The Movie of the Year Was Also a Surprise Blockbuster

In Slate’s annual Movie Club, film critic Dana Stevens emails with fellow critics—for 2025, Justin Chang, Alison Willmore, and Bilge Ebiri—about the year in cinema.

Dear Alison, Bilge, and Justin,

For an interview on a Slate podcast this month, I was asked to pick a movie that exemplified 2025—not the year’s best film necessarily, but one for which I could make the case that it belonged in some way to this moment in time and no other. Choosing a single title to fit such a broad remit is a trickier assignment in its way than coming up with a Top 10 list, especially if you’re committing to spend 45 minutes on mic discussing your choice, and I found the challenge oddly daunting. What does it say about where my brain was at this year that nearly every movie seemed like a movie specifically of and for its moment? In Alison’s introduction to her Top 10 list, she rightly declares this “a year for dreams of revolution on the big screen.” What strikes me looking back at the year is how many forms those dreams and the change they envisioned could take, from what Alison calls “sweeping stories about fighting the good fight” to dystopic nightmares of entrapment and exploitation. If there was one situation this year’s movie protagonists consistently found themselves in, it was being stuck in an intolerable reality and devising ways, whether individually or as a collective, to rebel, escape, and start again.

Back in January, Bong Joon Ho’s acid sci-fi satire Mickey 17 arrived like a harbinger of the dawning Trump II era, with Robert Pattinson as an infinitely reprintable worker drone who stands up to Mark Ruffalo’s preening CEO-turned-despot. But that movie’s call to arms went largely unheeded at the box office, and it got a lukewarm reception from most critics as well, though I continue to maintain that the revered Bong was a victim of unfairly high expectations. If the auteur behind masterpieces like Memories of Murder and Parasite can’t be allowed the space to try a conceptual big-swing comedy about the nature of identity set on a planet full of gargantuan peace-loving pillbugs, what’s a film industry for? Mickey 17 was imperfect, a shade too long with some narrative threads left dangling, but it started off the year with a scrappy kick-out-the-jams energy and a healthy loathing for the forces of extractive capitalism that would become 2025’s greatest villain, on the screen and off.

James Gunn’s Superman was a blockbuster conceived long before the 2024 presidential election that nonetheless made for an of-the-moment parable about immigration, interplanetary and otherwise. The decision to frame Supes’ archenemy Lex Luthor as a bratty tech bro was also prescient, given that upon the movie’s midsummer release, Elon Musk and his broccoli-headed teen minions had just finished laying waste to America’s bureaucratic infrastructure. And the sheer throwback goodness of newcomer David Corenswet’s Man of Steel—a superhero so earnestly altruistic he takes a moment during a full-on alien invasion to rescue a single squirrel—caused at least one viewer (hi) to tear up at the novel notion that in a pitiless-seeming cosmos, every life, even—imagine!—our own, might matter.

Summer also brought the thrilling surprise of Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later, which was no staid legacy sequel to the venerable speedy-zombie series, but a starkly contemporary portrait of an England frozen in place—not by Brexit or COVID, but by a decades-long quarantine in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse. Nothing could (or should) prepare the viewer for the metaphysical turn this movie takes in its last hour, as the appearance of the shaman-like doctor played by Ralph Fiennes abruptly shifts the movie’s central question from “How long can one kid and his family keep outrunning genetically mutated super-zombies?” to the more profound, if less logline-friendly, “How does the act of making art help us to contend with the primal human experience of accepting that everyone we love must eventually die?”

Also very much in the spirit of 2025 were assaultive black comedies like Eddington and Friendship and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Jagged and thudding and deliberately hard to sit through, these A24 releases provided a spectacle of sheer endurance that put the audience through the same emotional and physical wringers as the unraveling protagonists: They were movies that replaced conventional narrative rhythms with an unrelenting series of adrenaline jolts. Meanwhile, international films like The Secret Agent and It Was Just an Accident played out scenarios of resistance and persecution, restitution and revenge, while envisioning communities capacious enough to make space amid the state-sponsored terror for moments of connection, humor, and pleasure.

Julia Loktev’s astonishing My Undesirable Friends: Part I—Last Air in Moscow, a five-hour documentary about the vicious crackdown on independent journalists following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, felt so current and so urgent that watching it was like having the real-time dispatches from a crumbling state wired straight to one’s brain—dispatches that doubled as dire warnings of where our own increasingly regime-aligned media might be headed next.

Justin, your unusually structured movies-of-the-year list presents the reader with 25 movies organized into 12 slots, so as to pair each film with one or two others that you see it as being in conversation with. It’s a sneaky move that allows you to more than double your movie-picking pleasure, while finding unexpected convergences among the year’s releases. So you should approve of my solution to the dilemma of attempting to name the 2025-iest of all 2025 movies. In the end I chose two films that seemed to present opposing if interrelated models for how to survive and thrive—or at least create the conditions for future generations to come a little closer to thriving—in this battered hellscape we call home.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another swept into theaters in autumn like an electrical storm, seeming to change the weather for the rest of the movie season to follow.
A brazenly self-assured amalgam of Sergio Leone–style Western epic, galumphing Big Lebowski–style shaggy-dog comedy, and scabrous Pynchonian social satire, One Battle presents revolution not as an aspirational “To the barricades!” ideal but as a cyclical multigenerational slog, a thankless and self-renewing chore that is nonetheless worth pursuing with everything we’ve got—even when all we’ve got is a bathrobe, an uncharged burner phone, and a fuzzily remembered series of secret passcodes for a maddeningly bureaucratic network of underground revolutionaries.

Above all the movie of the year for me, as much for its fervent embrace by audiences as for its thrilling cinematic craft, was the springtime miracle of Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. Ironically for a movie that’s all about the practice of artistic appropriation—the “love and theft” that are at the origins of so-called American roots music—Sinners feels like it burst forth fully formed from its creator’s imagination. Sure, Coogler’s folktale about a Mississippi juke joint besieged by banjo-strumming vampires is indebted to a variety of genre traditions—Southern Gothic horror, body-snatching sci-fi, even the one-crazy-night party movie—but these influences are all in the service of an entirely original vision that’s almost startling in its profundity. That scene on the dance floor when the history and future of Black music suddenly and matter-of-factly show up in the form of whirling, twerking, guitar-solo-shredding ghosts: Was there any other scene in the movies this year that so effectively achieved liftoff, as if the movie-theater roof had been raised to let these spirits, along with the audience’s own, mingle and rise up as one?

Alison, your list included a few foreign and independent titles—movies like April, The Mastermind, Sex/Love/Dreams, and Sound of Falling—whose protagonists demonstrate more intimate forms of resilience in the face of insuperable oppression (or sometimes, as with The Mastermind, just insuperable Nixon-era malaise). Can you kick off this first round with some reflections on these quieter, smaller-scale, but no less radical visions of a world where, as you write of the Norwegian Sex/Love/Dreams trilogy, “norms can be challenged and age-old assumptions about ourselves shed for something better”?

And because I jumped into writing this post without a proper greeting: Welcome one and all to Slate Movie Club! 2025 may have sucked major balls, but our conversation over the next two weeks or so most certainly won’t. I know we’re only exchanging these missives over a series of impersonal internet tubes, but in my mind and heart this is a time of intimacy and fellowship, the holiday season of the movie-critical year, and I’m honored and delighted to have the three of you—all among my favorite working critics—gathered around the punchbowl. So let’s get to decking these halls with boughs of hotly debated movie opinions!

Festively,

Dana

My Top 10, in alphabetical order

April
Blue Moon
Familiar Touch
It Was Just An Accident
Listers: A Glimpse Into Extreme Birdwatching
My Undesirable Friends: Part I—Last Air in Moscow
One Battle After Another
The Secret Agent
Sentimental Value
Sinners

10 runners-up

28 Years Later
Caught by the Tides
Eephus
The Mastermind
Peter Hujar’s Day
Roofman
Sound of Falling
Superman
The Testament of Ann Lee
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery

Read all of the entries in Slate’s 2025 Movie Club.