This year has seen some big hits on the big screen, including some new stories finding unmatched streaming success like K-Pop Demon Hunters, and a few refreshing takes and extensions on some beloved IP like Superman, 28 Years Later, or Avatar: Fire and Ash.
Musical lovers also got treated to the much-awaited Broadway sequel adaptation Wicked: For Good, and the genre-reshaping tunes and thrills of Sinners. Horror, already back on the up and up for the past few years, has also seen a tidal wave of releases in 2025: additions to The Conjuring, Final Destination, and The Black Phone series, adaptations like Frankenstein and The Long Walk, as well as some daring original ideas like Good Boy and The Monkey.
Closer to home, we were treated to the latest work by South Korean director Park Chan-wook, No Other Choice, and Rental Family out of Japan. But perhaps most exciting for Filipino moviegoers is Lav Diaz’s Magellan, the country’s entry for the Academy Awards’ Best International Feature category, which debuted at festivals earlier this year before showing locally in September.
No matter what type of film it is that gets you out of the house and into the theatre, 2025 gave us an abundance of titles to choose from. So if you’re looking for a flick or two to put on over the holidays, here are a few options for whatever vibe you had in mind.
Night In With The Girls: Drop
While you and the gals probably have your fair share of dating woes, your Christmas get-togethers should be spent relaxing and enjoying each other’s company, and not thinking about the last ill-fated match you’re totally not trying to forget over a few bottles of wine.
Image courtesy IMDB
Instead of some real-life horror stories, consider putting on Drop, a film that follows single mother Violet on her first foray back into dating after a traumatic end to her last abusive relationship, only to find herself being harassed by an anonymous ‘digi-dropper’ sending increasingly threatening messages. As we follow Violet around the restaurant on her date, trying to put a face to this faceless threat, a deeper mystery begins to unfold as she realizes her date is a much more desirable man than she’d first thought.
Drop knows it doesn’t have the freshest premise in the genre, but it keeps you waiting on the edge of your seat with enough gasps, laughs, and thrills, as well as a stylish, moody take on the characters and their internal predicaments, despite a rather outlandish story (though I imagine plenty of women are thankful for that!)
Get Inspired For A New Year: Jay Kelly
Too often we look to the New Year, thinking up resolutions and goals to #manifest, and only care to look back at the highlights of the year. But if you want to be stirred into some gentle reflection before diving headfirst into next year, Jay Kelly is the right pick.
Image courtesy IMDB
George Clooney stars as the titular Jay, an aging movie star dismayed by the death of the director of his debut film. What follows is, plainly, a midlife crisis, which finds Jay dropping out of a film for a trip to Europe to receive a tribute at a film festival, though that is mostly his excuse to follow his daughter before she goes off to college and leaves him with a dwindling career surrounded only by people on his payroll.
Whether your 2025 was a bit of a slog, a mixed bag, or maybe the best year of your life yet, this film is a stirring introspection on the things we’ve accomplished and we’ve failed at; the things we’ve learned about ourselves and how to reckon with realizing they’re no longer, or maybe have never been, the truth; and how when we look into the mirror and see everything in the rearview, it’s important to recognize the people who’ve been standing behind us the entire time.
Lighthearted Laughs With The Whole Family: Nonnas
For something that’ll engage the apos, the grandparents, and everyone in between, put on this sweet comedy about family, tradition, and resilience.
Based on a true story, the film follows Joe, a man on a journey to find meaning after the loss of his mother. When his friends urge him to make a better life for himself, he uses the life insurance payout to start a restaurant named after his mother, serving all her special recipes from a kitchen fully staffed by Italian grandmothers.
Image courtesy IMDB
Sincere, sweet, and as comforting as a dish by grandma, Nonnas isn’t anything we haven’t seen before, but this simple story of a man almost comically trying his hardest to honor his mother’s legacy is a heartwarming watch for everyone.
Soak In Suspense & Intrigue: Weapons
If, for whatever reason, you’re jonesing for a much less relaxed viewing experience, Zach Cregger’s sophomore project Weapons has enough suspense and masterfully executed tonal shifts to keep you zooming along a rollercoaster of emotions.
Image courtesy IMDB
Following the disappearance of an entire third grade class in the middle of the night, school staff, parents, and authorities struggle to make sense of the incident and move forward in its wake. Weapons takes us through each character segment as they are haunted by questions they don’t even know how to begin to ask, while ominously, slowly spelling out the answer in each vignette.
With an incredible mastery of suspense, subtle substance and subversion, Weapons keeps you following its thread back and forth, holding taut and loosening just enough at just the right times, before finally giving you some bittersweet but well-earned catharsis with a bordering-on-bonkers ending—satisfying enough that it’ll make you want to come back for a second watch and relive all that stress just to get there again.
Food For Fun Convos With The Friend Group: Companion
With a year that’s seen a huge push towards AI on virtually every internet platform, Companion’s January release seems almost like an omen in hindsight. The film follows Iris as she blissfully tags along with her partner on a lake house trip with his friends, where she finds herself wrapped up in a murder conspiracy that goes off the rails when she comes to the realization that she is simply a (rented!) companion robot that is far too easy to turn into a scapegoat.
Image courtesy IMDB
On the surface, the horror is in the age-old idea of autonomous robots rising up against humans, but perhaps more chilling is how Companion explores the very real danger of humans avoiding accountability for the things their creations do. The film also deftly contemplates the very real (and very human) tendency for us to program ourselves and each other in our relationships, so much so that we struggle to sift through what is real and born of our true agency, and what’s simply the result of some thorough ‘coding’, so to speak.
For a casual hangout with the barkada, Companion is clever, sleek, and amusing enough to keep everyone chatting for hours.
Spend The Evening Unraveling A Mystery: Wake Up Dead Man
We all have sleepless nights every once in a while, so if there was a movie that could tire out your mind from trying to figure out the mystery, this would be it. The latest Benoit Blanc mystery hit Netflix just a short couple of weeks ago, but already, audiences are looking to sink their teeth into more of director Rian Johnson’s meaty narratives. In this installment, we find Father Jud, a boxer turned priest, relegated to a new parish under the dubious Monsignor Wicks, where he discovers how the ghosts of the church’s tempestuous past have reached into the present and embroiled the community in suspicion amid a murder conspiracy.
Image courtesy IMDB
Wake Up Dead Man feels just as fresh as the first two Knives Out movies, but feels so much more personal than inheritance or ownership spats, as it centers on faith, and the things we feel we must do to preserve it. But even with its more introspective tone, Wake Up Dead Man contains all our favorite hallmarks of a Benoit Blanc movie, with its clever storytelling and stimulating ensemble dynamics.
Scratch Your Action Itch: One Battle After Another
If you’ve been missing a different kind of thrill but maybe feel like action movies have been pretty stale and repetitive lately, Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest project boasts a stellar cast, some incredible needledrops and astounding action sequences that you definitely wouldn’t confuse for anything else in the genre. This is a film that feels like it’s continuously ramping up from the very first frame, leaving you feeling like no time has passed despite its runtime creeping quite close to the three-hour mark.
Image courtesy IMDB
The film follows former revolutionary Bob on his search for his teenage daughter Willa, more than a decade after they and the rest of their far-leftist group were forced into hiding by Willa’s unpredictable mother. Definitely, One Battle After Another is an epic tale of resistance against oppression and injustice and the inextricability of past and present, but it does not sacrifice any of its substance or humanity for ideological rhetoric. In fact, what truly propels the film, underneath all the explosions and gunfire and war cries, is the simple truth that Anderson and the entire cast so beautifully depict: we need trust and love.
Unrelentingly funny, punctuated by great music, stirring visuals, and unapologetic depictions of the dangerously sedative minutiae of both revolution & authoritarianism, One Battle After Another is so vast and action-packed that you can’t do much else but strap in and enjoy the ride.
