The 12 Best Movies of 2025 So Far (And 60 More We Can’t Wait For)

The cult-favorite action heist frenzy from 2018 is back for round 2, but in a totally different (but still super fun) story led by returning players Gerard Butler and O’Shea Jackson, Jr. You’re going to have a lot of fun with this one.

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Director Steven Soderbergh’s resume has proven that he can do quite literally anything (he was behind Ocean’s Eleven, Erin Brockovich, Traffic, Magic Mike, and Che, just to name a few), and he really puts that to the test with his spooky and inventive new film Presence. How inventive, you might ask? Well, the entire film is shot from the perspective of a ghost haunting a family in their new home—and it is both expertly-made and thrilling. But the characters are great too; Chris Sullivan is particularly strong as the family’s father, while Lucy Liu plays a vapid mother with expertise and Callina Liang is a revelation as the daughter whom the story essentially revolves around.

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Companion is a fun thrill ride of a movie that comes from producer Zach Cregger (Barbarian) and is built on the genre strength of stars Sophie Thatcher (Yellowjackets, Heretic) and Jack Quaid (The Boys, Scream (2022)). One tip? Go into this one as blind as possible—there are thrills throughout that you will not see coming. Just know that it’s a fun, violent, wild ride.

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The Monkey marks an absolute horror dream team: director Oz Perkins (who last year did Longlegs), producer James Wan (who has done about a million great things, including Insidious, Saw, and Malignant), and based on a story by Stephen King. The Monkey, which stars Theo James as a pair of troubled twins, is more of a dark horror comedy than Longlegs, but don’t be mistaken: you can expect a lot of scares and a lot of violence to go along with quite a lot of laughs as well. One of the more visceral films of the year so far.

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Bong Joon-ho’s follow-up to the Oscar-winning Parasite is finally here, and its Mickey 17, the sci-fi dark comedy featuring Robert Pattinson as many, many, different doomed versions of a guy named Mickey. This film is more like Bong’s heightened worlds of Snowpiercer and Okja than the grounded mania of Parasite, but nonetheless it’s still an expertly-crafted movie with great performances (Pattinson is joined by Steven Yeun, Tilda Swinton, Toni Collette, and Mark Ruffalo, among others) and lots of goofy violence. Fun fact: the movie is based on a novel called Mickey 7, but the title was changed because Bong wanted to kill Mickey 10 more times. A valuable member of the growing genre of Sad Man In Space movies.

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The second Steven Soderbergh film of 2025 is Black Bag, which finds the 62-year-old master director returning to a zone he thrives in: the sleek, cool, fun, thriller with an absolutely stacked cast. And surprise surprise: the movie is awesome, an early contender for the year’s best and most fun film. Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett play a pair of high-level intelligence agents who find themselves wondering if they can trust each other, their colleagues and friends, or the agencies they work for in the midst of some major international danger. The rest of the cast includes Pierce Brosnan, Naomie Harris, Regé-Jean Page, Industry star Marisa Abela, and more. If you were waiting for a follow-up to Out of Sight or the Ocean’s trilogy that felt delightfully set in the modern world of espionage, this is your movie. And as a bonus, everyone is dressed unbelievably well—I don’t even wear glasses, but after the movie I was searching for how to wear them exactly the way Fassbender does.

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The second Jack Quaid film of our list finds the young star as a guy with a condition where he can’t feel pain on an adventure to save the potential love of his life. Novocaine is filled with bouncing, frenetic action, and Quaid’s optimistic energy and charisma seem make him a great fit for the Lethal Weapon, ’80s-esque movie that this is going for. It’s fun!

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Alex Garland re-teams with his Civil War military consultant Ray Mendoza for the star-studded Warfare, which they co-directed together. The movie—based on the true story of a 2006 Iraq mission gone awry—stars an array of today’s upcoming actors, including Will Poulter, Joseph Quinn, Charles Melton, and Kit Connor. The movie is a down-the-middle depiction of that mission one awry; It is intense, visceral, and will have you in the shoes of these soldiers experiencing the true and utter hell of battle. It’s one of the best modern war movies you’ll see.

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One of the most fun horror directors in the last decade or so is Christopher Landon, who was behind the Happy Death Day films and Freaky. Now, he’s back for Drop, an escape thriller that stars The White Lotus star Meghann Fahy and 1923‘s Brendan Sklenar. And folks, Drop is good! It’s not reinventing the wheel, but this movie—about a woman on her first date in a long time after a traumatic life event who receives increasingly threatening drop notifications—is full of tension, dread, and even a little humor. It’s well made and will keep your attention, and that’s all you could really want in a movie like that. It’s also filled to the brim with thrills, so that’s even better.

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I had the chance to see David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds at NYFF last year and it’s a super interesting late career revelation from one of the great filmmakers of the last 40 years. Cronenberg (who counts The Fly, Crash, and countless other classics to his name) meditates on death, capitalism, and technology in The Shrouds, which is an erotic thriller, a romance, and a conspiracy thriller all in one. Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, and Guy Pearce are among those leading the cast.

Screened at NYFF 2024.

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One of the year’s most exciting and intriguing blockbusters is Sinners, an original period-setting horror adventure film by Ryan Coogler (Black Panther, Creed, Fruitvale Station) that stars Michael B. Jordan as a pair of twins. Vampires are involved! A little wild that Ryan Coogler got to Vampires with Warner Bros. before his old friends at Marvel Studios did with Blade, but what are you going to do? This movie, to put things quite bluntly, rules—it’s a talented director getting his vision to the screen in a way that we don’t see often. And he pulls it off. MBJ is joined in the cast by Hailee Steinfeld, Delroy Lindo, and Jack O’Connell, among many others.

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Ben Affleck is back for The Accountant 2. If you know you know, folks. The first movie made over $150 million at the box office, and is a lot of fun—so if you were into that one, here’s your treat.

Based on the novel of the same name, On Swift Horses tells a post-Korean War tale of family and forbidden romance. The cast includes Daisy Edgar-Jones, Will Poulter, Jacob Elordi, and Diego Calva; there’s already been much talk about the rather explicit love scenes between the latter two.

Going to be real: I am very optimistic about Thunderbolts. While the team lineup is different from the Marvel Comics team of the same name (Seriously, where is Zemo!?!), we do still get a great crew that includes Sebastian Stan’s Bucky, Florence Pugh’s Yelena, David Harbour’s Red Guardian, and Wyatt Russell’s John Walker along with Lewis Pullman as Bob (who will eventually become Sentry) and Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s Val. But the real exciting stuff comes from behind the camera, as the movie serves as a de facto reunion of the team from Netflix’s Beef: director Jake Schreier directed six of the show’s 10 episodes, while creator Lee Sung Jin is a credited screenwriter. Trust the process on this one!

A twisted, eccentric, weird friendship between Paul Rudd and Tim Robinson? Have never been more sold. The film debuted at TIFF last year to raves and we’ve been eagerly awaiting ever since.

The Rube Goldberg Death Machine horror franchise is finally back! It should be hard to mess up a Final Destination movie: we just want to see increasingly-creative death scenes strung together by whatever passable plot the screenwriters can come up with. Is that so hard? We’re confident here.

The most bittersweet movie event of 2025 will be Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning. Will this really be the final Mission: Impossible film? Will Ethan Hunt survive? “It’s just going to be going to amazing,” cast member Shea Whigham, who returns from Dead Reckoning, told Men’s Health in a recent interview. We know he’s going to be right.

Mike Flanagan hasn’t put out a feature film since 2019’s Doctor Sleep, having been largely at work on his many excellent TV projects in the years since. But he’s back in 2025 with The Life of Chuck, a film with a cast led by Tom Hiddleston that’s based on a Stephen King story of the same name (Adapting King is Flanagan’s real bread and butter). The film earned rave reviews when it premiered at TIFF last year, and should be a big hit for NEON this year.

Another Wes Anderson film! This espionage film will feature many of his star-studded collaborators (basically a theater troupe in their own right, at this point); Michael Cera and Benicio del Toro will likely be the key figures here, as they were among the very first cast.