It’s that time of year again. Since as a critic I am bound to my assorted guilds but have not been invited to any of the big-money reindeer games, I use the idea of the 10 Best list as a form, and not a limitation. It’s more fun to find thematic connections, and hopefully this will draw attention to some films that either got away in the big end-of-year battle royale or that have yet to take their turn locally. (An asterisk denotes a film that has not yet played in Nashville.)
Also, keep an eye out later this month for our annual Jim Ridley Memorial Film Poll, wherein a bunch of interesting critical voices gather thought and opinion into a provocative and rewarding discussion.
1. The Testament of Ann Lee* / Wake Up Dead Man (streaming on Netflix)
There’s a dialogue happening here, about how the ideal of religious liberty and expression very often becomes weaponized against those who hew to a more kind and nurturing faith; where religion becomes conflated with the exertion and retention of power. Mother Ann, Father Jud, how you reconcile within me against empty faith and unchecked power. Also, Testament does a Suspiria.
2. Sinners (streaming on HBO Max)
The Story of America — like Spencer Williams’ Go Down, Death!, like Robert Altman’s Nashville, like Avery Crounse’s Crying Blue Sky, like Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark, like Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, like James Gray’s The Immigrant.
3. My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow*
When this premiered a month or so before the 2024 election, it felt like the most visceral of cautionary tales and a testament to what journalism can accomplish. Now that it’s finally made it out into the world, it’s as close to an essential roadmap as one could imagine for the disassembling of an entire culture.
Resurrection
4. Castration Movie Anthology Part I: The Fear of Having No One to Hold at the End of the World* / Castration Movie Anthology Part II: The Best of Both Worlds* / Resurrection*
The cultivated garden of maximalism. Bi Gan’s Resurrection, coming soon to the Belcourt, is a sextet of sensory allegories and genre-hopping situations. It shares with Louise Weard’s lengthy vivisections (10-plus hours and counting) of modern trans life a noble willingness not to skimp on detail and emotion. Like Douglas Sirk. Like Jim Steinman. More. Everything. Maybe too much. But alive and aware and absolutely essential viewing.
5. Sentimental Value / Sorry, Baby (streaming on HBO Max)
That sense of comfort that a novel brings, like an easy chair and a cup of tea on an overcast day. Characterizations you derive joy from, even in moments of sorrow. Lives lived in a way you return to again and again.
KPop Demon Hunters
6. Bugonia / The Housemaid / KPop Demon Hunters / The Monkey / Tinsman Road*
The pleasure of genre is that the foundation is solid enough that no matter what twists and turns it takes, there are itches that you know up front will get scratched. But there’s so much more to be had than just that simple fulfillment of expectations: You watch something like Tinsman Road for the relentless creep of found footage, but Robbie Banfitch is also one of the great family dramatists of this moment, and the emotional trap is sprung. Sprung from a Stephen King short story, The Monkey gives good guignol, but in Osgood Perkins’ hands becomes a profound meditation on death. The Housemaid dives into mass-market bestseller tropes that are in the American DNA, but it’s as mean as a Jack Ketchum novel and it does a Dogville! Thanks to KPop Demon Hunters, an entire generation is going to be cautious about branding. And Bugonia, for a remake of a film I’d already seen, broke my heart in a way that sci-fi rarely gets the chance to do.
The biographical film from director Ira Sachs opens this week at the Belcourt
7. Peter Hujar’s Day / Videoheaven / The Voice of Hind Rajab* / Zodiac Killer Project
There’s a square, and in the center of it is reality. And this quartet of films is engaging with reality, trying to re-create a different facet of this central, ineffable concept. Peter Hujar’s Day is built from the transcript of an interview that happened in December 1974. The Voice of Hind Rajab uses actual voice recordings as a means of intensified engagement (and it works, devastatingly). Videoheaven gathers the physical evidence of something that existed, but is now endangered to the point of extinction. And Zodiac Killer Project (a film that evinced crazy amounts of hatred from audiences) is about a film that was never even made. We as viewers are the essential part of these circuits, the central node of impermanent spaces.
8. Maa (streaming on Netflix) / Reflection in a Dead Diamond* (streaming on Shudder) / Sister Midnight (streaming on Hulu and Hoopla)
One of the other pleasures of genre is a good switcheroo, where the filmmakers are skilled enough artists and sleight-of-hand tricksters that you get so much more than you might have initially expected. What Maleficent did for Sleeping Beauty, Maa does for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom on several different levels. Reflection in a Dead Diamond is somehow a delightfully cruel espionage thriller that is also the grad-school course about its own theoretical legacy (and the most inspired Bond pastiche you could hope for). And Sister Midnight pulls off a say what now pivot that makes me shake with joy even now.
9. Eephus (streaming on Mubi) / One of Them Days (streaming on Netflix)
The passage of time is part of all experiences, but I’m grateful for when it’s funny rather than tragic.
The latest work of horror from 'Barbarian' writer-director Zach Cregger is now playing at Regal and AMC locations
10. Twinless / Weapons (streaming on HBO Max)
There’s something about the structure of mass-market paperbacks from the ’70s and ’80s that lends itself to the modern film moment. Sex and violence and tragedy, but incorporated into a narrative that hits like one of those suburban roads with just enough wild turns and elevations that people spoke of them like homegrown roller coasters. Every community has one or two of them, and there’s something in the blend of the trashy and truthful in these films that pays proper tribute to this style of experience. Twinless could even be a Bari Wood adaptation, and Weapons has the feel of a Zebra paperback with the holographic cover.
Honorable Mentions:
Architecton, Black Bag, Bring Her Back, The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Story, Dead Talents’ Society, Die My Love, Radu Jude’s Dracula, the first six minutes of Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 (when it does the opening of Scream 2 but for kids), It Was Just an Accident, Kill the Jockey, L2: Empuraan, Materialists, A Nice Indian Boy, Pee-wee as Himself, Pillion, Rabbit Trap, The Secret Agent, Sholay: The Final Cut (still the most amazing theatrical experience of 2025), The Shrouds, Superman, Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted, Thunderbolts, Jr. NTR’s scenes in War 2, The Wedding Banquet.
Best Performances:
Leslie Anne Banfitch (Tinsman Road), Rose Byrne (If I Had Legs I’d Kick You), Oona Chaplin (Avatar: Fire and Ash), Christian Convery times two (The Monkey), Aidan Delbis (Bugonia), Benicio del Toro (One Battle After Another), Jack Haven (Queens of the Dead), Sally Hawkins (Bring Her Back), Fred Hechinger (Hell of a Summer), Nina Hoss (Hedda), Chase Infiniti (One Battle After Another), Michael B. Jordan times two (Sinners), Kajol (Maa), Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas (Sentimental Value), Delroy Lindo (Sinners), Jennifer Lopez (Kiss of the Spider Woman), Kyle Marvin (Splitsville), Harry Melling (Pillion), Wunmi Mosaku (Sinners), Jr. NTR (War 2), Dylan O’Brien (Twinless), Josh O’Connor (Wake Up Dead Man), Amanda Seyfried (The Testament of Ann Lee), Stellan Skarsgård (Sentimental Value), Emma Stone (Eddington), Michael Strassner (The Baltimorons), Michael Stuhlbarg (After the Hunt), Ia Sukhitashvili (April), Sza (One of Them Days), Tessa Thompson (Hedda).
Best Physical Media:
Bwana Devil 3D (Kino Lorber/3D Archive 3D Blu-ray), Eyes Wide Shut (Criterion Ultra High Definition/Blu-ray), Friday the 13th Part III 3D (Turbine Media 3D), Hundreds of Beavers (Cartuna BD), I Can See You/The Viewer (Glass Eye Pix 3DBD), Swamp Dogg’s incredible cookbook/biography If You Can Kill It I Can Cook It (Pioneer Works Press), It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time (Chicago Review Press), the Australian deluxe box set of The Keep (Imprint/Via Vision Box Set UHD/BD), the finest spatial audio mix of a classic album yet undertaken — Propaganda’s A Secret Wish (SDE/ZTT BD), Russ Meyer times five (Severin UHD/BD), the staggering coffee table collection Martin Scorsese: All the Films (coming in March from Black Dog and Leventhal, the must-have film book of early 2026), Taxi Zum Klo (Anus Films/Altered Innocence BD), These Fists Break Bricks revised edition (Running Press), Who Killed Teddy Bear (Cinematographe BD).
The Do Better Corner:
Anaconda and Housefull 5A prove that lazy comedies with impressive casts are a universal concept.
What to say about Baby Invasion? Well, I don’t know if you can even call it a movie, but it’s definitely exactly what Harmony Korine wanted to make. The score is excellent, though.
The Basic Instinct 4K/Blu-ray is an indictment of a 4K restoration that has shown in theaters and been sold on disc all over the planet without anyone fixing noticeably absent bass frequencies in the sound mix. A disgrace that Studiocanal really needs to address, and all their global partners need to explain why no one ever called them on it.
The kind of object that uses its anger and rough edges to imply some form of profundity, Eddington continues to annoy the shit out of me several months on.
The latest from writer-director Ari Aster opens this week at the Belcourt and Regal and AMC theaters
I feel bad for Fear Street: Prom Queen, because it’s got to hurt to be the fourth film in a series that did very well with the first three installments only to drop the ball so very badly in terms of characterization and structure.
I loved Todd Rohal’s 2011 film The Catechism Cataclysm, so I derive no joy from having to be a full-tilt hater of his latest film Fuck My Son! It has an opening few minutes that are witty and provocative in pitching a way for normie crowds to watch underground cinema, and it’s great. And then the actual film starts, and it hits wrong at every step of the way. Will still watch what he makes in the future, but ooh.
The right tone is essential to the magic of cinema, and I Don’t Understand You has a lot going for it. But the end result feels about as tone-deaf as it gets at This Moment; it feels like something that could have been made to foment homophobia, which does not seem like the intention of any of its involved parties.
Take comfort from the fact that Jatadhara will serve some good as an amateurish starting point for filmmakers who will doubtless go on to more accomplished and satisfying work in the future.
Regarding Jurassic World: Rebirth (which I was generally neutral on): Hey studios, if you hire Gareth Edwards to direct your film, how about just getting out of the way. He’s one of the best visual storytellers in the game, and you can feel the creak of the studio handcuffs shackling him to general foolishness.
Latest entry in long-running dino series opens wide Wednesday
I appreciate the gumption that draws in a game cast for an interesting idea, but sometimes that’s not enough — something’s off in the sauce. Opus is like that.
As for Star Trek: Section 31, no one involved with writing this project should have anything to do with Star Trek. To promote this film they hyped up the fact that they were going to have a main Deltan character (something we haven’t had since 1979, in a sci-fi illustration of Chris Rock’s “grand opening/grand closing” routine) and then disintegrated them within the first reel. Congratulations, assholes — you actually made me hate something Star Trek. Shame on you.
There was a way for Tron: Ares to be a great film, and it would have involved casting just about anyone but Jared Leto. This could have been the greatest 4DX experience the world could imagine — incredible 3D graphics, Nine Inch Nails dipping further into Challengers mode and getting industrial techno like the intervening decades have fallen away, and occasionally Gillian Anderson popping into frame to declaim, “What have you done!?” But no.
