Boba Phil chimed in earlier this week with his view of the worst movies of 2025. It was hard to argue with his choices.
While doing far too much doomscrolling than is healthy, I came across a list. It was for the top ten movies of 2025, as voted for by Circle Ranks users. This is an app that allows people to rank and rate their favorite movies and TV shows. Using a 1-10 rating system and allowing for decimals to draw out nuance, it is legit. As for the list, well. See for yourself.
1 – F1: The Movie
2 – Sinners
3 – Superman
4 – Thunderbolts*
5 – How To Train Your Dragon
6 – Warfare
7 – Predator: Killer Of Killers
8 – Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning
9 – 28 Years Later
10 – Companion
Other entries that rounded out the top 50 included K-Pop Demon Hunters, Apple TV+ feature The Gorge, The Accountant 2, Flight Risk, and MCU entry Captain America: Brave New World.
What a desperate year.
I am a big fan of F1: The Movie and can agree that it was probably the best film of the year. This year, 2025. In quite a few other movie years of my life, it wouldn’t crack the top 10. I enjoyed Superman a lot more than many of you, but it being the 3rd best movie of the year points more to a weakness of the year than anything else.
Then, when trying to think what my top 10 would be, I struggled to think of ten new movies I have seen this year. I have mostly been revisiting old classics and not-so-classics, rather than watching new movies.
Still, both this list and the time of the year mean it is now traditional and required for us to tackle this:
The Last Movie Outpost Top Ten Movies Of The Year
Boba Phil
Finding a Top 10 movie list was tough this year, very tough.
1 – The Ugly Stepsister
2 – Weapons
3 – F1: The Movie
4 – Cannibal Muckbang
5 – Kpop: Demon Hunters
6 – Life of Chuck
7 – Good Boy
8 – Fackham Hall
9 – The Toxic Avenger
10 – Bring Her Back
Yes, there are certain movies missing from my list. Sinners was very overrated, with a terrible story; same for Superman, it just wasn’t interesting. I felt that Weapons was the horror of the year for me, a well-paced story, genuinely creepy and just well done.
In my top 5 are two indie movies. The Ugly Stepsister was just brilliant, an original take on an old story, with some truly gruesome moments, but I couldn’t help but think it over and over. Same with Cannibal Muckbang, the story of a cannibal, but I couldn’t help but fall in love with her.
And yes, I put KPop: Demon Hunters in there. We didn’t talk about it enough on here, but it was just a great movie.
Wrenage’s Wrecognizes 2025 Movies
When the idea of everyone listing their Top 10 movies of 2025 got floated, my first thought was, did I even watch 10 movies from 2025?
I found the cinematic year to be highly forgettable.
The first thing I did was look up 2025 in film and list the movies I watched. I actually watched 19 from 2025, so I might as well list all of them.
You will notice some big ones missing. For example, Superman.
My dirty secret is that I am not a huge comic book movie fan. I like Spider-Man and Batman, but all the other superheroes are not on my radar. My favorite Superman movie is Superman III. My favorite non-Spider-Man or Batman movie is Dolph Lundgren’s The Punisher.
Ergo, if I missed some obvious choices, it is most likely because I did not watch them.
First, unranked ones…
The Naked Gun: I went out of my way to take people to this movie. We all then sat there in awkward silence, waiting for it to be over. Occasionally, a polite laugh emitted. In the end, we shuffled out the door in embarrassment and never spoke of that day again.
Good Boy: Interesting premise, and the director does a fine job of getting an excellent performance out of the dog. The problem is that even at a scant 72 minutes, the concept struggles to fill the runtime like a pat of cold butter struggles to cover a piece of toast.
Novocaine: Jack Quaid is fun. The concept of a man who feels no pain getting into a bunch of physical scrapes to rescue a girl is fun. Yet, Amber Midthunder’s character is not worth fighting for, and some of the gags end up being more gross than a good time.
Heart Eyes: Another Scream-inspired slasher. It is a movie that thinks it is clever by undercutting every moment onscreen with wit, but when everything is undercut, one has to wonder…do the people who make these movies even like movies?
Ash: Comparable to something like Supernova or Last Days on Mars. Ash needed something like Donald Sutherland in Virus to bump it up a notch.
Fantastic Four: First Steps: Galactus was cool, but it is a sad state of affairs that Terminator 2 did a chrome person better 35 years ago. I saw this movie in a bigger city multiplex. It cost $35 for two tickets. Theaters are trying to fix a toaster while sitting in a bathtub at this point.
Fight or Flight: Bullet Train on a plane with Josh Harnett and one third of the budget.
Sinners: When it comes to siege movies, I would rather watch Demon Knight. Billy Zane is better by himself than the entirety of Sinners. I thought Sinners would win the Most Shilled Movie of 2025 easily, but then the next movie showed up on the scene…
Predator: Badlands: Another IP falls to Disney. Predator: Badlands is an okay kid’s space adventure movie, but it is not a good Predator movie. One can understand Disney’s thinking. Predator movies don’t really set the box office on fire, so they thought they’d go after the YA market.
OG Predator fans got tossed out along the way.
To be honest, I’m not sure it matters much. The Predator concept was played out after Predator 2. Might as well give the Predator a hockey mask at this point.
Predator: Badlands also had a shill bot army glazing it. That kind of shilling is going to come back and haunt movieland. Early glowing reviews are conning people to buy tickets, and when they realize they were bamboozled, they won’t be back.
Companion: This is basically a Black Mirror episode. Jack Quaid’s emotional support sex bot runs amok. Another decade should take us to a point where this becomes plausible.
The Top 10
The Ugly Stepsister (10)
It is Norwegian, and it has a tape worm.
The Accountant 2 (9)
The first Accountant movie sneakily entertained. It was fun watching a hardcore father weaponize his autistic son. Alas, all of that stuff is missing from the sequel, and you end up with a plain action movie that is mostly played for laughs rather than thrills. The numbers don’t add up…
Death of a Unicorn (8)
Paul Rudd has cornered the market on sexually non-threatening humor man. He again plays to that type as a member of a group of people trapped in a mansion by unicorns. These unicorns are not the gentle creatures of myth, however. They are monsters.
Throw in a wacky Will Poulter and an R-rating, and the film is somewhat fun. Jenna Ortega with buccal fat is in the movie, as well. Now she looks like Hollywood stuck a straw in her…
The Gorge (7)
Speaking of which, we know The Gorge isn’t about Anya Taylor-Joy gorging herself on the recommended 2,000 calories a day. She looked more like a woman in The Witch. In The Gorge, she is a girl boss with chicken legs who teams up with Miles Teller to protect the world from whatever lives in a gorge.
The Gorge is the type of movie that is fun until the mystery is revealed. Then it becomes significantly less interesting. Still, it knows its lane and navigates it pretty well.
28 Years Later (6)
The first hour is fun survival horror worldbuilding, but then the movie absolutely dies as it delves fully into humanism philosophy on death. Plus, it is an incomplete movie. It ends like The Empire Strikes Back. Come back later to find out what happens. How 28 Years Later is remembered will largely depend on how the sequel builds on it.
Still, for a movie shot on iPhones, it looked great.
The Monkey (5)
This is Ozgood Perkin’s first 2025 offering (Keeper was his second). It is based on the Stephen King short story about a wind-up monkey that kills people.
Perkin’s leaves the straight-ahead narrative of the story and pushes the concept into dark comedy surreal territory. Ultimately, that is why I prefer Longlegs. I still don’t fully understand Longlegs, but it played out like a fairy tale and made sense in that regard. The Monkey is simply odd. Still, Ozgood is at least interesting.
The Wolf Man (4)
A neat idea exists here. The Wolf Man treats lycanthropy in a somewhat The Fly fashion, where it is a disease that eventually eclipses a person’s humanity.
I appreciate that, but problems arise because the film lacks potential victims. All it has to play with for characters are the father, mother and boy, and you never get the impression it is going to Alex Kintner anyone. That leaves you simply watching the movie to see how it will end.
Black Bag (3)
Sonderbergh plays around in the spy genre with Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett. It is hard to go wrong with that. Black Bag ends up with maybe a touch of Agathe Christie in its DNA, as well, as a large part of its plot is figuring out who is the bad person within a group.
Fassbender needs to be in a Hammer Horror film in a Peter Cushing role. He would absolutely crush it.
Weapons (2)
Not much to say about Weapons other than I had fun with it. The intertwining narrative, a kooky turn by Amy Madigan and good performances by Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, Austin Abrams and Alden Ehrenreich make the film entertaining. It has a message to it, but it doesn’t come off as preachy, like say, Sinners.
Bring Her Back (1)
I went back and forth between this one and Weapons for the number one spot. They are actually somewhat similar films in that they combine lost children and witchcraft. Bring Her Back is the more serious of the two. It doesn’t rely on any of the comedy Weapons effectively wields.
The second act is often where films go awry, but Bring Her Back had an extremely effective second act. It did an excellent job of ramping up the stakes. First time actress and real-life vision-challenged dudette Sora Wong also deserves credit for her natural performance.
My only real complaint about Bring Her Back is the ending. I did not like the choice to go poignant with it. I would have much preferred a poppy ending like Weapons.
Auld Lang Cinema
Should crappy movies be forgot and never brought to mind?
Yes, yes they should…
I will forget most of the 2025 movies I saw. I believe other people will forget most of them, too. Even if Sinners happens to win Best Picture, it will be about as remembered as Shakespeare In Love. Yet, people still talk about Saving Private Ryan, Armageddon and There’s Something About Mary from that year.
Truth always outs in the end…
Hawkzino
I almost noped out of this article because I thought I would struggle to fill a top ten list for 2025. As others have mentioned, it’s hardly been a vintage year. However, when I consulted my IMBD ratings, it turns out I saw more than I remembered. This sums up a lot of my contemporary movie watching experience, where many movies are ‘fine’ but almost instantly forgettable.
Deep State, Novocaine, Love Hurts, Jurassic World: Whatever It Was Called. I remember them as well as I remember the McDonalds Hamburger I ate yesterday. Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning wasn’t bad, but a marked downgrade from recent entries and a disappointing end to the series.
The three Marvel movies released in 2025 – Captain America: Not Brave Enough, Thundercunts and Fantastic Four: First Stumble – were standard fare for the most part. They might have gotten away with it in phase 1, but in phase 5 (?) where Marvel desperately needs some of that Steve Rogers super serum to get its mojo back, there was no Captain America: The Winter Soldier to be found.
Nosferatu looked beautiful but was self-important and slow. On the other end of the scale, G20 is not only the worst movie I’ve seen this year, but the worst movie I have ever seen (The Garbage Pail Kids Movie has finally been dethroned). I’ve been meaning to hate review it, but that would mean watching it again.
There are some gaps I need to fill. I am yet to watch Sinners, Weapons and The Long Walk. I suspect that at least one of these would make the list, but for now I’ll have to leave them off.
The best movie I saw all year was released in 2024, so couldn’t be included. It is called Touch, featuring an Icelandic man with early Alzheimer’s searching the globe for his long-lost love during COVID. In case that wasn’t dark enough, it throws in the legacy of the Hiroshima bomb for good measure. It’s the sort of synopsis that I would usually run, not walk, from. But somehow Touch wasn’t a bleak movie at all. It had a hero’s journey, real heart and a bittersweet ending.
So here is my top ten of 2025:
1 – F1: The Movie: Formula 1 fans may wince at the liberties taken with the rules and the excessive exposition being spoon fed to the noobs, but it serves a great feelgood underdog comeback story, so I’ll forgive them.
2 – The Life of Chuck: the best Stephen King adaptation of the year. Part dystopia, part musical, part ghost story and part heartwarming drama. It didn’t exactly set the box office alight, but I’m confident it will find its audience eventually.
3 – The Lost Bus: true story of a bus driver trying to escape a forest fire with a bus load of children. Tense stuff.
4 – Warfare: gripping Iraq war drama that puts you into the action with a Seal team besieged by insurgents. Powerful stuff, but probably not much rewatch value.
5 – Superman: unlike this year’s Marvel releases, I will watch this again. It introduces a vibrant Universe, features a Superman who isn’t overpowered and makes me root for a guy trying to do good in a cynical world determine to take him down with fake news. A little too wacky and over-the-top in parts. I’m not a massive Superman fan, so the bar was undoubtedly lower for me than it might be for you.
6 – The Ballad of Wallis Island: gentle comedy drama about a lonely rich guy who bribes his favourite musical duo to reunite and perform a private gig on his island.
7 – The Running Man: sticks too close to the book for its own good, and pussies out at the end, but for the most part this is a fun action flick.
8 – Heads of State: high concept action with John Cena and Idris Elba playing the US President and UK Prime Minister being hunted by terrorists. Good banter and solid action.
9 – Your Host: interesting indie horror that dares you to sympathise with a psycho who imprisons four Gen Z wankers and forces them to play a sadistic gameshow, with deadly consequences if they lose.
10 – 28 Years Later: solid survival thriller that sags in the second half and delivers an odd, almost spoof ending. First of a planned trilogy, and it shows. Plot wise, it comes across as an episode of a television show rather than a complete movie. But this is an interesting world I’m keen to revisit.
