In 2025, were movies ready to meet the political moment?

The most uncomfortable scene in “One Battle After Another,” the latest film from recent Golden Globe winner and Emerson College dropout Paul Thomas Anderson, does not involve immigration stings or clandestine white supremacist gatherings, two of the film’s thematic targets. Rather, it’s a moment that earnestly depicts a high school mosh pit — a gathering of bodies awkwardly congealed in the center of a gymnasium, thrashing vertically to “Mo Bamba.”

The scene feels representative of a trend in 2025 movies: A newfound bravery to directly address the ugliness of modern life. “One Battle After Another,” alongside “Eddington,” “After the Hunt,” “Bugonia,” “Weapons,” and other recent titles, form a group of unabashedly political films that don’t cower from directly confronting a highly unstable time in American politics.

Anderson’s film follows retired left-wing American revolutionary Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) as he clashes against online activism, identity politics, and newfangled technology. He comes up against vengeful military Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn), who yearns to join a white supremacist group but can’t kick his miscegenation habit. Its political trappings are worn brightly, and fleshes out the archetype of the left-wing insurgent, a character often maligned by mainstream cinema but glamorized by independents.

Some could argue that these films, all by white-guy directors, employ political trappings with the goal of “provocation.” In unprecedented times, what fuel do these films add, and to what fire? But while the biggest box office successes of the decade remain the big escapist blockbusters — the “Avatar” movies, “Barbie,” the newly decentralized DC superhero films and the lingering remnants of the Marvel Cinematic Universe — it’s refreshing to see films that don’t pretend things are normal right now.

Not that cinema has never been political, but big movies about national politics typically soften their commentary through history, fantasy, or allegory. From 2024, “The Brutalist” critiqued the American dream through a historical epic lens, and “The Substance” tackled mainstream misogyny as sci-fi, while “Civil War,” which directly purported to examine the state of the nation, obscured its politics in a mud pie of buzzwords and confused messaging.

That latter criticism has been applied to “Eddington,” the latest film by noted provocateur Ari Aster. Viewers watch small-town sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix)’s bid for mayor against incumbent Ted (Pedro Pascal), a man with whom he has a personal history. The film opens with an argument about COVID mask mandates, and its grab bag of subjects that become plot relevant include TikTok conspiracy gurus, the Black Lives Matter protests, and mega corporations siphoning from rural communities. But the film manages to overlap these themes into a surprisingly thoughtful political thriller, even if the ethics of using them as backdrops are up for debate.

“After the Hunt,” the third film in two years by “Challengers” director Luca Guadagnino, presented itself as the next big treatise on cancel culture, which may have led to its abysmal box office sales and middling reception — its eye roll of a tagline, “Not everything is supposed to make you comfortable,” even reads like a Ben Shapiro retort. The film follows Yale associate philosophy professor Alma (Julia Roberts) after her favorite student, Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), accuses her colleague, Hank (Andrew Garfield), of sexual assault. However, after its inciting incident, it mostly sheds its “cancel culture commentary” scales for a compelling character deconstruction of its unreliable protagonists.

Its significant primary flaw is that Edebiri’s character, the (alleged) survivor, is given far less nuance than the other two leads, creating a skewed contest. Even unflattering characterization garners more empathy than no characterization. For the opposite film, which entirely privileges a survivor’s point of view without claiming to be the ultimate perspective on the matter, check out this year’s “Sorry, Baby,” which Eva Victor impressively directed, wrote, and starred in.

Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Bugonia” tapped into a growing political distrust of the ultra wealthy, but weaponizes these instincts in a horror movie format. This is done with two conspiracy-riddled, working-class cousins (Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis) as the kidnappers, and a billionaire CEO of a shady pharmaceutical conglomerate (Emma Stone) as the helpless victim. Key to this discomfiting power dynamic is that the kidnappers believe she is an alien, and instead of one-sided sadistic torture, the film proceeds with mind games from both ends: The conspiracist kidnappers try to gain information on an alien invasion, and the billionaire hostage hopes to ensure her survival by using their paranoia against them.

Zach Cregger’s “Weapons,” a genre flick with the same provocative streak as the above titles, follows a supernatural inciting incident. One night, all but one of the students in a third grade classroom run away from their homes and are never found. Ms. Gandy (Julia Garner), the students’ teacher, is relentlessly questioned and blamed by the town, who face a tragedy irreconcilable with reality.

This fantastical setup invokes a wide range of political issues — school shootings, cancel culture, grooming, defunding in the education system — without explicitly calling upon any of them. In the film’s greatest moment of discourse bait, a father of one of the missing children (Josh Brolin), who is relentlessly trying to pursue the case on his own, looks up and sees a massive cloud shaped like an assault rifle. This sequence isn’t clearly connected to the plot, but it sure puts ideas in viewers’ heads. It’s ridiculous, but also brilliant, and reads as a perfect parody of the transparent provocation 2025 movies seemed to love.

However, is contemporaneity even such a big deal? For years, movies avoided even showing smartphones, as chronicled by Nerdwriter’s popular video essay, “Why Are There So Few Smartphones In Popular Movies?” Despite being an undeniable part of daily life, we collectively decided that screen time was deeply uncool. By contrast, these films reflect — nay, embrace — how uncool it was to be alive in 2025.

Funnily enough, these films all seem to consider one subject too embarrassing to include in the timeline. Movies like “Mickey 17” and “Wake Up Dead Man” flirt with personality cult leaders, but none explicitly engage with the current president’s first term or its effects. Even “Eddington,” the defining cinematic document of 2020 politics to date, does not address this elephant in the (ball)room. Perhaps they simply didn’t feel comfortable.

In 1942, Ernst Lubitsch produced and directed “To Be or Not to Be” at the height of Nazi Germany. The film used mid-war atrocities for screwball comedy, following a Polish thespian in occupied Warsaw who unwittingly helps resistance efforts by playing a convincing Nazi, and portrayed Gestapo officers as incompetent dolts — with Hitler appearing as a character himself. 

Then, critics were skeptical: Was it too soon to be creating comedy out of this? Is this in poor taste? Today, it’s regarded as one of the screwball era’s finest.

Will “One Battle After Another,” “Eddington,” or “After the Hunt” age so gracefully? Time will tell. But to all filmmakers aiming their sights on the current moment, I urge someone to go all the way.