Heading into the new year, it feels right to look back at the year 2025 in movies, which featured some stellar biopics (Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere) and original stories (Sinners).
Every year, it’s nearly impossible to see every movie and thoroughly rank them. However, here’s ClutchPoints’ ranking of the 10 best movies of the year.
10. Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning (dir. Christopher McQuarrie)
It’d be completely fair to say that Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning was messy, but much like how Fast & Furious fans accept Vin Diesel being a superhero, Tom Cruise has constantly surpassed typical expectations with this franchise.
You don’t watch a Mission: Impossible movie for its airtight plot. Each installment promises a globe-trotting adventure for the IMF team, but they have upped the ante with the stunts with each film.
The Final Reckoning delivers some of the most tense and mind-blowing stunts yet. From the underwater sequence to the plane fight, The Final Reckoning keeps you glued in for nearly three hours.
Read our full review of Mission: Impossible— The Final Reckoning.
9. Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (dir. Rian Johnson)
Another budding franchise that has reinvented itself is Rian Johnson’s Knives Out series. What started as a Clue-like whodunnit has launched a trilogy of serialized murder mysteries, with the only constant being Johnson behind the camera and Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc.
Perhaps his biggest risk was going the route of religious hypocrisy and corruption, as he did in Wake Up Dead Man. The ensemble may not be as star-studded as the first movie, nor as connected as in Glass Onion, but they deliver when they get a chance to shine.
Josh Brolin and Josh O’Connor are the biggest standouts. The former plays a corrupt Catholic priest, Monsignor Jefferson Wicks. The latter plays Jud Duplenticy, a former boxer-turned-priest, who’s reassigned to Wicks’ church.
Johnson’s script plays around with supernatural elements, adding to the mystery. The first two Knives Out movies were both relatively grounded, and Wake Up Dead Man makes you question everything.
The Knives Out series needed a refresh like this to keep the franchise alive. Johnson leaned heavily into the gothic aesthetic, a drastic diversion from the very sunny and glossy Glass Onion.
Read our full review of Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.
8. F1 The Movie (dir. Joseph Kosinski)
If you thought Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning was thrilling, just watch F1 The Movie. Directed by Top Gun: Maverick filmmaker Joseph Kosinski, F1 tells a familiar mentor-pupil story much akin to the relationship between Brett Favre and Aaron Rodgers.
Despite how rudimentary the story is, F1 is genuinely thrilling. James Mangold did something very similar in Ford v Ferrari: make racing exciting.
Kosinski throws viewers into the cockpit, and every turn sends a rush through your system. Damson Idris gets his breakout alongside Brad Pitt, who plays the grizzled racing veteran.
Read our full review of F1 The Movie.
7. One Battle After Another (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)
Paul Thomas Anderson followed up Licorice Pizza with the Leonardo DiCaprio-led One Battle After Another. It’s simply breathtaking to watch, with Anderson capturing the vastness of the desert landscapes (this was his first movie released in IMAX).
DiCaprio is the lead, but One Battle After Another is supplemented with the cold performance from Sean Penn, who plays a corrupt military officer after DiCaprio and Chase Infiniti’s characters.
It’s not always a pleasant watch, as with most of Anderson’s movies, but the adventure is impossible to look away from. Benicio del Toro is a hoot in his limited role as Sergio St. Carlos, a Karate-do teacher.
Ultimately, One Battle After Another is a movie about the endless struggle some face and generational trauma. It’s a really emotional story that hits harder than Anderson’s last movie.
6. Bugonia (dir. Yorgos Lanthimos)
To say that Bugonia is weird is an understatement, but that’s par for the course with Yorgos Lanthimos joints. It follows two men who kidnap a CEO under the suspicion that she’s an alien.
Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone play one of the kidnappers and the CEO, respectively, with first-time actor Aidan Delbis making his big-screen debut in the movie.
The tension builds over the first hour and a half before it gets full-on bonkers in the last half hour. Only Lanthimos could take it to the extremes he does, and it makes for one of the most ambitious movies of the year, even if it is a remake of the 2003 South Korean flick Save the Green Planet!
Plemons and Stone are fully committed to their roles. The former plays a paranoid conspiracy theorist while the latter is a powerful CEO adamant that she’s not an alien. The juxtaposition makes for such an interesting watch as they duel it out.
Despite how crazy it is, Bugonia is one of Lanthimos’ most accessible movies. Once again, he brings out the best in Stone (and Plemons).
5. The Running Man (dir. Edgar Wright)
Edgar Wright had the tall task of adapting Stephen King’s iconic novel, The Running Man, which was famously adapted in 1987 with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the lead role.
Almost four decades later, Glen Powell assumes the role of Ben Richards, going on the run for a chance at a life-changing amount of money.
The greatest strength of Wright’s version is how he trimmed the fat of the book. While King’s original novel is a brisk read, Wright picks and chooses where to focus his 133-minute film.
Perhaps the ending is too Hollywood for its own good, but personally, most of the other changes work. Powell brings a different dynamic to the character of Ben Richards.
In the book, he comes off like a hardened soul, akin to Harrison Ford’s Rick Deckard in Blade Runner. Naturally, the charming Powell brings humanity to the role. If you’re going to adapt The Running Man, you have to make Richards someone people want to root for. With Powell in the saddle, you almost have no choice but to.
Read our full review of The Running Man.
4. Marty Supreme (dir. Josh Safdie)
In the year of Safdie — both Josh and Benny released solo movies after their professional split — the younger brother, Josh, may have won the battle (not that it was a competition; both are prolific filmmakers and even greater together).
Marty Supreme, thanks to the marketing juggernaut it has become behind Timothée Chalamet, justifies the $250 jackets and ping-pong ball popcorn buckets. The expectations were sky-high after its surprise premiere at the New York Film Festival in October 2025, and it delivered.
Chalamet has grown comfortable playing characters who are jerks (he just played Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown). Marty Mauser is no exception. His blind ambition comes at a price.
The ending may not land with some, but it feels apropos for the small-scale nature of Marty Supreme. Marty ultimately learns his lesson, and the moral victory he achieves at the end is appropriately small.
Read our full review of Marty Supreme.
3. Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (dir. Scott Cooper)
Just as Marty Supreme gave its lead an ending accurately representative of the movie’s scale, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere does the same with The Boss.
As with most biopics, Jeremy Allen White will get a majority of the praise for portraying Springsteen. However, he’s surrounded by a great cast — especially the ultimate jack-of-all-trades, Stephen Graham — and Scott Cooper’s script, which understood Warren Zanes’ book about the making of Nebraska and his complex protagonist.
Springsteen fans will also love the music in the movie. It opens with a rousing performance of the latter half of “Born to Run,” which White nails. It sounds exactly like The Boss circa 1979’s No Nukes concert.
Deliver Me from Nowhere isn’t the Bruce Springsteen story. It’s all about the making of Nebraska, perhaps the most challenging of Springsteen’s albums. The small scope is exactly what Nebraska was all about.
Read our full review of Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere.
2. Sinners (dir. Ryan Coogler)
Sinners soars because of its originality. Unlike most of the remakes, sequels, and reboots Hollywood likes to fill theaters with, Sinners is an original horror movie with a dual performance from Michael B. Jordan. He stars in the film alongside the likes of Hailee Steinfeld, Miles Caton, and Jack O’Connell.
The juke joint scene where the spirits of several generations of musicians appear remains the best scene of 2025. It’s a brilliantly chilling sequence to watch.
Like One Battle After Another, Sinners is a beautiful IMAX watch. Very few movies are required viewing in IMAX — Sinners is one of them. Simply put, it’s a breathtaking feat.
Read our full review of Sinners.
1. The Ballad of Wallis Island (dir. James Griffiths)
One thing all Fleetwood Mac fans have thought is, What if they reunited? While the group has reformed over the years, the relationship between Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks has been up and down, to say the least.
Similar to Daisy Jones & the Six, The Ballad of Wallis Island shows a Buckingham-Nicks-like duo who have split. In The Ballad of Wallis Island, Tom Basden and Carey Mulligan play an estranged folk duo, McGwyer Mortimer.
A wealthy fan (Tim Key) of McGwyer Mortimer, who won the lottery, pays them separately for a private show on his island. Little do they know that he has gathered them for an impromptu reunion.
The Ballad of Wallis Island thrives on The Office-like cringe comedy, with Key perfectly playing the somewhat oblivious superfan. There is a deeper message in the movie, too, and it’s one about creative burnout. McGwyer and Mortimer went down separate paths after their breakup. One is still hoping to reclaim his glory, desperately changing genres and, in turn, compromising his values, while the other is happily married.
While it has the smallest scope of any movie on this list, The Ballad of Wallis Island leaves the biggest impact.
