The best movies of 2025—and where they’re streaming.

I’m not going to lie: 2025 was not a year that’s easy to put a rosy spin on, even in the introductory blurb to a list of the year’s best movies. This has been a 12-month period of daily pummeling by the forces of history and fate, of waking up to an infinite scroll of dumbfoundingly terrible news chased by an overpriced cup of Trump-tariff coffee. During that stretch early in the year when movie pickings always tend to be slim, I clung to older films I already knew I loved as if they were flotsam from a sinking ship. But as winter made way for spring, unusual and beautiful new releases began to poke their heads up like crocuses through frozen ground. By fall, there was a virtual harvest table of substantial, satisfying, sometimes sublime new films to choose from—such a bounty of them that