a jaw-dropping reductio ad absurdium extreme as if he were this misbegotten century’s answer to Rod Serling.

11. The Long Walk. The year’s hardest-hitting Stephen King adaptation that frames average-Joe pushback against an evil regime within a bleak reality-competition satire, which should inspire more real-world rebellions.

10. It Was Just an Accident. Jafar Panahi, expatriate from a certifiably totalitarian regime, surveys the long-term psychological damage from outside his Iranian homeland through an ensemble comedy-of-errors that cross-examines the motives and methods of its own righteous vigilantes before culminating in a harrowing, deadly serious homage to Death and the Maiden that refuses to feed us easy, feel-better answers for Likes and shares.

9. Final Destination Bloodlines. Death’s Rube Goldberg machinations return in the series’ strongest sequel yet, which continues the ongoing free-will-vs.-destiny debate, pays tribute to the late Tony Todd by giving him an origin story, wields an audaciously wicked sense of humor, and allows characters so fleshed-out that you might actually miss a few of them after they’re killed off.

8. Blue Moon. The highlights of Ethan Hawke’s busy year include his great FX series The Lowdown and this one-night-only biopic in which Richard Linklater converts him through Peter-Jackson Hobbit-Vision into the undertall, once-celebrated songwriter Lorenz Hart on the eve of his last grasps at fame that would soon leave him behind, railing at fickle fate and priding himself as the smartest man ever to wash up in Broadway’s gutter.

7. Weapons. Zach Cregger’s terrifying puzzlebox horror-mystery warns us of the dangers of jumping to conclusions based on limited evidence and exploits our deep-rooted fears of child abduction, neighborhood paranoia, and those creepy elderly relatives we don’t remember but who insist they remember us.

6. Happy Birthday. Egypt’s submission for Best International Feature was my favorite Heartland screening yet sadly didn’t make the Academy’s crowded shortlist, which is such a shame for this heartbreaking, class-conscious gem about an eight-year-old housemaid who helps plan her best friend’s birthday party only to find herself uninvited.

5. Superman. James Gunn leads DC Comics’ big comeback with The Year’s Best Superhero Film, a powerful antidote to today’s overwhelming society-wide narcissism and a much-needed resuscitation of the lost virtues of altruism and sincerity, which if nothing else might help younger generations understand the Man of Steel’s greatest strengths and why we over-the-hill geeks have never shut up about Christopher Reeve.

4. The Life of Chuck. The Year’s Best Stephen King Adaptation went down like force-fed cough syrup to more jaded viewers who didn’t care for its three-act sci-fi end-of-the-world romanticism or its Whitman-inspired assertion that every one of us is a universe of memories living and loving within us, and who would’ve been happier if Tom Hiddleston’s enchanting dance sequence had ended with him turning into a giant clown and eating the audience.

3. Sinners. The undying presence of Michael B. Jordan and Ryan Coogler’s resonant, relevant period-piece vampire flick in the current film-awards conversations after it came out last April is exactly the power level we fans anticipated based on their five-for-five team-up record.

2. Hamnet. Chloe Zhao’s cathartic Shakespeare Comeback Special declines full-on Bard adaptation in favor of using a singular work as a refracting lens for contemplating the agony of young parental grief, the sublimation of self-flagellation into artistic expression, the educational fun trivia that “To be or not to be” wasn’t the only soliloquy he ever wrote, and a reminder that sometimes art can speak volumes and bring healing to exactly the right audience where they are.

1. Frankenstein. My new favorite Guillermo del Toro masterwork is an extraordinary revisit to the SF/horror classic as narrative duel between one of pop culture’s longest-lived misunderstood loners and the narcissistic genius who learned too well the folly of tampering in God’s domain and whose rise-and-fall ends not with a raging mob or a blood-spattering fight, but with an elegiac consideration of forgiveness and redemption, to which the highest compliment I can pay is it’s the only film on this list that I’ve eagerly seen more than once.

…

…and that was my 2025 at the movies. Check back with us in the months ahead and see how many times I can be cajoled out of our comfy living room for 2-3 hours of big-screen splendor!