List-making, it turns out, can be quite controversial.
Earlier this month, when every critic and their brother published their picks for the top movies of 2025, a debate broke out in the usual circles (i.e., certain corners of Film Twitter where regular users dare not tread) questioning why some writers didn’t list certain widely loved movies (especially Sinners).
Actor Wendell Pierce (The Wire, Superman) even started a minor online flame war when he commented on Variety’s list of the best movies, tweeting, “It is inconceivable that you can leave Sinners off of this list and expect to be considered objective film journalists.”
Barry Hertz: The 10 best films of 2025
Which is of course nailing and missing the point at the same time: Criticism, by its definition, is not meant to be objective. It is a purely subjective pursuit – one person’s opinion, informed by their (hopefully) expert-level exposure to the medium, and elevated by the prestige of their publication and/or the size of their audience – that too many have come to misunderstand as hive-mind populism.
With all that in mind, I like to typically take this time of the year to highlight an alternative Top 10 list: a collection of the most overlooked, underrated, underseen and/or unfairly dismissed films of the year. Sinners isn’t here – because it’s not exactly overlooked or underseen (and also because while I admire its ambitions, I don’t think it quite worked) – but hopefully there are a few titles that will pique your completely subjective curiosity.
10. Friendship
From left: Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd in Friendship.The Associated Press
Andrew DeYoung’s comedy about a socially awkward guy (Tim Robinson) desperate to be buddies with his neighbour (Paul Rudd) is such a success because it is as terrifying as it is funny. DeYoung seizes upon Robinson’s intentionally unnerving aura – all eye tics, awkward shuffles and a resting facial expression that is at once harmless and deeply upsetting – and proceeds to craft an entire world around it. The trick to unlocking Friendship – which often plays like 2009’s I Love You, Man (also starring Rudd) meets Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master – is that you genuinely have no idea where it is going to go next. (Streaming on Paramount+)
9. Cloud
From left: Masaki Suda and Kotone Furukawa in the Japanese thriller Cloud.Films We Like/Supplied
Buy low, sell high might be the mantra of Cloud’s central character, Yoshii (Masaki Suda), a Tokyo factory worker whose off hours are spent in the grey-market world of online resale. But the economic maxim might also apply to the film’s own writer-director, Kiyoshi Kurosawa. If you bought stock in the filmmaker back during his early, more disreputable days working in Japan’s pink-film and V-Cinema genres (essentially, direct-to-video erotic thrillers and yakuza flicks), then you’d be a rich cinephile today. Cloud cements Kurosawa as his country’s greatest, and slipperiest, auteur. (Streaming on Criterion Channel)
From left: Pamela Anderson and Liam Neeson in a scene from The Naked Gun.Frank Masi/The Associated Press
There might not be a sharper and more ill-considered performance of the year than the one given by Pamela Anderson in this redo/reboot of The Naked Gun. Balancing sexpot clichés with a killer case of deadpan, the Canadian-born actress helps Akiva Schaffer’s update of the Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker spoof genre reach deliriously silly new heights. And Liam Neeson is pretty good, too – and not only because his name rhymes with Naked Gun OG Leslie Nielsen. (Streaming on Paramount+)
From left: Gerard Butler and O’Shea Jackson Jr. in Den of Thieves 2: Pantera.Rico Torres/Lionsgate/Lionsgate
Pulling a sort of Fast Five on fans of the original, similarly overlooked 2018 heist film Den of Thieves, Christian Gudegast’s sequel finds corrupt L.A. cop Big Nick (Gerard Butler) teaming up with his one-time nemesis Donnie (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) to pull off a heist inside a French diamond exchange. Whereas the first film was all industrial L.A. grit, Pantera transports Gudegast’s fascination with the visual landmarks of working-class America to the ancient history of European labour, the director finding countless shades of backwards beauty in the rusted shipping yards of France and rotting rural homes of Italy. (Streaming on Netflix)
6. Final Destination: Bloodlines
Brec Bassinger stars in Final Destination Bloodlines.Eric Milner/Warner Bros. Pictures
Sometimes, you just want to sit back and watch people get chopped up by household appliances and/or out-of-control vehicles. This sixth entry in the Final Destination series doesn’t reinvent the bloody wheel, but Canadian directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein are smart enough to keep the carnage creative, copious and gnarly. (Streaming on Crave)
5. Lucky Lu
Lucky Lu follows an Uber Eats-like bike courier in Manhattan over the course of 48 anxiety-inducing hours.Supplied
A raw and nerve-jangling cross between Vittorio De Sica’s classic neo-realist drama Bicycle Thieves and the Safdie brothers’ pressure-cooker drama Uncut Gems, the new film Lucky Lu follows an Uber Eats-like bike courier in Manhattan over the course of 48 anxiety-inducing hours. While the film’s conceit and its near-epic scope – the lead character dashes from one end of the city to the next as he searches for his stolen e-bike – would be noteworthy for a director of any experience, the project is all the more remarkable given it’s a first-time feature. Canadian director Lloyd Lee Choi proves himself to be a wildly ambitious, resourceful filmmaker right out of the gate. Let’s hope it gets proper distribution after its festival-circuit run over the past few months. (Coming to theatres in early 2026)
4. Ick
A still image from Joseph Kahn’s political horror comedy Ick.VVS
As much a deeply affectionate love letter to eighties-era horror-comedies as it is a synapse-stretching exercise in defiant maximalism, Joseph Kahn’s new film, Ick, is a true ride designed to hold, thrill, kiss and kill you. Equal parts Evil Dead, The Blob, Gremlins and American Pie, Kahn’s latest smooshes together incendiary satire with sticky gore as it charts the Born in the U.S.A. dreams of Hank Wallace (Brandon Routh), a one-time football star who is now charged with saving his hometown from an alien goo. Every shot feels a few milliseconds shorter than audiences have come to expect, the director fully enlisted in the battle raging for our ever-diminishing attention spans. (Available on demand)
The President’s Cake is an effective street-level tour through one particularly dangerous era of Iraqi history.Supplied
In a year in which a surprisingly high number of foreign-language films cracked North America’s awards circuit, it’s disappointing to see that writer-director Hasan Hadi’s Iraq-set drama hasn’t made the waves that it deserves after its Cannes debut this past spring. Tracing one young girl’s quest to gather the ingredients needed to bake a cake in “honour” of Saddam Hussein’s birthday, the film is a tremendously effective street-level tour through one particularly dangerous era of Iraqi history. (In theatres Feb. 13)
At foreground: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, left, and Alfie Williams in 28 Years Later.Miya Mizuno/The Associated Press
A sequel to a sequel to one of the most inventive zombie movies ever made promises no real stakes or expectations. And yet Danny Boyle’s latest plays like a thrilling postapocalyptic epic filtered through the lens of an experimental art-museum installation, horrific and enigmatic from one moment to the next. And as the whoa-what ending proves, Boyle isn’t above having some wild fun, either. (Streaming on Crave)
1. Splitsville
From left: Michael Angelo Covino, Simon Webster and Dakota Johnson in Splitsville.The Associated Press
Not content to simply let scenes live or die on the strength of their comic dialogue, filmmaking partners Michael Angelo Covino (who directs and acts) and Kyle Marvin (who writes and acts) ensure that every sequence in their new anti-buddy comedy has some kind of visual or narrative trick up its sleeve. There is a relentless energy to the pair’s gags about two couples on the rocks – including a riotous fight between the two performers that rivals the stunt work of a John Wick movie – that anchors the film somewhere between relatable and absurd. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry and then you’ll do a strange mixture of both. (Available on demand)
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