Here are Cinephile Corner’s picks for the 10 best A24 movies of 2025, ranked:
10. Materialists
Materialists feels like a transitional work. It shows Celine Song experimenting with scale, ensemble dynamics, and new narrative textures—but it lacks the intimacy and precision that defined her first film. It’s a movie with moments that flirt with those same highs in small doses, but one that ultimately falls short. Still, it leaves me hopeful: the emotional territory Song wants to chart is rare in contemporary cinema, and while Materialists stumbles, it’s a sign that she’s aiming high. Her best films are likely still ahead.
9. The Smashing Machine
8. Warfare
Warfare is the kind of war film that forgoes grandiosity in favor of raw, boots-on-the-ground immediacy, and the result is a lean, harrowing experience that feels startlingly real. Co-directed by Alex Garland and former Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza, the film comes just a year after Garland’s more polarizing and thematically ambiguous Civil War – a movie that aspired to be a socio-political reckoning but often buckled under the weight of its own ideas. In contrast, Warfare is stripped down and visceral in a way that’s much more effective.
7. Sorry, Baby
6. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
5. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You takes a familiar subject, motherhood under pressure, and finds a form that makes it feel newly tense and strangely intimate. Recent entries like Nightbitch and Die My Love circle similar themes, but this one trusts a single performance and a strict point of view. It keeps the ideas grounded in behavior, and it lets the anxiety build without leaning on overt allegory.
4. Highest 2 Lowest
Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest, his reimagining of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low, proves how easily one of cinema’s greatest stories can be adapted to the modern era. The update doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but with Lee behind the camera and Denzel Washington in the lead, it’s both stylish and engrossing – one of the stronger Spike Lee movies of the century and one of the best Apple TV+ originals to date.
3. Friendship
Friendship is one of the more unique comedies of 2025 – a weird, squirm-inducing, unexpectedly affecting film that feels true to its title in all the worst (and best) ways. It’s another feather in A24’s cap for championing daring, off-kilter voices in comedy. If you’re in tune with Tim Robinson’s specific wavelength, it’s a must-watch.
2. Marty Supreme
Marty Supreme is Josh Safdie working at his widest canvas, a 1950s period piece about a showman who can sell anything until he sells himself short. Marty Mauser, played by Timothée Chalamet, is a ping pong phenom, a sneaker salesman for his uncle, a serial charmer who glides from city to city on other people’s dimes. The world fits neatly in his palm until it does not. Safdie’s favorite subject has always been appetite colliding with reality, and this time the arc is bookended by matches that frame a life lived at match point.
1. Eddington
Ari Aster’s Eddington is a jagged political mirror – scattershot with ideas, audacious in tone – and somehow plays like a slow-burn powder-keg farce that detonates exactly when it means to. Premiering at the Cannes Film Festival to chilly early notices, the film was quickly read as opportunistic, a movie “profiting” off COVID lockdowns and the George Floyd protests rather than meaningfully engaging with them. But taken on its own terms, Eddington is a bracingly self-reflective work: an American fever dream about paranoia, doomscrolling, and the grifters who materialize when anxiety becomes a commodity.
READ MORE: The Best A24 Movies of 2024, The Best A24 Horror Movies of All Time
