The Best Movies of 2025, According to John Waters

New York City is the only place you might have been able to see all of my top ten this year. Thank the higher and lower powers (and maybe even the film gods) for the New York Film Festival, revival houses that often do better business with crackpot art films than supposed commercial blockbusters, and all the film nuts still out there who commute to the city to worship at the altar of alternative cinema. Just think, Jim Jarmusch, Richard Linklater, Gus Van Sant, Kathryn Bigelow, Spike Lee, and Paul Thomas Anderson all got their signature-style films financed and distributed — amazingly wonderful! Here are my fucked-up favorites; they need all the help they can get.

1. Eddington (Ari Aster)

My favorite movie of the year is a disagreeable but highly entertaining tale as exhausting as today’s politics with characters nobody could possibly root for. Yet it’s so terrifyingly funny, so confusingly chaste and kinky that you’ll feel coo-coo crazy and oh-so-cultural after watching. If you don’t like this film, I hate you.

2. Final Destination: Bloodlines (Adam B. Stein, Zach Lipovsky)

The best sequel to the coolest cinematic franchise ever. Ferocious, fractured, and filled with so many scary, twisted surprises—this picture goes beyond trash into a new realm of exploitation art.

3. Oslo Trilogy (Dag Johan Haugerud)

Three terrific Norwegian films directed by the newest heir to Ingmar Bergman’s throne concerning how complicated yet hopeful and similar all homo and hetero loves and lusts really are. The smartest dialogue about romance in a long, long time.

4. Sirāt (Oliver Laxe)

Move over, Mad Max. Hurry up, The Wages of Fear. This jaw-droppingly exciting new cinematic road trip to a rave party in the deserts of war-torn Morocco makes those classics look like slowpokes. Tragedy after tragedy of unspeakable intensity make this script the best feel-bad acid adventure ever filmed. It’ll blow your mind … [spoiler alert] literally.

5. Sauna (Mathias Broe)

Like a modern-day Andy Warhol’s Trash, this sexy and well-acted first feature is about an affair between a hunky, hip gay male who works in a Copenhagen bathhouse cleaning out glory holes and a trans man who now identifies as gay. Cockeyed cunnilingus — a whole new frontier to consider?

6. Room Temperature (Dennis Cooper, Zac Farley)

A purposely tedious and tender poetic head-scratcher of a film focusing on a family setting up their neighborhood home for a Halloween horror house. Just when you begin hating this film, you’ll suddenly realize—huh? I love it. It’s weird, creepy, and maybe … just maybe, great.

7. Misericordia (Alain Guiraudie)

An impossibly perverse thriller where murder, closet incest, and the inappropriate attraction to one guilty man collide, leaving the audience stunned by sexual plot twists and a lulu of an ending. Yikes! This one’s off the rails!

8. When Fall Is Coming (François Ozon)

A touching (and when have you ever heard me use that word?), nonjudgmental drama about a retired whore and her kind but rage-filled, down-low gay grown son, who gets out of prison and teaches her that maybe murder is the right thing to do.

9. My Mom Jayne (Mariska Hargitay)

A top rate documentary that reveals secret after secret about Jayne Mansfield and her family that will push you to the edge of your seat and possibly make you cry.

10. The Empire (Bruno Dumont)

I’m not a fan of science fiction, but when a brutalist spaceship lands in northern France in this film, I fell to my knees to worship the mutant deities onboard. I didn’t realize this script was supposed to be funny until I read the press notes after viewing. It is. Sort of. Not funny ha-ha. Not funny peculiar. But funny ha-ha peculiar, just like the director.