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Of the many exceptional movies I saw in 2025—10 of which I have listed below—the majority of them were available to catch in a Portland theater. The thriving ecosystem of independently-owned cinemas spread across our city is near inimitable, especially given our glut of centenarian show houses. While monster studios continue to eat each other, and the exhibition windows for big box office films shrink to accommodate streaming access, Portland has been able to sustain a unique community of rep showings and fans. In 2025, that feels like a blessing.
Here are my favorite movies of the year.
10. Train Dreams
Since Netflix recently announced its intent to purchase Warner Bros Discovery for a meaningless $80 billion or so—instigating Paramount to barge in with a hostile takeover bid of $100 billion—the only potentially decent news coming out of that monopolistic nightmare is that WB will no longer be run by dull-eyed toad in a quarter-zip, CEO David Zaslav. Regardless, whoever wins, we lose.
As I wrote in my review, “Because Train Dreams is indebted to the acute pain of loss…and Netflix is more responsible for the loss of theatrical culture than any other unyielding corporate monster, it’s a strange home for the film.” It would be ironic that one of the most patently gorgeous films of 2025 barely made it to any actual theater screens, but we’re past irony at this point.
Now all we can do is accept this. Just as Robert Granier allows his grief to impress texture, like record grooves, into a seemingly impressionless life, so we can allow a film this massively sumptuous to remind us of what we’ve lost.
Watch on Netflix.
9. The Secret Agent
Set in 1977 in the coastal city of Recife, Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent follows a man going by the name of Armando (Wagner Moura) as he, aided by underground organizers, hopes to escape Brazil’s military dictatorship with his young son.
Why Armando has assumed an alias and why he must abscond from the country are questions the film excavates as it spans decades. Filho reaches as far forward as present day, with university students listening to degraded recordings of Armando and his cohort-in-hiding, picking through microfiche for newspaper articles and details the sound bytes can’t quite verify.
Though The Secret Agent isn’t the spy flick its title promises, Filho’s film feels like an act of subterfuge, using scraps, shreds, and morsels of time—clues, songs, newspaper clippings, and even a young boy’s excitement over the Brazilian release of Jaws—to give playful, powerful life back to everything a government destroyed.
Currently playing in theaters.
8. Evil Puddle
Back in October, Evil Puddle had its Portland premiere at the Clinton Street Theater. Despite being screened 1 pm on a Sunday afternoon, and despite theater staff being wholly unfamiliar with the film’s creators, Matt Farley and Charles Roxburgh, the showing drew a sizable crowd. This led to a brief standing ovation and the ample consumption of popcorn. Theatergoing seemed alive and well again. Somewhere, Tom Cruise smiled without using his eyes.
Such is the irrepressible magic of Farley and Charlie’s latest independent feature, a delightful microbudget take on ’70s disaster movies that was made, like all of their output, with a community of family, friends, and fans. I’ve written before about how that sense of community is essential to much of the sublimity of what these two guys can accomplish. With Evil Puddle, that sense is so infectious it can coax enough people to a small movie theater on a quiet afternoon to justify opening the theater at all.
Watch on Vimeo.
7. Marty Supreme
An early 1950s period piece built like an ’80s sports movie, replete with synth-pop needle drops that mellifluously slip in and out of Daniel Lopatin’s anachronistic score, co-writer and director Josh Safdie’s follow up to Uncut Gems (without brother Benny) is an undeniable spectacle. So much so that when it hits theaters on Christmas audiences can catch it on 70mm where available—in Portland at the Hollywood—projecting the wild bildungsroman of motor-mouthed New York twentysomething Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet) onto screens the size of at least 40 regulation ping pong tables.
Yes, Marty Supreme is centered around table tennis. However, Safdie’s film—co-written with Ronald Bronstein, who also produced his wife’s equally stressful If I Had Legs I’d Kick You—isn’t compelled by the game so much as by Marty’s need for a legacy, especially as a poor Jewish kid mired in the post-war malaise that left so many people without a past. His near-delusional ambition carries him through both posh international tournaments and grimey long nights of the soul, joined on labyrinthine detours by faces like Abel Ferrara and Tyler, the Creator, to accomplish nothing less than the kind of fame that will land him on a Wheaties box. At one point, a brief flashback involving honey becomes suddenly so weird and moving that I gasped, and this was only two minutes, at most, of Marty Supreme’s whopping 150. It is, to put it academically, a whole lotta cinema.
Premieres on Christmas in theaters, including in 70mm at the Hollywood Theatre.
6. The Mastermind
Writer-director Kelly Reichardt spent some time apart from the Pacific Northwest to tell the pathetic tale of extremely ordinary white man JB Mooney (Josh O’Connor) in 1970 Massachusetts. Art school dropout and nondescript male figure to his twin preteen sons (Sterling and Jasper Thompson), JB proudly hatches a heist to steal four Arthur Dove paintings from a local museum, all while keeping his wife (Alana Haim) in the dark and generally ignoring the political upheaval just outside of his perennially unemployed, upper middle class purview.
Shot by Christopher Blauvelt with the soft, grainy immediacy of the late ’60s and early ’70s crime films in which JB might imagine he’s starring, The Mastermind may be Reichardt’s funniest film, depending on how much you enjoy watching a disappointing man unravel.
Watch on MUBI or available to rent.
5. One Battle After Another
Since writing about One Battle After Another in September, I’ve had a Talking Heads lyric on loop in my skull. It goes, “Heaven is a place, a place where nothing, nothing ever happens,” and it sounds like David Byrne’s extraordinarily tired, exhausted by the sheer glut of stuff that never stops happening around him. Happening to him, in fact—weighing on him and demanding responsibilities of him. And maybe no film in 2025 better translates that very modern anxiety, that low hum of particularly American dread, into big screen spectacle than Paul Thomas Anderson’s love letter to the heroism of getting off the couch when you’re really stoned.
Watch on HBO Max or available to rent.
4. Eephus
Carson Lund’s enchanting Eephus is a patient film about obsolescence: In the 1990s, and over the course of a Sunday afternoon that bleeds into evening, an amateur Massachusetts baseball league has one last game before their field—the only one within an hour’s drive—is bulldozed to make way for a new elementary school.
But rather than mount the match as a blowout celebration and overt symbol for gentrification, or aging, or whatever, Lund (who also co-wrote and edited the film) simply and beautifully tracks time as it runs out.
Though Eephus is a solid hang-out, drama kept to mostly a hush, Lund is remarkably precise about where characters are on the diamond and when, or how the light moves across the grass as it gets dark, inviting us to ponder this location, what it meant to these guys, and how uneventful goodbyes can be. As they light fireworks, only half the guys stick around to watch. “So this is how it ends…?” a player sighs. Yes, this is how everything ends, bittersweetly and a shadow of what it once was, which was in reality a shadow of your fading memory of it.
Watch on MUBI, or available to rent.
3. Caught by the Tides
Caught by the Tides is as much a gorgeous retconning of director Jia Zhangke’s filmography as a culmination of his lifetime spent collecting images alongside his hot wife. To paraphrase my review, it’s part travelogue and part documentary, alloying crime story atmospheres with the sweep of historical tragedy to consolidate the past 25 years—from which Jia pulls footage, sometimes whole scenes, shot for several previous films—into an overwhelming digital folk tale.
Watch on the Criterion Channel or available to rent.
2. Blue Heron
With distribution purchased by Janus Films out of the Toronto International Film Festival, Sophy Romvari’s Blue Heron won’t see Portland theaters until 2026 (and that date’s still fully nebulous). I’ll write more about the film when it comes to theaters, but until then: Blue Heron wrung me out.
Romvari’s rooted in a lineage of filmmakers willing to use reenactment—like William Greaves, Werner Herzog, Errol Morris, Robert Greene, and Joshua Oppenheimer, as well as fellow Canadians Guy Maddin and Nathan Fielder—to excavate the emotional truth of their deeply personal, and therefore often self-obscured, experiences. Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements and Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine have similarly attempted to weave in and out of defined biopic structures to play with the reality of what’s shown on screen. But Blue Heron, Romvari’s debut feature, feels like more of a culmination of all of that work than a film in line with what those artists have accomplished.
In exploring childhood trauma by casting actors to play self-reflexive, slightly fictionalized versions of her family, Romvari puts aside clean storylines for something more prismatic, gathering details from as many perspectives as she can to dig up—whatever answers are available. Romvari seems to know that narrativizing grief encourages an audience to expect revelations. It’s not a spoiler to say that she doesn’t come to any; Blue Heron finds freedom in accepting that.
Coming to Portland in 2026.
1. No Other Choice
The 13th film from Park Chan-wook is about as Park-core as he can get: very funny and very grim, the two balanced in bleak harmony. So it goes for Yoo Man-soo (Lee Byung-hun), a manager at a Korean paper factory who’s laid off after an American company buys them out. Emasculated and facing the worst job market in decades, Man-soo decides he must guarantee he’ll be first in line for increasingly unavailable career opportunities. He’s got to murder his competition.
No Other Choice presents Man-soo’s plan as set-up for plenty of violent farce, but beating beneath its ridiculousness is the shame of being, suddenly and without explanation, unemployed—or worse: having AI replace your job. What you thought was the thing you are best at just no longer exists. And in enduring that, in trying to remember who you are, you disassociate from who you swore you were. The best movies of 2025 understand this—that the machine has worn you out, ground you down, fertilized data centers with your bone dust—and assure you that everyone is just as helpless to it as you are. What a relief.
Premieres in limited cities on December 25th, opens at Cinema 21, 616 NW 21st; Hollywood Theatre, 4122 NE Sandy on Jan 1, 2026.
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Dom Sinacola
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