As a new year of films prepare to hit the big screen, the Pope of Trash is looking back on 2025 with some of his favorite titles of the year.
This week, John Waters curated his list of top 10 movies from 2025, with Ari Aster‘s A24 neo-Western thriller Eddington topping the chart, which takes just a many unexpected and chaotic turns as the year itself. But what else should fans expect from the eccentric godfather of camp cinema?
With films like franchise horror Final Destination: Bloodlines and the French apocalyptic sci-fi The Empire in his rotation, the Polyester (1981) auteur provides several eclectic viewing options for loyal fans.
Check out John Waters’ top 10 films of 2025 below, originally published by Vulture.
1. ‘Eddington’, dir. Ari Aster
Image Credit: A24/Courtesy Everett Collection
“My favorite movie of the year is a disagreeable but highly entertaining tale as exhausting as today’s politics with characters nobody could possibly root for. Yet it’s so terrifyingly funny, so confusingly chaste and kinky that you’ll feel coo-coo crazy and oh-so-cultural after watching. If you don’t like this film, I hate you.”
2. ‘Final Destination: Bloodlines’, dir. Adam B. Stein, Zach Lipovsky
Image Credit: Warner Bros./Courtesy Everett Collection
“The best sequel to the coolest cinematic franchise ever. Ferocious, fractured and filled with so many scary, twisted surprises—this picture goes beyond trash into a new realm of exploitation art.”
3. Oslo Trilogy, dir. Dag Johan Haugerud
Image Credit: Strand Releasing/Courtesy Everett Collection
“Three terrific Norwegian films directed by the newest heir to Ingmar Bergman’s throne concerning how complicated yet hopeful and similar all homo and hetero loves and lusts really are. The smartest dialogue about romance in a long, long time.”
4. ‘Sirāt’, dir. Oliver Laxe
Image Credit: Match Factory
“Move over, Mad Max. Hurry up, The Wages of Fear. This jaw-droppingly exciting new cinematic road trip to a rave party in the deserts of war-torn Morocco makes those classics look like slowpokes. Tragedy after tragedy of unspeakable intensity make this script the best feel-bad acid adventure ever filmed. It’ll blow your mind … [spoiler alert] literally.”
5. ‘Sauna’, dir. Mathias Broe
Image Credit: TrustNordisk
“Like a modern-day Andy Warhol’s Trash, this sexy and well-acted first feature is about an affair between a hunky, hip gay male who works in a Copenhagen bathhouse cleaning out glory holes and a trans man who now identifies as gay. Cockeyed cunnilingus — a whole new frontier to consider?”
6. ‘Room Temperature’, dir. Dennis Cooper, Zac Farley
Image Credit: Leopard Films
“A purposely tedious and tender poetic head-scratcher of a film focusing on a family setting up their neighborhood home for a Halloween horror house. Just when you begin hating this film, you’ll suddenly realize—huh? I love it. It’s weird, creepy, and maybe … just maybe, great.”
7. ‘Misericordia’, dir. Alain Guiraudie
Image Credit: Rosamont/RAI Cinema
“An impossibly perverse thriller where murder, closet incest, and the inappropriate attraction to one guilty man collide, leaving the audience stunned by sexual plot twists and a lulu of an ending. Yikes! This one’s off the rails!”
8. ‘When Fall Is Coming’, dir. François Ozon
Image Credit: Music Box Films/Courtesy Everett Collection
“A touching (and when have you ever heard me use that word?), nonjudgmental drama about a retired whore and her kind but rage-filled, down-low gay grown son, who gets out of prison and teaches her that maybe murder is the right thing to do.”
9. ‘My Mom Jayne’, dir. Mariska Hargitay
Image Credit: HBO Films
“A top rate documentary that reveals secret after secret about Jayne Mansfield and her family that will push you to the edge of your seat and possibly make you cry.”
10. ‘The Empire’, dir. Bruno Dumont
Image Credit: Kino Lorber/Courtesy Everett Collection
“I’m not a fan of science-fiction, but when a brutalist spaceship lands in northern France in this film, I fell to my knees to worship the mutant deities onboard. I didn’t realize this script was supposed to be funny until I read the press notes after viewing. It is. Sort of. Not funny ha-ha. Not funny peculiar. But funny ha-ha peculiar, just like the director.”