Best Films of 2025 So Far (A Current Affairs Blog)

mid-year movie check in

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I’m trying to get back into being a “person who writes about art and culture,” by being a person who’s also aware of current art and culture. This is I think what a lot of people originally subscribed to my Substack for in the first place. I’ve said this before probably too many times but it’s been a weird byproduct of accumulated trauma in that I’ve felt a rupture in my passion for film and pop culture. But at the same time I’ve also had a real desire to unplug from social media. Most of the time I scroll Instagram or X the Everything App now, I feel like an outsider looking in as opposed to an active participant.

This is great, in part because I can lurk on X the Everything App and not really get an urge to add to the discourse or start one of my own. My life feels a lot more zen now that I don’t ever really know what dumb fake arguments about movies are happening in a space that doesn’t actually exist. Any personal opinions I feel the need to express I do so on my Instagram stories, where the legions of low IQ blue checks and sexbots can’t hound me. But this lack of participation in the most active spaces of discussions has also left me a little in the dark on social and cultural fads. Sometimes it’s great, because I genuinely don’t care about most of them and I welcome that part of getting older—so much arts writing now is just expounding upon worthless, ephemeral inanities that are helping to dumb down our already dumb culture. But other times I miss my modest acuity when it came to spotting emerging trends and jumping on a pitch.

Anyway, at the very least I think I’ve done a mostly alright job at keeping up with new release films, or at least keeping up with the ones I’m genuinely interested in (or whatever horrible titles I’m paid to watch and write about). So I’m going to start there. Here are my 10 favorite movies that I’ve seen six months into the year.

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10. Warfare

I’ve both already reviewed this and also already contributed a blurb on it to another “Best Films of the Year So Far” list. It succeeds as a brisk, tense thriller, but it’s also totally bozo-brained. Its attempt to present a veteran’s memory of the Iraq war as objectively as possible is innately impossible. Memories have biases and unflattering distortions, ones that paint a picture of apathy and blind patriotism. This makes it almost implicitly anti-war regardless of intent, but this seems beyond what Alex Garland and his co-writer/veteran Ray Mendoza have conceived. When the film ends both with a statement of gratitude towards the soldiers and a side-by-side of the actors and the soldiers they played that blurs most of the real men’s faces, everything coalesces into a perfect object of bleak irony.

9. The Ugly Stepsister

Satirical Norwegian reinterpretation of Cinderella which focuses on—obviously—one of the ugly stepsisters instead of the titular orphaned beauty. I’ve never looked into the original story, which is a passed-down folktale with numerous versions including one published by the Brothers Grimm. But this iteration (directed by Emilie Blichfeldt) feels in keeping with the spirit and tone of those original, much darker fairytales. Yucky, engrossing, and deeply sad. Being a woman has always been hard, but it was probably harder back when nose jobs were done wide awake with a hammer and weight loss was encouraged via parasite consumption. Will make you hate Cinderella, the person.

8. 28 Years Later