The year's best movies helped us cope. Here's a 2025 list, with stories about trauma, grief, vampires and more.

Plenty of movies did well for themselves at the box office at 2025, but that doesn't mean they were all cut from the same cloth.

These 10 films connected when they took really big swings. They hail from gratifyingly divergent perspectives, grapple differently with history and art, aim for diverse audiences, and are — without exception — passion projects worth seeking out on the biggest possible screen.

Idris Elba in A House of Dynamite. While much of the focus on award-worthy movies is put on those that come out in the final months of the year, the release dates for the ones that made the list of CultureMap's Best Movies of 2025 spanned nine months,

The world is terrifying sometimes. But one of the best ways to manage the horrors of the real world is to contain those extremes in a movie. Unlike life, horror movies actually end, and so, even if you're scared out of your mind while watching,

Lots of new movies, series and games dropped over the Christmas period with Emily in Paris and The Great Flood topping the charts.

Here are my 10 favorite movies of 2025. I watched basically everything that I wanted to this year, but it's definitely possible that something slipped under my radar. I'd also like to throw out an honorable mention to 28 Years Later, which proved to be a great new installment in the zombie franchise and had one of my favorite endings of the year.

With the tragically twisting (and great) year that 2025 has been for movies, here are the top 10 movies with the most tragic twist endings, ranked!