Justin Chang

Billionaires and tech giants are laying waste to what remains of the major Hollywood studios.

I'm not entirely sure how to square all this bad news with my own good news, which is that I saw more terrific new movies this year than I have any year since before the pandemic.

True, most of those movies weren't from here, but all of them played in U.S.

theaters in 2025.

and all of them are well worth seeking out in the weeks and months to come.

The best new movie I saw this year is Sirat, a breakthrough work from a gifted Spanish filmmaker named Oliver Lache.

It's a nail-biting survival thriller set in the desert of southern Morocco during what feels like the end times.

It's a little Mad Max, a little Wages of Fear, and all in all, the most exhilarating and devastating two hours I experienced in a theater this year.

Sirat also features the year's best original score, composed by the electronic musician Kangding Ray.

The second film on my list is One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson's much-loved, much-debated reimagining of Thomas Pynchon's novel Vineland.

An exuberant mashup of action thriller and political satire, it stars Leonardo DiCaprio in one of his best and funniest performances, as an aging revolutionary drawn back into the field.

He leads an ensemble that includes Teyana Taylor, Benicio Del Toro, Sean Penn, Regina Hall, and the terrific discovery Chase Infinity.

In this scene, DiCaprio's character, Bob Ferguson, calls up someone from the French 75, the underground movement he was part of years earlier.

Unfortunately, he can't remember the elaborate series of passphrases needed to verify his identity.

Number three is Caught by the Tides, an unclassifiable hybrid of fiction and nonfiction from the Chinese director Jia Zhangke.

Drawn from a mix of archival footage and newly shot material, it's a one-of-a-kind portrait of the myriad transformations that China has gone through over the past two decades.

At number four is another structurally bold Chinese title.

It's called Resurrection, and it's a bit like an Avatar movie for film buffs.

Placing us in the head of a shape-shifting protagonist, the director, Bi-Gan, takes us on a gorgeous, dreamlike odyssey through various cinema genres, from historical spy drama to vampire thriller.

My number five movie is the year's best documentary, My Undesirable Friends, Part 1, Last Heir in Moscow, from the director, Julia Lokotev.