Top 10 Lists

TOP 10 MOVIES OF 2025: MAINSTREAM EDITION

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Will 2026 be the last year of cinema? Yes, if the prophets of the Netflixpocalypse are correct. But I’ll remain a contrarian on that score and suggest movies will continue on as they always have for the foreseeable future.

Here is my obligatory/traditional annual top 10 list of movies, ranked according to mainstream standards. In other words, weird movies are allowed on this list, but I attempt to rank the 2024 releases according to their general cinematic merit, intended for people who don’t specialize in the surrealer genres. We will announce our staff consensus top 10 weird movies of 2025 on this week’s Pod 366 released on Friday (print list to follow).

There are a fair number of films that might have made this list but for the fact that I didn’t have time to get to them in 2025, including, most notably, ‘s No Other Choice and Brazil’s international contender The Secret Agent. I expect to see them, and some other worthy movies I hadn’t considered, before awards voting season concludes in mid-January. Some of them may end up deserving inclusion here.

Before the official top ten starts, here are ten honorable mentions, in alphabetical order: Bad Guys 2, Boys Go to Jupiter, Companion, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle;  Eddington, Kill the Jockey, Reflection in a Dead Diamond, The Surfer, The Ugly Stepsister, and Warfare.

And now, the official list:

10. Paddington in Peru: Marmalade-loving bear Paddington travels to Peru to visit his Aunt Lucy, but when he arrives he discovers she has mysteriously disappeared, and he must venture into the Amazon jungle to find her. I don’t really care about the Paddington mythos or canon; I’m just here for the jokes, Olivia Colman as a guitar-playing nun, Antonio Banderas as a seedy riverboat captain and his own ancestors, and  references.

9. Sketch: Young Amber, being raised along with her brother by a single father after her mother’s death, draws pictures of monsters when she gets mad at people—but what will she do when the sketches come to life and start rampaging through town? Exceptional kids’ horror with comedy, kooky monsters, genuine suspense and scares, and a meaningful message that’s psychologically astute but simple enough for kid to grasp. Tony Hale is great as the bereaved father, and the kid acting is superior. Angel Films is a “faith-based” company (producers of the somewhat embarrassing Sound of Freedom, among others), but there is no preachiness (and scant religion) to be found here. Some people were turned off by the ad for a “Sketch” phone app that plays during the end credits, though.

8. Ghost Boy: A 12-year old boy develops a mysterious neurological condition that leaves him in a coma, then conscious but paralyzed and unable to speak; years later, he improves to the point where he’s able to use a speech computer to tell his story. This documentary begins as the ultimate real-life horror story about a man “marooned on the island of myself,” which makes Martin Pistorius’ eventual recovery emotionally profound. Director moves away Continue reading TOP 10 MOVIES OF 2025: MAINSTREAM EDITION →

Pod 366: A Weird Movies Podcast, Top 10 Lists

POD 366, EP. 149: THE BEST AND WEIRDEST AND BEST WEIRD MOVIES OF 2025

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Audio link (Spotify)

YouTube link

Discussed in this episode:

Megalopolis re-release: Read our Megalopolis “three takes” review. refuses to give up on Megalopolis despite the movie flopping at the box office, and now hopes to revive it theatrically annually for New Years’ Day. Alamo Drafthouse is willing to play along, this year, at least. Even more interesting, though, is the fact that Coppola wants to make another cut, Megalopolis Unbound, a longer, weirder version (with dream sequences that didn’t make the initial cut). More in this snarky article from The Guardian.

STAFF CONSENSUS TOP WEIRD MOVIES OF 2025:

10 (tie). The Shrouds: “Starting from a typically Cronenbergian premise–straddling the line that separates the just barely plausible from the utterly implausible, but presented as if it were perfectly natural—the august director takes a deep dive into human depravity and loss, accompanied by plentiful hallucinations.“–Gregory J. Smalley

She Loved Blossoms More: “Hallucinating your dead mom as a talking vaginal flower, complete with glowing clitoris, might be a totally natural Oedipal response for a son still processing grief and loss. But when Hedgehog then makes a psychedelic drug from said flower so he can hold a séance with a transdimensional severed head to perfect his time travel experiments, things get pretty weird.“–Enar Clarke

8. Bugonia: “… it’s the confluence of outrageous plotting and matter-of-fact adherence to the film’s psychotic worldview that creates the sense of strangeness here. Despite Lanthimos working in a stripped-down, more approachable mode, the material allows him to indulge his love of nihilistic plot twists. Parts will make you squirm, and parts will fill you with moral horror. The closing montage, scored to Marlene Dietrich singing ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,’ ends things on as beautifully bleak of a Lanthimosian note as could ever be imagined: a deep cynicism undercut by a yearning melancholy that testifies to the director’s genuine, bereaved humanism.“–Gregory J. Smalley

7. Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass: “The meandering pace, repetitions, and lack of clear narrative may be off-putting to some viewers, but the films of the Brothers Quay have always been more about the experience of seeing than storytelling. For fans, this one is definitely a long-anticipated must-see.“–Enar Clarke

Continue reading POD 366, EP. 149: THE BEST AND WEIRDEST AND BEST WEIRD MOVIES OF 2025 →

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: ADOLESCENCE OF UTENA (1999)

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Shôjo kakumei Utena: Adolescence mokushiroku (Revolutionary Girl Utena: Adolescence Apocalypse); AKA Revolutionary Girl Utena: The Movie

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DIRECTED BY: Kunihiko Ikuhara

FEATURING THE VOICES OF: Tomoko Kawakami, Yuriko Fuchizaki, Takehito Koyasu; , Sharon Becker, (English dub)

PLOT: Newly arrived at school, Utena finds herself in a duel for the freedom of the beautiful and mysterious Anthy, and must fend off multiple challengers while navigating her new-found betrothal.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: For an ostensible transfer of a popular TV series to the big screen, Adolescence of Utena delights not only in jettisoning any obeisance to its source material, but moves in strange and unpredictable directions. Whenever you think you’ve got Utena’s number, you definitely don’t, right up to its outrageous conclusion.

Still from Adolescence of Utena (1999)

COMMENTS: The first moments of this big-screen successor to the popular manga and TV series “Revolutionary Girl Utena” suggest a fish-out-of-water story, as the impossibly wide-eyed title character is led on a tour of the architectural wonder and human-interaction Petri dish that is the Ohtori Academy. Who will she meet? What will she learn? Who will become friends and enemies? A classic shōjo manga in the making. And as soon as those moments end, you can forget all about them, because Utena’s encounter with the cheekily devoted Anthy will shortly become the only thing of importance.

The two girls have an unusual meet-cute, with Utena wandering onto a flower-festooned platform and inadvertently instigating a duel for the rights to Anthy’s hand. It turns out this kind of  accidental heroism happens to Utena a lot; for such a powerful champion, Utena is remarkably unsure of herself. We soon learn why, but the careful crafting of her character lends great potency to her developing relationship with Anthy, empowering what could easily be reduced to cliché. A scene in which the two girls have to create life-drawings of each other, far from feeling obvious or superfluous, develops real romantic power.

All of this takes place in a lush and fantastic design that adds another layer of surrealism and wonder. The school is a wild mashup of Roman architecture and civic planning by M. C. Escher. Places and people are all decked out in a wild palette of colors, with heightened military costumes complemented by crazily flowing hairstyles of pink, magenta, and green. Director Ikuhara supplements these visions with intriguing abstractions, like the radio hosts who only appear in silhouette. Even when the plot and backstory become too dense to be certain you’re following, the visuals are never less than striking, often gasp-inducing.

Adolescence of Utena is already unusual, but the final third raises the bar significantly as our heroine begins to suspect that the universe is hiding a fundamental truth about its nature. She’s right, in a way that rhymes thematically with fellow 1999 release The Matrix; but where ’ Neo had to be flushed out of a simulation to find clarity, Utena makes her escape by turning into a uterus-shaped hot rod and doing battle with a city-sized monster car. It’s a remarkable visual, and it’s hard to undersell the surprise generated by the pivot the movie takes at this juncture. The film’s final image, with the two lead characters in a nude embrace and riding their sex luge into the horizon, is a fitting denouement for a film that has committed fully to following its own path.

Revolutionary Girl Utena: The Movie

Revolutionary Girl Utena: The Movie

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    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “…for fear of spoiling the most wild moment in a film made up of wild moments, I would be very reluctant to say what happens in the film around the 65-minute mark, except in general terms, but it is both the most intensely, if fuzzily, symbolic event in the film, involving an extraordinary physical transformation that allows the full scope of Utena’s revolutionary potental to express itself… When it gets to the actual visionary moments, where Utena starts to perceive the greater world than just herself (and this is, basically, the arc of the plot: it’s a coming-of-age story, though one that has been buried deep below the expressive dream imagery), it turns into full-on surrealist explosions of roses, clouds, spaces defined purely in terms of line and shape with no sense of what kind of space they are, though they come across as fundamentally Gothic in their ancient weight and richness.”–Tim Brayton, Alternate Ending

    “A film of absolute beauty, it’s also the weirdest thing I have ever seen. Now that’s a pretty big statement, but I’ve racked my brain, and I can’t think of anything weirder… Yes it’s weird, but all of that weirdness is in the form of metaphor, allusion, and illusion.” – Stephen Porter, Silver Emulsion

    (This movie was nominated for review by Jenn. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.) 

    Capsules

    CAPUSLE: RETURN TO REASON: FOUR FILMS BY MAN RAY (1923-1929/2023)

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    DIRECTED BY: Man Ray

    FEATURING: Alice Prin, Robert Desnos, Jacques Rigaut, Man Ray

    PLOT: Four experimental films form Man Ray shown in rhythmic sequence, set to a partially-improvised score by ‘s band SQÜRL.

    Still from "Les Mystères du Château du dé" (1929)

    COMMENTS: Though May Ray considered himself a painter, he experimented with photography for decades. In the 1920s, as part of his explorations, he decided to try his hand at making motion pictures. Paradoxically, he cut strips of film into their individual frames, dusted them with salt and pepper, covered them with tacks and pins, exposed them to light according to his Rayograph process, then spliced the images back together. La retour à la raison/Return to Reason (1923) was his first result, two minutes of visual chaos in which random objects and detritus dance across the screen.

    Ray had originally planned to screen Retour with a performance by George Antheil, but the enfant terrible of avant-garde music failed to appear. Antheil’s atonal sound remains associated with Ray’s films (Kino Lorber previously released Return to Reason with an Antheil score, as part of the collection “The Silent Avant Garde,” in 2022). This latest release by the Criterion Collection provides a moodier, atmospheric take on Ray’s imagery, through SQÜRL’s signature feedback-laden guitars, electronic tones, and resonant drums. The score’s dirge-like cadences slow things down, encouraging the viewer to notice each intricate detail in every frame while falling under their spell.

    Jarmusch, familiar to readers of this site as the director of Dead Man, is also a guitarist, and has written scores for many of his films together with musician Carter Logan. The duo’s sound, at times reminiscent of late ’90s-era Sonic Youth, wraps the listener in a sonic net woven of reverb and ambient drones. Electronic blips and beeps rise out of the static, like distant signals from sonar equipment; deep resonant tones echo like the moan of foghorns. A sudden metallic tinkling, like a forgotten wind chime on the porch of an abandoned house caught by a stray breeze, heightens the uncanny atmosphere.

    The disc presents the films in rhythmic, rather than chronological order. The first, L’Étoile de Mer/The Starfish (1928), inspired by Robert Desnos’ poem, has the most coherent plot of the four. A man falls in love with a beautiful woman who gifts him a starfish in a jar. Filmed as though through a pane of rain-streaked glass, or from behind an aquarium wall, the impressionistic visuals come into focus only at key moments. The intertitles feature lines of the poem, but unlike in many silent films where the title cards explain the action, here text and image juxtapose each other in surrealistic fashion; for example, the phrase “women’s teeth are such beautiful objects” precedes a shot of the female character (portrayed by the famous Kiki de Montparnasse), lifting her skirt to adjust her stocking garter.

    Emak Bakia (1926) follows. With financing from stockbroker Arthur Wheeler, and featuring his wife driving her Mercedes around Biarritz, Ray created another, longer experimental film (22 min.) in Continue reading CAPUSLE: RETURN TO REASON: FOUR FILMS BY MAN RAY (1923-1929/2023) →

    Capsules

    CAPSULE: WORKING CLASS GOES TO HELL (2023)

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    Radnicka klasa ide u pakao

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    Working Class Goes to Hell is currently available for purchase or rental on video-on-demand.

    DIRECTED BY: Mladen Djordjevic

    FEATURING: Tamara Krcunovic,  Leon Lucev, Szilvia Krizsán

    PLOT: A group of former factory workers find solace in satanism.

    Still from Working Class Goes to Hell (2023)

    COMMENTS: When a movie opens with murals of socialist era workers on the crumbling walls of an abandoned building, you understand pretty well what it will be about: a society in disarray looking back to an idolized past while trying to find hope in desperate times.  And it is, as we follow a group of former factory workers trying to negotiate a better future for themselves and secure severance payment for an accident that happened years ago and took the lives of many of their loved ones.

    Everything changes for the weirder when Mia, a man with some disturbing ideas of the apocalyptic kind, arrives in the group. At first, he persuades the group to conduct Satanic rituals to communicate with their dead loved ones. Then he offers more wish fulfillment.  Will they find what they are looking for, and what will be the price?

    Serbian director Djordjevic is known mostly for his shocking 2009 The Life and Death of a Porno Gang, a provocative piece of cinema that went largely unnoticed because of the release of an even more disturbing Serbian movie in the same year, the infamous A Serbian Film. But whatever comes from this director needs to be examined as potentially weird, especially when supernatural events are mentioned.

    What we have here, though, is a contemporary moral parable with hints of the supernatural and the apocalyptic. More grounded than a typical horror—only some bad omens like birds falling dead hint at the supernatural—this tale portrays moral decay and the worship of false idols in an ambiguous, non-didactic way. While the idols prove to be hollow in the end, a new unity emerges from the experience of common rituals, reigniting the passion of our characters to continue fighting for their rights. It is almost wholesome.

    Balkan cinema is known for eccentric magical realist works, like the filmography of . Here the tone is less lighthearted, but a similar exaggeration of reality in a portrait of societal upheaval takes shape, climaxing with an urgent act of vigilantism. There are many nods to the history of the country too, from the Ottoman Empire to its recent socialist past, giving context and enriching the narrative.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “…even if the director lets his tale go on for too long, with a messy narrative in need of trimming, he still delivers an appealingly whacko and unique work.”–Christopher Reed, Hammer to Nail (festival review)

    Celebrating the cinematically surreal, bizarre, cult, oddball, fantastique, strange, psychedelic, and the just plain WEIRD!