Film critic Jesse Hawthorne Ficks of Movies for Maniacs breaks down his favorite films of last year, in his preferred double-feature format.
1. (tie) Peter Vack’s www.RachelOrmont.com (US, 2024)
This self-distributed, mind-meltingly maximalist time-capsule is not only my favorite film of the 2025, but also one of my favorite films of the decade. Unavailable to stream online, rarely does a movie understand its own era so well. Feeling similar to misunderstood masterpieces like Deborah Kaplan & Harry Elfont’s Josie and the Pussycats (2001) and Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers (1997), audiences (and seemingly distributors) will need a decade or two to unpack how deeply insightful the film’s hyper-truth is about our present-day insanity.
After receiving a Feature Film Fellowship from the Sundance Institute (along with tapping financially and emotionally supportive parents), writer-director Peter Vack’s hyper truth look at being swallowed up by the internet follows Rachel, a 31-year-old who doesn’t realize she has grown up working for an advertising agency, where her only job is to assess Mommy 6.0—her favorite online pop star in the whole entire world. Vack meta-practices the same addictions that Rachel has online in his movie itself by throwing together dozens of the era’s most famous controversial culture vulture memers, podcasters, and substackers to argue over one another’s “based” memes and “cucked” lifestyles. Add to that a kaleidoscope of tonal shifts from ironic to neo-sincere to downright cringe, all in 30-second sequence, one may not even understand what hit them until days later. Even the title www.RachelOrmont.com seems to confuse some, who think he’s distributing a website and not a movie.
The film’s greatest attribute is the absolutely, deranged performance by Vack’s real-life sister Betsey Brown. Attacking each scene with the same unhinged and committed audacity that she gave in Dasha Nekrosova’s The Scary of Sixty-First (2021), here she manages to flesh out a much more complex character that feels worthy of Gena Rowlands in John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence (1974). These two hard working siblings have assembled an incredible trilogy of hilarious yet poignant films beginning with Vack’s deliberately grotesque debut Assholes (2017), followed by Brown’s brilliant (and deeply misunderstood) directorial debut Actors (2022). Clearly their films are going to be polarizing. I have seen audience members walk out, ridicule the filmmakers during a Q&A and theaters downright refuse to even program their movies. Yet this kind of fearlessness and genuine bravery by filmmakers to keep pushing the expectations of what contemporary cinema can be is why I fell in love with cinema in the first fucking place.
1. (tie) Louise Weard’s Castration: Movie Anthology Part 2 – The Best of Both Worlds (US, 2025)
Tapping into the multi-faceted satire of John Waters and Lina Wertmüller, while channeling the transgressive audacity of John Cassavetes, this equally hilarious and disturbing deconstruction of modern times is at the absolute forefront of a new wave for 2020s Independent cinema.
Shot on Hi8 video, lo-fi masterpiece entitled Chapter III: Polygon!!!! Heartmoder is a stand-alone chapter in director Louise Weard’s Castration Anthology. (She has already finished Chapter IV and is raising the funds for Chapter V as we speak.) This “labyrinthine post-modern epic about gender” follows a young woman named Circle (Alex Walton, giving one of the best performances of the decade), who lives in a trans woman separatist cult in Bushwick, NY, but is having second thoughts about her commitment to the group. The cult’s constant ketamine-fueled orgies, online recruitment tactics facilitated by an AI agent, and questionable ideological stances influenced by the online group 4chan is both monotonously hilarious and at the same time uncontrollably terrifying. Ivy Wolk (Anora), Lea Rose Sebastianis (The All Golden), and Peter Vack (www.RachelOrmont.com) are all major highlights in the second half (did I mention this chapter runs 300 minutes with a built in intermission?), while Hesse Deni (Brain Death), Jack Haven (I Saw the TV Glow), Alexandra McVicker (The Serpent’s Skin), Betsey Brown (Actors), Theda Hammel (Stress Positions) are wonderfully weird and uncomfortably on-point. Keep your eyes glued to the astounding new label Muscle Distribution for an upcoming Blu-ray release.
2. Ari Aster’s Eddington (US, 2025)
This hilarious satire of our contemporary culture wars is a completely committed, thoroughly realized vision that builds to such a brilliant and devastating climax, that it should (and will) be studied in future film history classrooms. Joaquin Phoenix gives yet another pitch perfect performance as a modern-day, small town Texan sheriff trying to navigate every single modern-day problem. Ari Aster’s nuanced and darkly comedic 150-minute opus “practices what it preaches” so well, that it clearly seemed to hit a little too close to home for 2025 audiences. (How is this not nominated for every single category at the Oscars this year?)
Film-noir westerns have been around dating back William Wellman’s The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), Raoul Walsh’s Pursued (1947), and the granddaddy of them all, John Ford’s The Searchers (1956)—which was also a major influence for Paul Thomas Anderson on One Battle After Another (2025). Later, Sam Peckinpah revitalized things with Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) and more recently the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men (2007), and Jordan Peele’s Nope (2022) have risen to the occasion to reimagine the genre into neo-noir. Each of these films focus on a lost and confused anti-hero, broken down by war and caught in a firestorm of anarchy. Many are overlooked by audiences at the time of their release. Whenever it happens, put your phones away, and turn off all your notifications. Take a serious head-first dive into Eddington. Its nostalgic observations of 2020 are also prophetically still coming to fruition.
+ Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme (US, 2025)
Ignoring Wes Anderson’s recent movies seems to be the way of the world. Some casually deride his films when they clearly have no clue what they are actually talking about (see Onion piece here.) This dismissive attitude is paving the road for future generations to scoff at older generations that dismissed the greatest artists in their own time. Not only is Anderson’s latest the most politically radical film of his career, he’s at the absolute top of his cinematic game.
Shot on 35mm and using the unusual 1.5:1 aspect ratio, Anderson continues to explore bittersweet family matters by way of a hyper speed screwball comedy, actors Benicio del Toro, Michael Cera and newcomer Mia Threapleton (Kate Winslet’s daughter) all give career best performances worthy of a nomination. Make sure to also pay close attention to the purposeful paintings hanging in the backgrounds. Most of them are the actual paintings, and Anderson had them brought in for each scene, needing guards to protect them at all times. In fact, watching the hilarious ramifications of each shady decision by “bad dad” Zsa Zsa Korda (del Toro) ranks up there with Gene Hackman’s Royal Tenenbaum, Bill Murray’s Steve Zissou and Ralph Fiennes’ Monsieur Gustave H (of Grand Budapest Hotel). Add to that the low-key ending that knocked me out in a similar manner to Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) and the “Phoenician Scheme” might just be the best MacGuffin of the decade.
3. Annapurna Sriram’s Fucktoys (US, 2025)
Restoring all faith in independent filmmaking, this movie could change your life. Fucktoys channels the early trashiness of John Waters’ Female Trouble (1974), as it follows a couple of sex workers as they attempt to lift a curse while taking a road trip across “Trashtown,” USA. Like all great exploitation filmmakers, writer, director and star Annapurna Sriram lures you into the theater with gloriously homemade raunch and then slowly but surely, reveals that it’s in fact delivering the wisdom of Federico Fellini and Agnes Varda. This is the kind of unstoppably hilarious movie that you discover at a certain age, covet for years and then screen for someone important in your life, hoping they “get it” (because that would mean they “get you”). It’s shot in glorious Super-16mm by Cory Fraiman-Lott. Do whatever it takes to see this self-distributed cinematic treasure.
+ Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby (US, 2025)
Deftly balancing quick-witted humor and genuine moments of profound poignancy, Eva Victor has delivered an incredible debut feature. This therapeutic safe space to explore the uncomfortable sports stark camerawork and a screenplay laced with haunting silences. Premiering at Sundance in 2025, it’s a deep dive into the psyche of a struggling liberal arts literature professor, (with beautiful locations in rural Belfast, Maine) was unjustly overlooked by the Oscars. Thankfully Eva Victor was nominated for a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in a Female Dramatic Performance.
4. Óliver Laxe’s Sirāt (Spain/France/Morocco, 2025)
No other movie this year gripped my insides and held me breathless throughout its entire 114-minute odyssey. As a father searches for his missing daughter, along with his son, their dog, and a group of ravers in the deserts of southern Morocco, nothing could prepare me for the guttural peaks and valleys that this film achieves. Produced by Pedro Almodóvar and shot on Super-16mm by Mauro Herce, it’s a jaw-dropping follow up to director Óliver Laxe’s previously hypnotic Fire Will Come (2019), and has bewitched the Academy of Arts of Sciences, garnering nominations for Best International Feature Film and as well as Best Sound Design. Stay away from all spoilers and walk into this blind. I haven’t been able to shake it out my system since.
+ Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another (US, 2025)
Similar to Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme, Paul Thomas Anderson has made his most political film to date and wow, does it land on point. Shot by cinematographer Michael Bauman of Phantom Thread (2017) and Licorice Pizza (2021) on 35mm using VistaVision cameras, you can truly feel the horizontal aspect of this film stock in the film’s climactic car chase. All the actors are having the time of their lives, with Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Teyana Taylor and Benicio del Toro all “chewing up the scenery.” Newcomer Chase Infiniti is the heart of the film. Her compassion for her “bad dad” helps make this loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (1990) a movie that you can return to over and over again.
5. Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia (UK / Ireland / South Korea / US, 2025)
Another loose adaptation, this time ofSouth Korean cult classic Save the Green Planet (2003) by Jang Joon-hwan, attacks the heartland of Americana with such absurd irony that even audiences that might usually skip the surrealism of Yorgos Lanthimos might come out of this contemporary cult classic with a smile on their face. Not only that, somehow this hyper-violent screwball torture-porn (named after an ancient Greek folk practice in which bees were spontaneously generated from a cow’s dead carcass) was somehow nominated by the Academy for Best Picture, Best Actress (Emma Stone), Best Adapted Screenplay (Will Tracy), and Best Original Score (Jerskin Fendrix). (Why Jesse Plemmons was ignored for perhaps one of his greatest performances is still totally baffling.) This breath-takingly bizarre look at isolation and loneliness, from the top to the bottom, could solve the entire universe’s problems in fall swoop.
+ Harmony Korine’s Baby Invasion (US, 2025)
An addictive anti-movie, yet another hypnotic reflection of contemporary culture by cinema’s greatest underachiever, Harmony Korine. His latest 80-minute, multi-dimensional extravaganza follows a game designer, whose latest concoction, Baby Invaderz, is leaked onto the dark web. As gamers livestream the first-person shooter game—which follows a group of mercenaries, disguised with AI generated baby faces, as they violently invade mansions of the wealthy and powerful—the protagonists start to confuse what is real and what is not. Shot using over a hundred different GoPros and edited down from over 150 hours, there are two versions of the film: the “PURE” (an un-narrated version allowing the viewer to just be immersed in the mesmerizing sound design by Hyperdub musician Burial) and the “UNPURE” (an ASMR narrated version, telling a very long story about a rabbit).
Having watched both versions, I suggest you stay focused on the ever-spiraling livestream chat; the “random” comments are hilarious and low-key brilliant. In-synch perfectly with Korine’s previous endeavors Trash Humpers (2009) and Aggro Dr1ft (2023), this seemingly aimless excursion is a sneaky little transcendental styled pearl that accomplishes everything-and-nothing.
6. Park Chan-wook No Other Choice (South Korea, 2025)
Key moments as well as curious minor details keep popping up in my mind months after watching this swirl of controversial ideas from Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, The Handmaiden). While the Academy of Arts of Sciences seems to have dismissed the film completely, I find No Other Choice delivering a much more fascinating and darkly complex look at similar themes brought up in the Oscar sweeping Parasite (2019) by Bong Joon-ho. No character is simplified or demonized. And no other sequence this year, along with the film’s final shot which I will not spoil, brought me as much glee and uncomfortable terror as Man-su (hilariously performed by Park’s longtime muse Lee Byung-hun) driving back to the house of his first unemployed rival.
The chaotic combination of a poignant 1980s song (by Cho Yong-pil) with over-the-top screwball violence, laced with the power dynamics of what longtime marriages bring—not to mention Man-su getting bit by a snake to start the whole thing off—is truly the stuff that cinematic dreams are made of. Park apologized in person at the SFMOMA before the film began stating “I know the film is very long at 139-minutes (and I even want to add a few more scenes back into it) but I just have so many things to say about the world right now.” Please Mr. Park, release your sprawling director’s cut because I will be first in line.
+ Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee (2025)
Why did Searchlight Pictures mishandle the release of one of the year’s most exhilarating and memorable films!?! Maybe because it’s set in the mid-1700s and based on the real events of an egalitarian group of Shakers, who practiced pacifism and racial and gender quality, were celibate, and lived a communal utopian lifestyle. Amanda Seyfried goes full tilt as the title’s lead character, Ann Lee, while debut director Mona Fastvold combined forces with creative partner Brady Corbet (The Brutalist) on the hypnotic screenplay and gorgeous 35mm and 70mm cinematography. Did I mention it’s also 137-minutes and a musical as well? Seyfried prepped for years to audition for Glinda in Jon M. Chu’s recent adaptation of Wicked, yet after experiencing this kind of committed performance, I think this proves that Wicked did not deserve her, and that she truly is one of the best actors of her generation.
7. Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme (US, 2025)
Let’s start with the extraordinary veteran production designer by Jack Fisk, whose career is highlighted by legendary set work for Terrence Malick, David Lynch and Paul Thomas Anderson. His 1950s sets are filled with the kind of “lived-in” details that can easily be taken for granted. Not once did I feel like something looked “off,” which is remarkable due to the number of different locations designed for the film. Next is the 150+ unique roles in Marty Supreme, obtained by casting director Jennifer Venditti. It’s not an accident casting Tyler, The Creator Okonma and Odessa A’zion, alongside legends like Abel Ferrara, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Fran Drescher. Venditti’s background in documentary helped shape her ability to find actors for Ryan Gosling’s Lost River (2014), Andrea Arnold’s American Honey (2016), and HBO’s Euphoria (2019).
Daniel Lopatin’s synth-induced soundtrack, combined with the most popular hits of the 1980s (played during a 1950s period piece) will either work for you or it won’t. Either way, it is a purposeful high concept, whose culture clash should inspire you to look further into Lopatin’s work. Josh Safdie has taken things up a notch with this fascinating look at being Jewish in a post-WWII America. By purposefully side-stepping Hollywood’s usual clichés of needing to save the dog, impress the aging star, caretake the pregnant girlfriend, win back his family, and win the championship, Marty’s character (along with the entire world) contains the multitudes that are rarely seen on the screen.
+ Francis Lawrence & JT Mollnar’s The Long Walk (US, 2025)
Set in an ambiguous amalgamation of the 1930s, ’50s, ’70s, and 2020s, this “dystopian survival thriller” was based on the first novel Stephen King ever wrote, during his freshman year at the University of Maine in 1966-67. Published in 1979 under the name Richard Bachman (alongside The Running Man), this prophetic story of a reality show following a group of 50 young men attempting to outlast one another on a “very long walk” can also be viewed as an eye-opening metaphor for just growing up in the United States of America. The cast is exceptional (even winning the Robert Altman Independent Spirit Award for Best ensemble cast, director, and casting director of a film). Remember, unique mid-level movies like this are rapidly disappearing from modern day cinemas. Make sure to go out of your way to support the overlooked and underrated films in the time that they are released.
+ Scott Stark’s Tulsa (US, 2025)
Having conceived and directed more than 85 films over the past 45 years, Scott Stark is easily one of my favorite filmmakers working in the world today. The Bay Area premiere of his latest 15-minute masterpiece employs a batch of 1950s “stereo photos” transforming suburban cocktail parties and tourist trips into a hypnotic “visual playland.” Stereo cameras emerged in the 1940s and ’50s, utilizing two different lenses that took twin-shots of scenes, which then were supposed to be viewed in dedicated image viewers. What makes Stark’s movies so fascinating for me is how they’re able to transcend their initially unique techniques by entrancing the viewer with a peaceful repetition into a kind of Stendhal syndrome stasis.
8. Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck (US, 2025)
This extraordinary Stephen King adaptation is genuine medicine for modern-day melancholy. Polarizing most everyone I have met who has seen it (or refused to see it), Mike Flanagan follows Stephen King’s structuralist novella and gives Mark Hammill one of the best roles of his career as Chuck’s grandfather. Don’t read any spoilers. Very few films continue to help me existentially as much as this one.
+ David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds (France/Canada, 2024)
This deeply autobiographical body horror was directly inspired by the end of Cronenberg’s 43-year long relationship with his wife Carolyn, who passed away in 2017. As usual, he uncomfortably dives headfirst into the contemporary contradictions of humans and technology, this time looking at the decay of the body and the grieving process. Guy Pearce has never been better as the emotionally unstable Maury while Vincent Cassel and Diane Kruger were made for this style of otherworldly acting. Like his underrated gems Crimes of the Future (2022) and Cosmopolis (2012), David Cronenberg’s continue to make films that will matter years from now.
+ Ben Leonberg’s Good Boy (US)
Showcasing an eight-year-old Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Golden Retriever named Indy (who is my sincere pick for best actor of the year), director Ben Leonberg and producer Kari Fischer filmed this $70,000 supernatural horror flick in their own home for 400 days over a three-year period. Premiering at South by Southwest Film & TV Festival and later being picked up by Shudder, this film should be sought out by animal lovers and low budget horror fans at all costs. Good Boy is also yet another prime example as to why there should be an Oscar category for Best Non-Human performance of the year.
9. Grace Glowicki‘s Dead Lover (Canada)
Gorgeously shot on 16mm (using both an Arri SR3 & a Bolex camera) this transgressive tour-de-force is a non-stop laugh-out-loud, absurdly lo-fi, horror camp-fest, inspired by Mary Shelley, German Expressionism, and seemingly, the Kuchar Brothers. Writer-director-producer-star Grace Glowicki is hilariously unhinged as she inhabits a lonely gravedigger who not only stinks of corpses, but is desperate to find the man of her dreams. Playing four separate characters, Glowicki is somehow magically matched by her co-stars Leah Doz, Lowen Morrow, and Ben Petrie, who are each as equally bizarre as she. What’s most impressive is how this homemade homage to avant-garde cinema manages to achieve its very own surreal uniqueness and should be placed alongside the outsider films it is honoring. Throw in a brand-new soundtrack by legendary Toronto pop project U.S. Girls (aka Meghan Remy) and you’ve got one of the best films of the year.
+ Emilie Blichfeldt’s The Ugly Stepsister (Den Stygge Stesøsteren, Norway / Poland / Sweden / Denmark, 2025)
Calling all horror fans, who may have wished that Coralie Fargeat‘s over-wrought The Substance (2024) had been a little less redundant and a bit more complex. Emilie Blichfeldt’s outrageously harsh, tongue-in-cheek body horror deliciously retells the story of Cinderella by shifting the focus to her stepsister Elvira. This Cronenberg-esque pursuit of destroying one’s beauty, by way of a 19th century surgical makeover, is a downright masterpiece and should be sought out at all costs.
10. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (US, 2025)
This audacious historical-horror-musical-comedy is just as much a tribute to John Carpenter’s western-horror films—Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) to Vampires (1998)—as it is to the Blaxpoitation cinema of the 1970s. Yet it stands on its own as an ode to the soul beneath the Blues of the Deep South. Ryan Coogler’s cinematic audacity (as well as Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s 70mm cinematography) help lure me back, again and again to this polarizing spectacle. Delroy Lindo, Buddy Guy, and Jack O’Connell’s performances alone are all worth the admission, and composer Ludwig Göransson’s mind-melting metal-blues-orchestral-synthesizer score should not be taken for granted, especially during these frustratingly homogenized times.
+ Jia Zhang-ke Caught by the Tides (风流一代, China, 2024)
Assembling footage and outtakes from across the past two+ decades of his own films, incredible 6th generation Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke has constructed an experimental personal essay film that I am unable to stop thinking about. Admirers of the filmmaker will delight in seeing alternate versions of sequences (showcasing the Jia’s professional and personal partner-in-crime Zhao Tao) from Unknown Pleasures (2002), Still Life (2006), and Ash Is Purest White (2018). Audiences unfamiliar with their work may still be able to follow the mesmerizing trek through a history of creating art together.
+ Ross John Fearnely’s Lose Yourself (US, 2025)
Channeling Christian Marclay’s 24-hour video installation, this astounding 4-minute montage captures every single word of Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” from the history of cinema.
11. Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value (Affeksjonsverdi, Norway / France / Germany / Denmark / Sweden / UK, 2025) + Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague (New Wave, France/US, 2025)
These step-by-step accounts of the art of making a movie brought back all the earnest excitement that emerged in my high school years when I first encountered my love of all things “cinema.” (Special shout out to my movie mentor, Mr. Mark E. Johnson who shared his unending love for movies with every week with after-hours screenings at Cineplex Odeon Trolley Corners and the Tower Theater in Salt Lake City, Utah.) in Sentimental Value, Elle Fanning playing a Hollywood actor who is doing her very best in an international art-house project (yet not hitting the director’s mark) is a lot more brilliant than people might be giving her credit for. She really is one of her generation’s best actors. Richard Linklater’s career has consisted of steadily making mid-level masterpieces for the past 35 years, and we may want to start comparing the unique importance that he has had on cinema, respective to Jean-Luc Godard.
12. Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love (US, 2025) + Hong Sang-soo What Does That Nature Say to You (그자연이네게뭐라고하니, South Korea, 2025) + Eugene Kotlyarenko’s The Code (US, 2024)
Three auteurs who can’t make a bad film. I could watch these purposefully messy and dangerously subversive relationship studies all day, every day.
13. Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (Zambia / Ireland / UK / US, 2024) + Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams (US, 2025) + Lindsay McIntyre’s Tuktuit: Caribou (Canada, 2025)
These atmospheric familial puzzles left me haunted for months. Lead actors in the first two, Susan Chardy and Joel Edgerton, are both heartbreaking as they attempt to hold their respective families together, while Lindsay McIntyre’s 15-minute manifesto Tuktuit literally layers itself with sumptuously saturated superimpositions by using actual lichen-based developers to help bring its 16mm images to life.
14. Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident (Un simple accident, Iran/France/Luxembourg, 2025) + David Osit’s Predators (US, 2025)
Revenge is messy. Both of these controversial firestorms bravely complexify the pitfalls of our primitive political times.
15. Alex Garland & Ray Mendoza’s Warfare (US/UK, 2025) + Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite (US, 2025) + Janus Metz & Dan Gilroy’s Andor – Season 2, Episode 8: Who Are You (UK/US, 2025)
Anxiety war-core at the highest level.
16. Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (US, 2025) + Celine Song’s The Materialists (US, 2025)
An A24 double bill with Mary Bronstein making the perfect frenetic counterbalance to her creative partner-husband Ronald Bronstein’s (and Safdie Brother’s) Daddy Longlegs (2009). Celine Song has made another spot-on slice of New York City magic. Don’t listen to all the Dakota Johnson haters out there. Critics also dismissed Audrey Hepburn as “effortless, doe-eyed royalty” during her era as well.
17. Dag Johan Haugerud’s The Oslo Trilogy: Love-Sex-Dreams (Norway, 3 feature films, 2025) + Cooper Raiff’s Hal & Harper (US, 9 episodes, 2025)
These long form stories are masterful patchworks of our modern-era and should both be binge-watched in six-hour increments.
18. Zach Lipovsky & Adam Stein’s Final Destination: Bloodlines (US, 2025) + Zach Cregger’s Weapons (US, 2025) + Danny and Michael Philippou’s Bring Her Back (Australia, 2025)
The year’s best “Creepy Kids” triple bill. Also, Sora Wong and Sally Hawkins in Bring Her Back deserved Oscar nominations this year.
19. Takeshi Kitano Broken Rage (Japan, 2025) + Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest (US, 2025)
Structural cinema is often misunderstood as clunkiness. Respect your cinematic elders.
20. James Cameron’s Avatar: Fire & Ash (US, 2025) + Ryan Crego’s Gabby’s Dollhouse: The Movie (US, 2025)
Surreal style can be substantial substance.
