A Brief Survey of Concerns Expressed by the Films of 2025 - Reactor

I watched A LOT of movies last year, even by my standards. Obviously these films were written over years, with edits, redrafts, delays because of COVID, strikes, recasting, etc.—and yet, when I looked back over what I watched, I found a startling number of synchronicity. As we head into Oscars Weekend I thought it would be fun to break the movies down by these shared themes, to do a temperature check on what the movies are telling us about ourselves as we stagger further into 2026.

Let me say here at the outset that I loved a lot of these films, liked even more, had major issues with one (Marty Supreme—there’s a lot of fun to be had, but I’ve seen Uncut Gems already) and only really loathed three films (After the Hunt—and I say this with more love for Andrew Garfield than any of you, reading this, can possibly imagine—was ABSOLUTE GARBAGE; Fantastic Four was everything I’ve come to dislike about late-period Marvel, and it wasted Pedro Pascal; Edgar Wright, wtf was The Running Man????)

And with that out of the way, join me on a haphazard slalom through film, and tell me—did I miss any movies that belong here? (I’m sure I did. I tried, but I couldn’t see everything.) What weird themes popped out at you?

Are The Men OK? (No. No, They Are Not.)

• Blue Moon
• Companion
• Keeper
• Marty Supreme
• The Mastermind
• Megalopolis
• One Battle After Another (above)
• The Phoenician Scheme
• The Shrouds
• Sinners

A perennial topic, this! Whether they’re living with PTSD, battling Jim Crow/vampires, taking first dates to their wife’s graves, drinking/smoking themselves into oblivion, destroying other peoples’ lives for funsies, or desperately pursuing dreams they know they should give up already, the men of 2025 cinema are not doing well.

Are The Moms OK? (Ummmm….)

• Bring Her Back
• Die My Love
• Fantastic Four
• Hamnet
• If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (above)
• One Battle After Another
• Presence
• Sinners

2025 cinema featured a number of mothers who were wresting with the devastation of losing a child, crushed by post-partum depression, or the breaking under the stress of being a caretaker in a world that, most of the time, doesn’t seem to care about anything other than money. Each character has a different response to her motherhood and her pain—the thing I like most about this collection of films is how it shows motherhood as a spectrum.

You Know What Would Make Parenting Easier? A Functional Health Care System!

• Good Boy (above)
• If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
• The Running Man
• Toxic Avenger
• Weapons

If the parents (and in Good Boy’s case, the dog-parent) could get safe, affordable, reliable medical care… well, none of these movies’ plots would happen in the first place.

But Even That Might Not Save Us From: Bad! Dads!

• Frankenstein (above)
• Hamnet
• HIM
• The Phoenician Scheme
• Predator: Badlands
• Sentimental Value

To be fair, Will Shakespeare is at least trying to be there for his kids, but the other three? Zsa Zsa Korda and Victor Frankenstein both have to stare death in the face before they even attempt to be nice to their children, and Cam Wade’s dad sets Cam up for a failure even worse than HIM’s box office numbers.

Counterpoint: Here Are Dads Who Will Stop At Nothing To Give Their Daughters The Advanced Arts Education They Deserve!

• No Other Choice
• Happy Gilmore 2 (above)

Really didn’t think I’d find a thread between these two, but here we are: sometimes you have to be willing to murder—or head back to the golf course—in order to pay for an extremely expensive specialized school so your little girl can follow her dreams. #GirlDad

You Know What, Let’s Just Start Over and Make Our Own Family

• Dust Bunny (above)
• Predator: Badlands

Some people are born into loving, supportive families, which is cool! But some people have to go out into the world to find their true family, be they Predators, the top half of a Weyland Yutani synth, or a nameless hired killer with emotional baggage.  

The Surprising and Welcome Presence of Michael Cera

• The Phoenician Scheme (above)
• The Running Man

Yeah, I know, it is weird that Michael Cera had never been in a Wes Anderson film before The Phoenician Scheme! But he was a big highlight in a film I really dug. He was even more of a highlight in The Running Man, which (and trust I hate saying this as a person who saw all the Cornetto Trilogy AND Scott Pilgrim on their respective opening nights) otherwise suuuuucked. But Michael Cera’s hilarious. Thanks, Michael Cera.

Never Trust An Enby

• After the Hunt (above)
• One Battle After Another

If I’m being honest, this is the reason for this list. I love One Battle After Another. I hate After the Hunt. It was frustrating that these very different films each featured one (1) non-binary character, and in both cases their entire characterization was their untrustworthiness. One is maybe manipulating a character into a dodgy situation for the #drama, and the other is a straight-up rat in a film where rats are the worst thing you can be. And I’m certainly not looking for the enbies to be cardboard cutout heroes, but we don’t get to see ourselves onscreen too often, and it would have been cool if there was a least a little nuance before the heel turns.

Fascism Suuuuuucks

• Dracula (Radu Jude’s version)
• HappyEnd
• It Was Just An Accident
• The Long Walk
• Mickey 17
• One Battle After Another
• The Secret Agent
• Superman (above)
• Wake Up Dead Man
• Wicked For Good

Man this came up a lot this year! Wonder why.

Capitalism: Needs Improvement!

• Boys Go To Jupiter
• Bugonia (above)
• Dead Man’s Wire
• Dracula (Radu Jude’s version)
• Locked
• Marty Supreme
• Mickey 17
• No Other Choice
• Rebuilding
• The Running Man
• Train Dreams
• Toxic Avenger

It sure does!

You Know What’s Fuckin’ Rad Though Is TREES

• No Other Choice
• Train Dreams (above)

One is a somber, beautifully shot, decades-spanning epic about a man’s humble life in the Western US. The other is a hyper modern, nihilistic satire about murdering your way up a broken capitalist system. Unsurprisingly, these two films have very little in common—but they’re both deeply committed to the beauty and importance of trees.

In Fact, Have You Ever Considered Becoming A Tree?

• Rabbit Trap
• Train Dreams

These films have very little in common—one is an eerie fairy tale about music producers in 1970s Wales, and, again, the other is a somber, beautifully shot, decades-spanning epic about a man’s humble life in the Western US. BUT. Both films ultimately make a strong argument becoming one with nature, in a very literal way, is the best humanity can hope for.

What About Becoming… A Chair?

• By Design

This one’s a little bit of a cheat, as it doesn’t share themes with anything else. But By Design was pretty cool, and this is my list, so I’m gonna include it. A woman (played by Juliette Lewis) becomes a chair, (a man) played by Mamoudou Athie) is obsessed with the chair. I just think it’s neat.

But Seriously We Have GOT To Stop Messing With The Environment

• Jurassic World Rebirth (above)
• The Lost Bus

These two are by no means cinematic classics, but they do make good points about how heating the planet up and turning Earth into a tinderbox/dragging dinosaurs into an era and climate they were never meant for are extremely shortsighted acts with disastrous consequences.

We Love Da Movies!

• Chain Reactions
• Megadoc
• Nouvelle Vague (above)
• Resurrection

If you love movies, and I assume you do if you’re reading this post, you will love these particular movies about movies.

Heaven? Brain Death? Who’s To Say!

• Life of Chuck (above)
• The Phoenician Scheme
• Resurrection
• Scarlet

Heaven may be a place where nothing ever happens, but these films would submit that you can use your afterlife to pursue vengeance, take a tour of Chinese cinema history, dance, and even argue with God—who looks suspiciously like Bill Murray. Conversely, these movies posit that their entire plots are the hallucinations of catastrophically damaged brains.

Hey, Can Art Heal Trauma?

• …maybe?: Hamnet (above)
• Nope! GO TO THERAPY ALREADY: Deliver Me From Nowhere; History of Sound
• You Know What Does Help Though Is Community: Train Dreams; Rebuilding; Thunderbolts; Paddington in Peru; KPop Demon Hunters
• But What About… Confession? The Testament of Ann Lee; Wake Up Dead Man

My favorite thing about Hamnet is how seriously it takes this question. My least favorite thing about Hamnet is how it undercuts its own exploration of the importance of art by (1) not giving us enough William Shakespeare (I realize I may be alone in this opinion) and (2) undercutting its final scene with a musical choice that will force a certain type of audience member to think about a different movie about grief, thus utterly and irrevocably throwing said audience member out of the very visceral experience it’s trying to create. I say all this because I wanted to love this movie, and it wouldn’t let me love it.

As for the rest: these films all hold up art, community, friendship, and faith as important parts of a person’s life, but also point out that sometimes those things aren’t enough to work through trauma, grief, and mental health issues. And while a couple centuries and some stark denomination disagreements stand between Mother Ann Lee and Father Jud Duplenticy, both agree on two things: (1) always choose compassion and pacifism in the face of emotional and physical abuse, and (2) unburdening yourself through ritualistic confession will actually help you process guilt and trauma. (Though I think Jud would still nudge you toward therapy.)

It’s Harder to Kill People than You Might Think!

• Dust Bunny
• Frankenstein
• It Was Just an Accident
• The Long Walk
• No Other Choice (above)
• Paddington in Peru

We’re fed a steady diet of revenge narratives. Most action movies, horror films, sci-fi films, and thrillers end in a big culminating fight to the death, the ultimate showdown of Good and Evil. What I found interesting in 2025 was how many film complicated that narrative. People felt they had to kill in order to survive or right wrongs—only to find that the act of killing was worse than they ever imagined. People dedicated their lives to vengeance—only to choose forgiveness and reconciliation in the end. People actually did kill the bad guy—only to discover that it didn’t change a goddamn thing. People tried to kill cause it was their job—but it’s way harder to snap a living, struggling human’s neck than the movies would have you believe.

Let’s Hit Pause On The Film For A Banger Duet

• Highest 2 Lowest
• History of Sound

If I had a nickel for every time a movie in 2025 laid its cards on the table in the form of an extraordinary duet between its two main characters, I’d have two nickels—which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice, right? In Highest 2 Lowest, the duet is an incendiary rap battle between Denzel Washington’s record exec David King and A$ap Rocky’s striving musician Yung Felon. In History of Sound, it’s the tender, tentative ballad shared between Paul Mescal’s conservatory scholarship kid, Lionel Worthing, and Josh O’Connor’s wealthy, cultured song collector, David White. One is a game of one-upmanship with violent consequences; the other is the opening note of a romance, but both act as discrete pockets of time for the films to seed everything that comes next.

That’s A Nice Genre You’ve Got There. Be A Shame If Someone… Deconstructed It

• Black Bag
• The Mastermind (above)
• No Other Choice
• Presence
• The Secret Agent
• The Testament of Ann Lee
• Wake Up Dead Man

Some of my favorite films this year were ones that took well-worn genre tropes and used them to tell different kind of stories—while still respecting the tropes. Black Bag is a great spy thriller, but it’s mostly about the difficulties of long-married people keeping the romantic flame alive. The Secret Agent uses the shape of a spy thriller to tell a story about resisting autocracy (and please go watch director Kleber Mendonça Filho talking with Guillermo Del Toro about the film). Presence turned the haunted house genre inside out to talk about grief. The Mastermind’s heist is tense, not because of Oceans 11-style hijinks, but because we’re watching a man blow his entire life up. No Other Choice is a hilarious black comic thriller, but lurking beneath is a bottomless pit of despair at the state of our world. Wake Up Dead Man is an excellent locked-room murder mystery, but it’s also a thoughtful meditation on faith in the modern world. The Testament of Ann Lee is an epic biopic of a great historical figure—but it tells its story through captivating, tightly choreographed musical numbers.

I recommend an exercise: watch each of these films and then ask yourself how the Coen Brothers would have done it. Watch that movie in your mind, compare it with the film you’ve just seen, and marvel at the infinite possibilities of cinema.