Our picks for the 2025 movies you should watch this holiday season

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1:12Hollywood hoped 2025 would be its comeback here. Movie theaters are booming. I think finally after five years roaming around in the wilderness after COVID, I think the movie industry is finally back. That is AMC CEO Adam Aaron talking with CNBC a few months ago. The industry expected to make$9 billion. It would have been the best year since before the pandemic. With just a day left, though, it looks like North American revenues will fall a few million short of that goal. Here's Comscore's Paul Daguerabedian on CNBC. Spent a very tumultuous year at the box office. Tumultuous to the very end. Big movies released in the last week or so are pulling in big crowds.

1:55We're looking at a really strong holiday period with Avatar, with the housemaid, with the movie David. We had Marty Supreme go into wide release, Song Sung Blue opened, and Anaconda. Speaking of Anaconda, reboots and sequels had a big year. Hey buddy, eyes up here. Films like Superman and Wicked for Good. This is the work of the Wicked Witch. How to Train Your Dragon. Maybe they're not as bad as we think they are. and Lilo and Stitch. Ancient Cobra Bubbles. We have a blue dog to catch. But as individual ticket prices get more expensive, just holding steady overall means fewer moviegoers in cinema seats.

2:39And as our movie critic notes, money and attendance aren't necessarily indications of quality. Consider this. Whether you are headed to the theater this winter break or binge-watching at home, there's plenty to choose from, and we're here to help. our Bob Mandello has rounded up his top movies of the year.

3:08From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly.

3:18It's considered this from NPR. Hollywood had another quiet year at the movies. Box office income just hasn't bounced back to pre-pandemic highs. But ticket sales are not always a sign of quality. As proof, we offer critic Bob Mondello's 10 best list. Well, 10-ish. This list positively overflows. When filmmakers are cranking out blockbusters, Tinseltown can seem like any other business. Customer satisfaction measured in popcorn sales and audience smiles. But when filmmakers are passionate, movies can make audiences vibrate. With grief, with excitement, with rage. And that happened a lot this year.

3:58Ryan Coogler unleashed a blue spectacle for the ages in Sinners. This ain't no house party. A stomping, shiver-inducing barn burner of a thriller that conjured all of this music's ancestors and descendants, along with some sharp-fanged demons. You keep dancing with the devil. One day he's gonna follow you home. Sinners tells a story about power, prejudice, and the aftermath of slavery, a tale of saving not just one person's soul, but a community's. Who ain't gonna kill every last one of you? And Sinners wasn't alone in combining feverish social commentary with entertainment. In One Battle After Another, director Paul Thomas Anderson uses thriller conventions to make a story of political resistance literally explosive.

4:37What I'm doing here is I'm creating a closed circuit so you don't accidentally detonate your charge. Anderson does lots of hugely entertaining things. He's even come up with a new kind of car chase. In the service of pitting stoner revolutionaries against authoritarian creeps who despise anyone who's not white male and reactionary. To the vigilante group known as the French 75, we are here to award Stephen Lockjaw with the Medal of Honor. One battle after another is so of this moment it almost leaps off the screen. A pair of provocative foreign films did that in their own countries. The Secret Agent is about a 1970s Brazilian man hiding from that country's dictatorship.

5:19He's been targeted by the authorities for championing science over ideology. Parallels are being drawn to our own time. But in this wildly eccentric thriller, he's not just dodging hitmen, but all manner of weirdness, including a hairy, disembodied leg. Like The Secret Agent, Jafar Panahi's It Was Just an Accident uses humor to brighten a story of resistance. This one's about an Iranian guy who gets all squirrely when he hears the squeak of a prosthetic knee coming his way. Reminds him of prison and a sadistic one-legged guard. The filmmaker was himself imprisoned in Iran, and it's remarkable how generous of spirit he is in It Was Just an Accident.

5:57That's four bests. The next two are riffs on literary classics. Tell me a story. What story would you like? Something that moves you. Hamnet, Chloe Zhao's adaptation of a speculative novel about Shakespeare, looks at the death of the bard's young son Mama! My boy! and with directorial fervor and lush visuals, turns a portrait of a family tragedy into a heart-stopping meditation on the transformative power of art. To die. To sleep. Perchance to dream. If recent years have brought a more staggering cinematic catharsis than the last ten minutes of Hamnet, I have not experienced it. Guillermo del Toro also tackles a classic narrative in a swoony, almost operatic Frankenstein.

6:45By giving Jacob Elordi something besides anger to play, del Toro makes this Frankenstein a uniquely soulful creature feature. A self-made monster is the subject of Josh Safdie's Marty Supreme, an adrenaline-fueled screwball comedy about a 1950s hustler who dreams of world domination in table tennis. Timothee Chalamet plays a guy based on a real ping-pong champ, scamming and cheating his way through this propulsive, sometimes harrowing thrill ride. What do you plan to do if a stream of yours doesn't work out? That doesn't even enter my consciousness. While Marty's supremely watchable, imagine for a sec that it's your dad who's this kind of self-absorbed.

7:22That's the situation in Sentimental Value, a wrenching Norwegian drama about an actress who turns down what could be the part of a lifetime when it's offered by her neglectful filmmaking father. Why didn't you want to do the role. I can't work with him. We can't really talk. Sentimental Value has a twisty plot that keeps you guessing to the final moments of the final scene. That's eight bests, and international films set in the Middle East also keeps you riveted, though the action is deliberately kept off screen. The voice of Hind Rajab embeds audiences in a West Bank emergency call center, where Red Crescent operators are fielding desperate calls for help from Gaza.

8:01We are shooting at a car with a little girl inside. Can you imagine that? So do something. The film's power stems from a simple fact. Those on-screen are actors, but Hind's voice, the voice of Hind Rajab, is real, recorded on January 29, 2024, while she was trapped in the car. The American epic that rounds out my top ten gets its power from a Terrence Malick-like kind of cinematic poetry. Train Dreams is set in an era of steam locomotives and Western expansion. It was all gone by so fast. The American dream is experienced by a lumberjack and his family in the Pacific Northwest. Joy, heartbreak, natural disasters spanning decades.

8:41The monumental landscape, nearly a character in itself. Beautiful, ain't it? What is? All of it. Every bit of it. That is ten films, but I still have time left, and there were plenty of other passionate filmmakers, so I'll just keep going. No film this year was more alarming than Catherine Bigelow's eerily authentic nuclear thriller, A House of Dynamite. Approximately three minutes ago, we detected an ICBM over the Pacific. Current flight trajectory is consistent with impact somewhere in the continental United States. So shoot it down, right? You're talking about hitting a bullet with a bullet.

9:20So it's a coin toss? That's what$50 billion boxes? Catastrophe is also the subject of Sirat, a breathtaking story of raves, rage, and despair in North Africa. And while catastrophe may be a strong word for what lyricist Lorenz Hart is feeling in Blue Moon, how else could he see the loss of his partner Richard Rodgers on opening night of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma? We write together for a quarter of a century, and the first show he writes with someone else is going to be the biggest hit he ever had. Am I bitter, Larry? Yes. It was boom time for business world satires, what with No Other Choice, about a downsized Korean worker's desperate job search, and Begonia with his big pharma exec kidnapped by guys convinced she's an alien.

10:04Where's my hair? Your hair has been destroyed. To prevent you from contacting your ship. What ship? Your mother's ship. Family dynamics get the side eye from an understated Jim Jarmusch comedy called Father Mother Sister Brother. You've always been my favorite son. Well, your only son. As far as we know. And also from Bradley Cooper's Is This Thing On, starring Will Arnett as a guy who processes his divorce on a stand-up stage. I was unhappy in our marriage. I wasn't unhappy with our marriage. Man, I wish I had a punchline. Meanwhile, documentarians were all but reinventing documentary form in 2025, from actors doing Shakespeare inside a video game in Grand Theft Hamlet.

10:47Don't shoot us, please. To the dazzling sensory overload of cascading, dancing, building materials in Architecton, to the upbeat, rousing way two queer artists approached a stage four cancer diagnosis in Come See Me in the Good Life. Why don't we just root for me being alive, and if I'm not, I will not feel bad about not being there. That is a whole second ten. Passion projects every one, enough to make any film lover confident, despite box office woes, as we head into 2026. I'm Bob Mandela. This episode was produced by Chloe Weiner, Mark Rivers, and Karen Zamora. It was edited by Clara Lombardo and Sarah Handel, with audio engineering from Ted Meebane.

11:34Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan.

11:41It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Mary Louise Kelly.