In movie terms, the year is young—we all know that the serious awards contenders start emerging in the early fall, around the time of the Venice, Toronto, and Telluride film festivals. But it’s never a good idea to sleep on the movies released in the first half of any given year: our favorites often spring forth from that period, like hardy spring flowers ready to go the distance. Here are eight of the best movies released so far in 2025: there’s lots of time to fill in any gaps before awards madness kicks in.
Sinners
What makes Ryan Coogler’s extraordinary horror entertainment Sinners, set in the 1932 Mississippi Delta, so effective—so chilling, so hypnotic, and occasionally so grimly funny—is the way it yields to mystery, never seeking to overexplain. Michael B. Jordan plays twin brothers, Smoke and Stack, returning to their hometown from a stint in prohibition-era Chicago. Their plan? To open a speakeasy, and they enlist their cousin, blues prodigy Sammie (Miles Caton), to provide the entertainment. Within a few hours of opening, the place is a smash hit—until a trio of vampire hillbilly musicians, led by Jack O’Connell’s scarily seductive Remmick, show up at the door, begging with utmost politeness to be let in. Sinners is one of the great vampire movies of the modern age, mining the legend of these perpetual outsiders who desperately yearn to belong. Mostly, though, Sinners is alive to the mystery of music: the way, for centuries, white people and Black people seemed to hear and feel music differently, until somehow the sounds they were hearing, and making, merged and blurred into a kind of aural futureworld, one that’s still unfolding today. Sinners is gory, seductive, pitiless. But there’s also something wistful about it, as if its characters had glimpsed a possibility of freedom, unity, and happiness that, nearly 100 years later, is still out of reach.
Warfare
You don’t need to have fought in a war to make a great war movie, but you could argue that the stakes are higher when a filmmaker who’s been to hell and back sets out to express the truth of his experience. Iraq War veteran Ray Mendoza has teamed with Civil War and Ex Machina director Alex Garland to make Warfare, which dramatizes the day in 2006 a team of Navy SEALs, Mendoza among them, entered an apartment building in Ramadi province, Iraq, on a treacherous surveillance mission. Within just a few hours, al-Qaeda forces had tossed a grenade in their midst, injuring two SEALs, one of them sniper and medic Elliott Miller (played in the movie by Cosmo Jarvis). Miller was even more seriously wounded, along with another SEAL (Joseph Quinn), when an IED exploded outside the building as they were being evacuated. Mendoza and others who took part in the mission (played by a group of fine young actors including D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Charles Melton, and Will Poulter) pieced the story together from memories of that day. Miller doesn’t remember the day’s events at all, and Mendoza has said that he wanted the movie to be “a living snapshot” for him, a way of honoring all that he lived through but can’t recall. Warfare, beautifully crafted, tells the harrowing story of the men’s rescue in real time. If a movie can be elegant and brutal at once, this one is.
Presence
Sometimes what’s absent from a film defines it as much as what’s present. Negative space is the great underused resource in filmmaking, demanding that you trust your audience to follow along, to fill in every intentional gap, to pick up the meaning of every invisible whisper. Steven Soderbergh’s ghost story Presence—compact, smart, elegant—is a great negative-space movie. Without handing everything over, it gives you all you need. A well-off family moves into a highly covetable Victorian house. Matriarch Rebekah (Lucy Liu) is the big decision maker in the family. Her husband Chris (Chris Sullivan) mostly just follows along, though he’s well aware that Rebekah favors the couple’s son, star athlete and star student Tyler (Eddy Maday) over their daughter, Chloe (Callina Liang). Chloe is quieter and more thoughtful than her brother. She has also recently suffered the loss of her closest friend, and there’s something a little ghostlike and absent about her, too—like a sleepwalker in a Val Lewton movie, she approaches an old mercury mirror above the mantel as if it were a portal to another world. Presence stands apart from other modern-day horror movies: though it does feature one scene of unmitigated, slow-burning terror, there are no wacky psychos in excessive makeup, no creepy, sentient dolls, no sadistic entrapment sequences. Presence is something else, a film that builds dread but also has poetry in its heart.
One of Them Days
In this lively, raunchy, broke-girls-about-town comedy, Keke Palmer and SZA play Dreux and Alyssa, best friends and roommates who risk being evicted from their crummy Los Angeles apartment unless they can rustle up $1500 in rent money in one day. The film opened in January and, defying all odds at a time when Hollywood bean-counters have largely given up on theatrical releases, stuck around in cinemas for more than three months. A movie that draws that kind of audience must be doing something right, even if that “something” is simply reaching people where they live right now, in an America where paychecks are withering and necessities are more costly each day. Palmer and SZA make a dazzling team: their timing crackles, and even when Alyssa and Dreux fight, you can still feel the fizzy, blood-is-thicker-than-water affection between them. With their flirty, wisecracking charm, these two performers go a long way in setting the movie’s tone, particularly its generosity of spirit. One of Them Days is fleet and fun, ridiculous in all the best ways, the kind of movie that miraculously makes you feel better about everything. Misery may love company. But it loves comedy more.
Caught By the Tides
If you’ve never seen a film by master Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke, you may be a little thrown by Caught By the Tides. And even if you have seen films like The World (2004) and Still Life (2006), you may still find yourself a little lost, especially at the beginning. But it’s worth sticking with Caught by the Tides, a romance that spans two decades—and allows us the luxury, in somewhat the same way Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy does, of watching the lead actors’ faces age realistically. As the movie opens, Qiaqiao (the deeply expressive Zhao Tao, who is also the director’s wife and a regular star of his films) is a young woman trying to make it as a dancer and singer in the city of Datong. She’s in love with Bin (played by another Jia favorite, Li Zhubin), who announces he’s leaving Datong to pursue opportunities—shady ones, it turns out—elsewhere. Caught by the Tides follows Qiaqiao across a 20-year period, from her era as a young dreamer to middle age, by which time she’s resigned to her reality yet also, perhaps, more content. Jia has been saving extra footage from his earlier movies for years, which is how we can see young and older versions of Zhao and Li in the same film—time is essentially passing before our eyes. This is a quietly brilliant film, one that blends a personal story, about two young people trying to make their mark, with a more global one, about a country that, a little more than 20 years ago, began changing drastically by the minute. Jia’s vision, and his camera, embraces it all.
Black Bag
Familiarity breeds contempt, and that can happen in marriages, too. How do you keep a close partnership fresh? Maybe married spies, like the ones in Steven Soderbergh’s silky spy caper Black Bag, have the answer. Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett play George and Kathryn, husband-and-wife agents working for Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre. George learns that Kathryn, to whom he’s devoted, may be a mole, part of a grand scheme involving a cyber worm designed to wreak nuclear havoc. He hopes not—but he needs to find out for sure. Soderbergh makes movies swiftly, and he seems to have fun doing it. Maybe that’s why his pictures never feel fussy or over-serious. That’s Black Bag in a satin-gold nutshell. It’s a slippery, if delightful, piece of work; maybe it feels like more of an amuse-bouche rather than a whole meal. But then, would you rather have a well-crafted little morsel served up on a perfect porcelain square, or a heaping plateful of mashed nonsense that bores you before you’ve even finished it? Black Bag succeeds on its style and chilly wit, and on the cool, nervy appeal of its two stars.
I’m Still Here
In 1971 Brazil, a nation ruled by a military dictatorship, former congressman Rubens Paiva was taken from his home for questioning, never to return. His wife Eunice sought his release in vain—and once she realized he wasn’t coming back, she shifted her energy to keeping her large, close-knit family together. Walter Salles’ superb drama I’m Still Here tells Eunice’s story, and even though it’s based on fact, it plays almost like a thriller: Salles is a master at building and sustaining tension, though he’s even better at vesting this story with radiant human warmth. Brazilian actor Fernanda Torres earned an Academy Award nomination for her role as Eunice Paiva, and it’s easy to see why. In the film’s opening section, she’s an elegant matriarch and affectionate wife, the kind of person who holds a family together simply by being a vibrant presence. But when she’s seriously tested, pushed nearly to the breaking point, Eunice summons strength she didn’t know she had. In this muscular but graceful performance, Torres shows us what resistance truly means.
The Shrouds
As a thriller, David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds isn’t a very good film: the plot mechanics feel like an afterthought, tied up in the end with a messy shrug. Yet there’s something about this mysterious, tender picture—a story of grief, and almost-renewal—that’s not easy to shake. Vincent Cassel stars as Karsh, a man mourning the fairly recent loss of his wife—she’s played, in several dream sequences, by Diane Kruger. Karsh has invented a special shroud that allows the living to witness the decomposition of the dead, a way of bringing physical intimacy into the grave; he has also made this technology available to others, opening a cemetery equipped with a number of these special shroud-enabled tombs. One night, the cemetery is plundered; graves are tipped over, their wi-fi connections disabled. Karsh’s sister-in-law (also played by Diane Kruger) and ex-brother-in-law (Guy Pearce) try to help him unravel the mystery of who might do such a thing, and why. Meanwhile, Karsh struggles to find his way back to life. The Shrouds’ true center is Kassel’s performance. He translates grief into a restless electrical energy; you can practically feel it vibrating through his agile, lanky frame.