Hey kids! It’s that time again! I’m listing my favorites and biggest disappointments at the multiplex this year!

Actually, this year had some really great highs, but I had a hard time finding ten that I thought were worth the top ten. There were nine I thought were worth putting on the list this year for the best, but I will list ten here. Or eleven. You’ll see.

The Best

10. Rental Family/Superman (tie)

I watched both of these movies and thought neither was the greatest ever nor something that would go on my top ten list for the year. And yet, here they are. I thought these were both rather optimistic movies where a benevolent protagonist does what he can to make the world he lives in better because, well, someone needs to. Rental Family is sweet, and Superman, I think, is just the hero I needed in 2025 for a wide variety of reasons. Maybe, when the real world looks too much like a terrible place to be, seeing two nice men just try to help is a good thing to see.

9. The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie

Like the two movies in the previous entry, this was not the greatest movie ever made, but man, just seeing Daffy Duck and Porky Pig having what was basically a very old school sort of adventure really made my day. I smiled through the whole movie. Was it something that deserved to be a top ten entry? Probably not, but I saw a lot of movies this year where the I thought something was very good, but not great, and The Day the Earth Blew Up gets points for being as unique as it was.

8. The Life of Chuck

I came across some critic’s “worst of the year” list that had The Life of Chuck listed as the worst movie of the year, where the critic in question argued that the movie was cliched, trying to make the audience care about this dull cipher of a character who danced in the street once with a message or moral that wasn’t that deep, and the thing is, I read the commentary and thought it was a reasonable conclusion to make. I just completely disagreed with it. This movie did everything it did very well, and I was really invested in the story being told. Mike Flanagan knows how to adapt Stephen King, even when it isn’t a horror movie. Honestly, I wouldn’t mind more movies like this one if they can be made this well.

7. One Battle After Another

OK, I know a number of critics picked One Battle After Another as their best of the year, and I don’t generally dislike Paul Thomas Anderson’s work or anything, but this movie didn’t work for me as much as it apparently did for a lot of other people. Then again, that describes how I feel about most of the Paul Thomas Anderson movies I see. Still, this may be one of Anderson’s best works.

6. Frankenstein

Guillermo del Toro’s take on Mary Shelley’s novel is, well, uniquely del Toro’s work. The general vibe of the movie, the way the movie makes the monster even more sympathetic than the story usually does really worked for me, but the ending had what I felt was an unearned character moment given everything that had come before.

5. Nuremberg

Russell Crowe has made a lot of schlock in recent years, scenery-chewing performances where he’s probably just having some fun for the paycheck, such that a movie like Nuremberg is necessary to remind people that he can act when he wants to. It’s also good to remember that guys like Herman Goring had to have been pretty charismatic to get as far as they do. You can’t expect every monster with a path to powers to actually be repulsive in personality since they won’t get that power if they weren’t able to attract any followers. My girlfriend and I are still debating whether Crowe or Timothée Chalamet gave the best performance of the year, though I think the star of the next movie on my list might be in contention just for what he had to do.

4. Sinners

Anyone who decries a lack of originality in the movies of late hasn’t seen Sinners. Actually, there were some really original horror movies out this year, but Sinners was as much a tribute to music as it was a really good vampire movie. There were also a number of movies out early this year where one actor played multiple roles, of which I have more to say below. Suffice to say, Sinners was the one movie with that gimmick that really worked for me because Michael B. Jordan was great as twin brothers Smoke and Stack.

3. Marty Supreme

I was expecting one type of movie when my girlfriend and I went to see this one, something she wanted to see because Timothée Chalamet’s performance was being praised as the best of his career. Is it? Well, it may be, but the movie itself is really fantastic, with a central character who consistently shoots himself in the foot as he scrambles to get to a table tennis world championship while refusing to take responsibility for most of his actions. It’s a legitimately great performance in the middle of a great movie.

2. Hamnet

I’m a Shakespeare guy, so a well-made movie adapting a well-written novel fictionalizing the death of William Shakespeare’s only son and the effect it had on both of his parents, with a particular focus on Agnes Shakespeare, is something I would really want to see. Of course it was going to end up on my top ten list of the year.

1. Weapons

Another great, creative horror movie. This one really hit hard with me, and the tense feelings the movie provoked stuck with me for a day or two. That’s a well-made movie, and one I wanted to recommend more than anything else I saw this year, even if the ending seems to have come from a completely different movie.

Special Mention

KPOP Demon Hunters

Oh, this was a well-made movie that was just totally not for me. I figured it needed a special mention as a result.

The Worst

5. Snow White/The Alto Knights (tie)

To be clear, I don’t think either of these are the worst movies every made. I just felt like they were both doing something really unnecessary. Snow White is the obvious one: Disney needs to knock it off with the live action remakes of their animated movies. The Alto Knights probably would have been a perfectly cromulent movie if not for the decision to cast Robert De Niro in dual roles for what seemed like no other reason than that they could. The characters were not twins, and they didn’t change the actor’s appearance that much. It just felt like a baffling decision that distracted from the rest of the movie.

4. Mickey 17

Honestly, this one might have been more forgettable and disappointing after Bong Joon-ho won the Oscar for Parasite, but the normally reliable Mark Ruffalo turned in such a repulsive performance that it put me off the rest of the movie. And unlike The Alto Knights, at least this movie had a reason to let its lead actor play multiple roles.

3. Love Hurts

Ke Huy Quan is a really charismatic actor, but there’s only so much even a guy like him can do to elevate stuff like this stinker of a movie. It had a couple bright spots here and there, but overall, it was just bland, and like a lot of the movies on my “worst of” list, it was probably more disappointing given who was in it than anything else, though it did make letting my Peacock subscription lapse a whole lot easier.

2. Honey Don’t

The more the Coen Brother pursue separate career paths, the more it becomes obvious only one of them knows how to direct a legitimately good movie.

1. Eddington

I used to be a big Ari Astor fan, but now? Well, I almost walked out of Eddington, and I never walk out of movies. I know the movie has its fans, but I am most assuredly not one of them.

Anyway, that was 2025. Here’s to 2026, and maybe a better crop of movies.