Critical Blast's Top Movies of 2025

We here at Critical Blast love movies, which is a good thing, because 2025 was a spectacular year for cinema. While some hotly-anticipated franchise entries divided audiences (we’re looking at you, 28 Years Later), or were warmed-over vehicles for nostalgia (we’re looking at you, Jurassic World Rebirth), it was largely stand-alone films that earned the biggest critical and commercial rewards. Surprising, then, that our Best of 2025 countdown kicks off with a sequel

6: Final Destination: Bloodlines (Directors: Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein):

Who would’ve guessed that the sixth installment of a quarter-century old, fair-to-average teen horror franchise would be its greatest?

Bloodlines provides a welcome twist on the series’ tried-and-true Death-Never-Takes-A-Holiday formula while also commenting on the current so-called ‘legacy sequel’ trend popular in horror at the moment. The movie’s narrative posits that every fatality from the previous five films are the trickle-down result of an incident at the Sky View restaurant in 1968, an opening scene possessed of more intensity and suspense than many Final Destination films exhibited during their entire runtime. Picking up five decades later, we follow college student Stephani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) as she unravels the mystery surrounding her awful dreams of that deadly night, dreams that may be connected to her reclusive grandmother, who, so fate would have it, was the one who interrupted Death’s intended reaping at the Sky View six decades earlier.

Making the potential victims part of the same family serves to ratchet up the tension, but let’s face it, this franchise was built upon its gleefully gory pseudo-slasher flick kills, and Bloodlines more than lives up to that heritage. The Rube Goldberg-esque connect-the-dots aspect so prevalent in earlier Final Destination movies works better than ever, and several of the kills here rank among the series’ best, such as death-via-garbage-truck-compactor and death-via-MRI-machine. And seeing the late actor Tony Todd return one last time to his role as the mysterious mortuary attendant William Bludworth adds tender poignancy by reminding the audience how precious life truly is.

5: Weapons (Director: Zach Cregger):

Writer-director Zach Cregger burst onto the Hollywood scene in 2022 with Barbarian, a trapped-in-the-house horror movie that battered audiences into submission with its unrelenting dread, grimy underground squalor, and uncompromising finish. He returned this year with Weapons, a daring, experimental take on an old genre standard.

Told with a non-linear, multi-perspective point of view, Weapons is the story of Maybrook, Pennsyvania, a tiny town that sees seventeen children from the same third-grade class simultaneously vanish one evening. Angry parents blame the disappearances on the class’s teacher, Justine Gandy (Julia Garner); one of those parents is Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), a contractor who begrudgingly teams up with Justine to investigate the vanishings. What they eventually uncover is a bizarre plot instigated by a witch to leech life energy from unsuspecting individuals that she can then turn into living weapons.

Like he did with Barbarian, Cregger excels at fostering finger-wringing suspense, and it’s Weapons’ multi-point perspective that serves here to instill that feeling. Each segment uses a new character’s point-of-view to move the story forward; on paper, it’s a trick that shouldn’t conceivably work, but on-screen the curious narrative alchemy upends what it means to have an established main character. Instead of one central figure, we’re instead given an ensemble where no one person is greater than the whole, but who become more than the sum of their collective parts by the outrageously gory finale.

With Weapons, Cregger solidifies his status as a writer-director to watch and joins the new crop of up-and-coming 21st century horror glitterati alongside Jordan Peele, Robert Eggers, Ari Aster, and Oz Perkins. It will be interesting to see what project he develops next.

4: Thunderbolts (Director: Jake Schreier):

‘Superhero fatigue’ is one of Hollywood’s hottest buzzwords. Thanks to a streak of underperforming entries in Marvel’s Cinematic Universe (The Eternals, Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania, The Marvels, Captain America: Brave New World), the superhero gold mine has, after the better part of two decades, finally become tapped out. Theatergoers have turned away from tights-and-capes theatrics, and the MCU’s convoluted ‘Multiverse Saga’—epic in intellectual scope though it may be—has frequently been cited as the cause of increasing audience apathy.

But Thunderbolts bucks that downward trend. The movie follows Black Widow assassin Yelena Belova (the delightfully droll Florance Pugh) as she and a group of other deep-cover superhuman operatives are unknowingly set up for termination by their manipulative boss, Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus). After realizing they’ve been branded as expendable, the operatives—Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), U.S. Agent (Wyatt Russell), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), The Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), and Red Guardian (David Harbour), Yelena’s bombastic father—must fight one of their own, Bob Reynolds (Lewis Pullman), the mentally unstable Sentry, one of Valentina’s precious genetic lab experiments who may also be the world’s most powerful being.

What sets Thunderbolts apart from the current crop of superhero flicks is its emphasis on fun rather than franchise continuity. Sometimes criticized as Marvel’s answer to the DCEU’s Suicide Squad films, Thunderbolts nonetheless shares the wicked exuberance of those movies while returning to the nostalgic self-contained glory of earlier MCU entries. The film’s rapid-fire machine gun banter is thoroughly enjoyable, and the climactic showdown, where the Thunderbolts enter the Void (and its terrifying, endlessly interlocking Shame Rooms) to battle Sentry, ends on one of the most touching notes ever in the superhero movie genre. If more MCU movies are like this in 2026, it might restore audience faith in time for Avengers: Doomsday next December.

3: The Monkey (Director: Oz Perkins):

Osgood ‘Oz’ Perkins has some considerable horror pedigree. The son of the late Anthony Perkins (who infamously portrayed murderous momma’s boy Norman Bates in Psycho and its sequels), Oz has established himself in recent years through projects such as 2016’s The Blackcoat’s Daughter and last year’s creepy Nicolas Cage satanic panic sleeper hit Longlegs. The Monkey, though, took a different approach than either of those bleak-hearted affairs, adapting a lesser-known Stephen King short story about a pair of twin brothers and the misery inflicted upon their hometown by a wish-granting wind-up toy monkey.

Reveling in his natural gift for generating suspense, Perkins treated audiences to a darkly farcical death romp that outdoes the Final Destination series at its own grisly game. The kills in The Monkey never fail to surprise, from a shotgun-falling-out-of-the-closet mishap to the bullet-in-a-beehive death swarm, to that unforgettable just-before-the-credits school bus incident. Beyond the horror-comedy stylings, however, what truly gives The Monkey its life is Theo James, whose dual performance as good-and-evil twins Hal and Bill Shelburn is simultaneously heartwarming and heartbreaking. And speaking of actors handling a double role as twins, we’re about to discuss…

2: Sinners (Director: Ryan Coogler):

For once, the hype was real.

So much was said this year about writer-director Ryan Coogler’s period vampire epic in 2025 that it seems nothing new can be added to the conversation. But everything said was said for a reason, and those reasons were incredible; the flawlessly embodied Depression-era Deep South setting, the rich dialogue and characterizations, pitch-perfect casting, the climactic fangs-out barroom battle.

While the bait-and-switch from gritty familial crime drama to blood-and-guts undead horror has been done before (From Dusk Till Dawn anyone?), Coogler shifts gears more seamlessly than Robert Rodriguez’s gonzo Tarantino-penned flick, creating a more nuanced, complex, and ultimately more satisfying picture. The aforementioned blues-inspired score by Ludwig Göransson played a big part in Sinners’ success, and one would be hard-pressed to find a recent movie where music was so important, not only as an embellishment, but as an integral building block of the story itself. The sequence where guitarist Sammie (Miles Canton) conjures the spirits of musical icons both past and present while jamming onstage at his cousins’ juke joint isn’t just a scene-stealer, but a breath-taker.

Ultimately, however, as with Theo James in The Monkey, the single biggest asset in Ryan Coogler’s celluloid arsenal isn’t any special effect or line of dialogue, but actor Micheal B. Jordan’s bravura performance as twins Smoke and Stack, two imperfect souls fighting against an unjust world. Jordan infuses each brother with personalities so distinct they become fully realized, three-dimensional people, and makes their inevitable showdown all the more intense.

The word masterpiece is often thrown around haphazardly by critics, but with Sinners, the honor isn’t just warranted, but demanded. If you haven’t seen this movie, watch it. If you have, go watch it again.

1: Superman (Director: James Gunn):

What’s the only film that could possibly top Sinners? Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s James Gunn’s Superman!

The reboot of the DC Extended Universe (a.k.a. the DCEU, a.k.a. the Snyderverse) generated so much pre-release press that yea-and-nay battle lines divided fandom months before the first Superman trailer ever dropped. Even after the film’s release, online backlash continued from supporters of Zack Snyder’s grim-and-gritty vision lambasting James Gunn’s brighter approach. But what makes Gunn’s Man of Steel so thoroughly pleasing is the very thing missing from Snyder’s Man of Steel: a sense of hope. Where Snyder’s Superman focused on the character’s alien Kryptonian lineage to the detriment of his humanity, Gunn appeals to the five-year-old kid in all of us, the one who’d tie a bath towel around their neck and pretend to fight crime. His attempt is bolstered by actor David Corenswet, who effortlessly captures Clark Kent’s aw-shucks Midwestern charm without the slightest bit of snark or irony, giving audiences an instantly relatable, irrevocably human figure to identify with.

There’s a fun, almost goofy Silver Age vibe to Superman that flies in the face of the angsty 21st century. Wisely eschewing yet another origin story, we’re thrown right into the adventure, and Gunn grants audiences a hint of the new DCU’s scope. In the first hour alone we’re introduced to not only familiar faces like Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, Perry White, Johnathan and Martha Kent, et al, (Rachel Brosnahan, Skyler Gisondo, Wendell Pierce, Pruitt Taylor Vince and Neva Howell, respectively), but never-before-seen in live-action superheroes Hawkgirl, Guy Gardner, Mr. Terrific, and Metamorpho (Isabela Merced, Nathan Fillion, Edi Gathegi, and Anthony Carrigan). Then there’s Nicholas Hoult, the best Lex Luthor since Michael Rosenbaum’s multi-season turn on Smallville, and the best big screen iteration since Gene Hackman menaced Christopher Reeve, a genius-level corporate sociopath willing to sacrifice anything—and anyone—to achieve his Machiavellian goals.

Oh, and we can’t forget Krypto, the single cutest scene-stealer of 2025.

While Gunn’s usual sense of humor is readily on display in Superman (Lois’s throwaway insult about Guy Gardner’s haircut is priceless), the core idea behind the movie is a serious—and, yes, a hopeful—one: in a world where economic upheaval, political strife, and petty cruelty have become commonplace, the most dangerous, subversive, and rebellious act any of us can perform is to treat one another with kindness.

Superman is punk rock, and I love every minute of it. Bring on the rest of the DCU, and bring on 2026! I’ll see you at the movies.