Movie magic

With the movie business facing so-so box office, corporate consolidation, shifting viewing habits and the encroachment of AI, 2025 often felt odd, exhausting and polarizing.

In an uneven year of big disappointments and unexpected pleasures, here are some of the films that snuck up on me.

MUSIC MOVIES (BUT NOT MUSICALS):

Sorry, Wicked: For Good. The movie music that really grabbed me this year was from Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, a Depression-era vampire movie propelled by blistering blues, haunting gospel numbers and some undead Irish step-dancing.

It all comes together in a time-travelling musical set-piece that is not just a spectacular bit of cinema, but an integral part of Coogler’s statement on race, culture and artistic ownership.

In The Ballad of Wallis Island, a delicately funny, sweetly melancholy little British film, an eccentric superfan (Tim Key) tricks an estranged folk duo (Tom Basden and Carey Mulligan) into coming to his home for a private concert.

Expect some wistful indie folk songs that capture the down-deep connections between music and memory, love and grief.

SIDEWAYS SPORTS MOVIES:

In Marty Supreme, Josh Safdie’s frenetic, kinetic, unstoppable comedy-drama, Timothée Chalamet channels an obnoxiously confident table tennis player whose professional ambitions leave behind a trail of personal destruction. Come for the ping-pong. Stay for Safdie’s expertly controlled cinematic chaos.

If you’re in the mood for something quieter, Carson Lund’s Eephus is named for a baseball pitch that seems to hang in the air, suspending time. This gentle, understated, elegiac little drama follows a community team’s last game on a field that’s about to be built over. The innings unfold, almost in real time, and we’re right there with these mostly middle-aged guys, as they play, play against the dying of the light.

GENRE-BUSTERS:

Some of the year’s best crime flicks ended up being about other things.

Wake Up Dead Man brings back Daniel Craig as private detective Benoit Blanc, as he investigates a so-called “impossible murder” in a rural church, along with parish priest Josh O’Connor (shaping up to be 2025’s favourite leading man).

For all its golden-age mystery trappings, Rian Johnson’s third — and best — Knives Out flick is a moving, surprisingly subtle disquisition on faith.

In The Mastermind, a disaffected suburbanite (Josh O’Connor, again) schemes to steal some paintings from a public museum. While the score is plenty jazzy, in every other way Kelly Reichardt’s slow, quiet, closely observed character study upends heist film conventions, becoming a scathing takedown of the male antihero trope. (Spoiler alert: The title is sarcastic.)

One Battle After Another (with Leonardo DiCaprio, Teyana Taylor and Sean Penn) has some of the markers of an action movie — car chases, gun battles, bank robberies, explosions — but with Paul Thomas Anderson adapting a Thomas Pynchon novel. What we get is an electrifying, over-the-top and absolutely unblinking look at America’s current crisis.

MAGNIFICENT MESSES:

A lot of year-end lists highlight unquestionable achievement, making this a good time to remember that perfection is sometimes overrated.

The zombie movie 28 Years Later is alternately dead brilliant and completely kooky, and sometimes — somehow! — both at once. The hugely anticipated threequel in the 28 Days Later series, which sees a return of original creators Danny Boyle and Alex Garland, may be choppy, erratic and tonally all-over-the-place, but even its failures are ambitious and intriguing.

Is Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein a great movie? Nope. But its glorious images, unabashed excesses and lurid exploration of personal obsession are compelling all the same. Rather like Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) and the creature (Jacob Elordi) he has painfully birthed but cannot control, del Toro’s film lurches around — unwieldy, awkwardly stitched together, but somehow still poignant.

CHAT ROOMS:

Blue Moon is all talk. This lovely little tragicomedy from director Richard Linklater and scripter Robert Kaplow takes place at Broadway hangout Sardi’s over the course of one evening in 1943, with Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke), one half of the Rodgers and Hart songwriting duo, just conversing. With dialogue that is bitchy, witty and poignantly self-aware, this is essentially a super-compressed biopic.

Ira Sachs’ Peter Hujar’s Day is based on one day-long conversation between real-life writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall) and groundbreaking queer photographer Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw) in 1970s New York. A moving recreation of a very specific place and time, it’s also an examination of the complex interplay between creative work and everyday life.

HOMETOWN HERO:

My favourite film this year was also the most intensely Winnipeggy. Universal Language by Matthew Rankin, a Manitoba-born filmmaker now based in Montreal, is both hilariously hyper-local and wondrously strange, set in Winnipeg by way of Tehran.

In a wintry burg where the bus bench slogans are in Farsi, and Jeanne’s cakes and Old Dutch potato chips are sold in a freezing open-air bazaar, this absurdist comedy shades incrementally into something moving, sad and deeply human.

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