{"id":350228,"date":"2025-12-15T14:38:14","date_gmt":"2025-12-15T14:38:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/350228\/"},"modified":"2025-12-15T14:38:14","modified_gmt":"2025-12-15T14:38:14","slug":"the-best-shots-of-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/350228\/","title":{"rendered":"The Best Shots of 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

Movies<\/a>Movies<\/a>We see everything through phone screens these days. Many of this year\u2019s greatest compositions found a compelling way to play with that fact.\"\"A24\/Warner Bros.\/Mubi\/Ringer illustration\"\"<\/a>By Adam Nayman<\/a>Dec. 15, 11:30 am UTC \u2022 10 min<\/p>\n

\u201cThe idea of photographing a cellphone is just death,\u201d Robert Eggers said earlier this year,<\/a> and as long as he keeps making portentous horror period pieces (next up: 13th-century werewolves!), he should be able to keep his lunch down. Scrolling through my picks for the most arresting and affecting cinematic images of 2025, though, I couldn\u2019t help but notice how many of them involved cellphones, computer screens, and other pieces of consumer-grade technology\u2014a sign of filmmakers doing their best not to turn a blind eye to the times, but to meet the multimedia gaze head-on. As usual with this annual project, the goal isn\u2019t so much to choose the most beautiful or most \u201cperfect\u201d frames of the year as to spotlight moments that distilled something larger about either the movies they appeared in or the world beyond the frame.\u00a0 I also tried to create at least a bit of variance between the selections here and the movies on my 10-best list<\/a>, although there are a few titles pulling double duty.<\/p>\n

(Dis?)honorable Mention: Happy Gilmore 2Directed by Kyle Newacheck, Cinematography by Zak Mulligan\"\"<\/p>\n

To be clear, I\u2019m very fond of Happy Gilmore 2, which isn\u2019t a good movie by any means. It exists somewhere beyond good and evil, to paraphrase Nietzsche\u2014it\u2019s slop that goes down easy, a vanity project defined by its star\u2019s winning and sincere sense of self-deprectation. (Lest anybody suspect that Adam Sandler doesn\u2019t know the difference between fake movies and real ones, check out his amazing work in Jay Kelly, a movie I actually liked less.) The most striking thing about Happy Gilmore 2 isn\u2019t the roll call of pop cultural cameos or even the thick, greasy residue of nostalgia; it\u2019s how unbelievably ugly it looks. So ugly, in fact, that it almost has to be a satire\u2014the Netflix equivalent of a Trojan horse, skewering Big Streaming\u2019s complete and utter enshittification of the cinematic image. The villain is a manic energy drink magnate (Benny Safdie) trying to drag the PGA kicking and screaming into the TikTok influencer era; the lurid, vomit-flavored color scheme of his MAXI empire suggests a dystopia located on the wrong side of the uncanny valley. By contrast, the original Happy Gilmore\u2014shot on celluloid by Arthur Albert\u2014looks like an 18th-century woodcut. We must RETVRN<\/a>.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

CloudDirected by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Cinematography by Yasuyuki Sasaki\"\"<\/p>\n

The waiting is the hardest part: Sitting patiently by the monitor to see whether his latest cache of marked-up junk has been clicked through, internet reseller Yoshii (Masaki Suda) transforms imperceptibly into a hybrid. He\u2019s at once spectator and puppet master in a late-capitalist drama playing out on flat screens around Tokyo and the entire world. Kiyoshi Kurosawa\u2019s Cloud is a dark comedy of supply and demand, and without resorting to show-offy camera movements or compositions, the Japanese master gives us a world where every location and exchange feels transactional. There\u2019s a texture of yearning to the images that should be recognizable to anybody who\u2019s ever wondered whether they truly need the items in their online cart or whether they just want them\u2014which is to say that Kurosawa\u2019s film strikes a universal chord.\u00a0<\/p>\n

EddingtonDirected by Ari Aster, Cinematography by Darius Khondji\"\"<\/p>\n

Beneath its strident satire of COVID-era paranoia and protocols, Ari Aster\u2019s Eddington is a movie about compartmentalization; each of its major characters is trapped in their own little ceramic slabs of reality, unable\u2014or unwilling\u2014to tear their gaze away from the black mirror. When Joaquin Phoenix\u2019s Sheriff Joe Cross first announces his mayoral bid, he\u2019s framed dead center in his own iPhone display mounted on a police car dashboard. It\u2019s a clever composition\u2014the windshield glass appears on either side of the vertical screen, suggesting a set of blinders\u2014but Aster complicates it by having Joe\u2019s wife, Louise (Emma Stone), log on to her laptop. Her mortified reflection effectively transforms a selfie into a two-shot\u2014or, depending on how you look at it, a triptych, with her Facebook feed lurking as a character in its own right. That a lot of critics (and viewers) found Eddington annoying is fair enough; it\u2019s an obstreperous poltergeist of a movie about ghosts in the social media machine. But formally speaking, it\u2019s the strongest work of Aster\u2019s career, syncing form to content with finesse and a nasty sense of humor.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The MastermindDirected by Kelly Reichardt, Cinematography by Christopher Blauvelt\"\"<\/p>\n

Throughout Kelly Reichardt\u2019s exquisitely sketched character study The Mastermind, we see JB (Josh O\u2019Connor) looking intently at paintings and objets d\u2019art. He likes to think of himself as a man with an eye for the finer things. We\u2019re never quite sure whether it\u2019s aestheticism\u2014or just simple, stupid hubris\u2014that motivates our (anti)hero to risk his cozy suburban existence (and his responsibilities as a husband and father) on a harebrained, small-scale museum heist. Whatever the answer, Reichardt exacerbates JB\u2019s pathos in the aftermath of his scheme by confronting him with images of painterly beauty: The America he skulks through on the lam is suitable for framing. The most striking exhibit is a pair of JB\u2019s shirts, illuminated through the window of the hotel room where he\u2019s hiding out from the cops. They suggest a ghostly sort of duality; a would-be daredevil suspended in midair, the pale, faded traces of a man who\u2019s no longer really there.\u00a0<\/p>\n

No Other ChoiceDirected by Park Chan-wook, Cinematography by Kim Woo-hyung\"\"<\/p>\n

Three years ago in this very space<\/a>, I wrote about Park Chan-wook\u2019s swoony neo-noir Decision to Leave as an \u201cexample of how directorial imagination can transform conventions into visual coups.\u201d Right now, there\u2019s no filmmaker who\u2019s thinking harder about form, and No Other Choice\u2014about a downsized paper factory manager who starts to take the idea of a cutthroat job market literally\u2014is filled with dazzling, destabilizing visual tricks. It\u2019d require unraveling a lot of narrative threads to explain exactly why the widow played by Yeom Hye-ran is searching through various gun makes and models on an iPad being proffered by cops, but the skill of the filmmaking transcends plot points. Here is the most vivid depiction to date of the anxious, violent psychology of doomscrolling. Even as Yeom\u2019s character is being presented with a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card, Park shows us that she\u2019s just a prisoner of her own device.\u00a0<\/p>\n

On Becoming a Guinea FowlDirected by Rungano Nyoni, Cinematography by David Gallego\"\"<\/p>\n

Objects in the rearview mirror may appear closer than they are: Driving home from a house party in Missy Elliott cosplay, Shula (Susan Chardy) spots the supine body of her uncle Fred lying by the side of the road. He\u2019s dead, but he isn\u2019t gone: Rungano Nyoni\u2019s superb sophomore feature unfolds as a ghost story haunted by the spirit of a patriarchy that preys on its female subjects. Uncle Fred, it seems, was a monster, a fact that keeps slipping through the cracks of all the weeping, wailing testimonials offered up in his wake. Crucially, this is the only time we see him in the flesh\u2014as existential roadkill, as well as a (literal) reflection of a family history that refuses to rest in peace.\u00a0<\/p>\n

One Battle After AnotherDirected by Paul Thomas Anderson, Cinematography by Michael Bauman\"\"<\/p>\n

No American filmmaker locates poetry in motion like Paul Thomas Anderson. The paradox of One Battle After Another is that its most indelible images are the ones that hurtle by at serene velocity. Exhibit A: the silhouetted figures of the \u201cvato skateboarders,\u201d emissaries of the \u201cLatino Harriet Tubman situation\u201d orchestrated by Benicio del Toro\u2019s Sensei Sergio St. Carlos. OBAA is a movie of factions in collision and counterpoint; Sensei\u2019s skaters\u2014all of whom were recruited from El Paso and given free rein to show their stuff\u2014are shot to look as if they\u2019ve leapt off the pages of a graphic novel. They\u2019re so fleet and daring as they bound over and across rooftops in the sanctuary city of Baktan Cross that it\u2019s all Leonardo DiCaprio\u2019s washed dad-bod ex-revolutionary can do to try to keep up. (I could have just as easily gone with the static shot where Bob drops from a great height and splats on the concrete, a more slapstick form of kineticism.) \u201cAs skateboarders we\u2019ve kind of always been the underdogs, seen as the outcast or the rebels,\u201d said one member of the quartet, Gilberto Martinez Jr., in an interview with the Los Angeles Times<\/a>. \u201cBut in a way we\u2019re showing freedom, we\u2019re not trying to be put in a box, we express ourselves through this skateboard.\u201d Anderson, meanwhile, expresses himself by elevating his collaborators, however briefly, into Pop Art icons.\u00a0<\/p>\n

ResurrectionDirected by Bi Gan, Cinematography by Jingsong Dong\"\"<\/p>\n

It\u2019s futile to try to represent the serpentine 36-minute-long take near the end of Bi Gan\u2019s Resurrection via a single screenshot; the selected image could just as easily be wide-angled or intimate, crowded or desolate, deep red or perfect blue. It supposedly took the director and his crew four-plus hours to capture the sequence, which is set on New Year\u2019s Eve 1999 and includes group dancing, karaoke, a shoot-out, vampirism, and a shout-out to F.W. Murnau\u2019s seminal silent classic Sunrise. The most amazing moment involves an outdoor projection of a Lumi\u00e8re brothers short in which the ancient footage somehow plays at regular speed while the crowd milling in front of and around it has been sped up in a time-lapse blur. Bi is nothing if not a showman, and also a stuntman, to the point that he refers to his own practice as a \u201cmission: impossible.\u201d<\/a> As an almost-final reckoning with the history of cinema, Resurrection is literally death-defying stuff; the sheer complexity and exhilaration of its money shot should confer something like immortality.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Secret AgentDirected by Kleber Mendonca Filho, Cinematography by Evgenia Alexandrova\"\"<\/p>\n

Before Danny Torrance barreled through the corridors of the Overlook Hotel on a Big Wheel in The Shining, a pint-size Antichrist used his trusty trike as a battering ram in The Omen. The mock-Hitchcockian scene in which poor Lee Remick gets thrown off her footstool and over the staircase by her adopted progeny is a bad-taste classic, and Brazilian director Kleber Mendonca Filho gets good mileage by deploying it in his late-\u201970s period piece, The Secret Agent. There\u2019s a satirical point being scored here via the juxtaposition of an explicitly satanic big-screen antagonist and the all too banal authoritarian evil consolidating power behind closed doors in movie-mad Recife; in a film that keeps forging links between cinephilia and political consciousness, the use of a Hollywood genre movie is more than just a sight gag. Although, speaking of sight gags, there\u2019s a good one in this scene when the camera, approximating the view of Wagner Moura\u2019s dissident hero, pans down to notice one lucky viewer in the balcony receiving oral sex from his seatmate. We come to this place for magic \u2026\u00a0<\/p>\n

The ShroudsDirected by David Cronenberg, Cinematography by Douglas Koch\"\"<\/p>\n

The films of David Cronenberg are filled with mad scientists who wind up as the subjects of their own bizarre experiments: Think of Jeff Goldblum zapping himself through the telepod in The Fly or game designer Jennifer Jason Leigh getting exiled into her own virtual video game world in eXistenZ. In The Shrouds, GraveTech impresario Karsh (Vincent Cassel) decides to try out the electronically modified burial garments that have made him a wealthy man. Standing alone in his company\u2019s office, draped in his jet-black chain-mail creation, he cuts a forlorn\u2014and sadly funny\u2014figure, captured by Cronenberg at a clinical but empathetic distance. \u201cI wanted to know what it felt like to be wrapped \u2026 to be shrouded,\u201d Karsh tells his customized helper-bot Hunny, who\u2019s been made in the yassified image of his own dearly departed wife, Becca. \u201cIt\u2019s not meant for the living,\u201d the AI replies in Becca\u2019s voice, caution and commiseration blended into a single deadpan tone. Some viewers might find The Shrouds\u2019 visual style flatlined, but the simplicity of Cronenberg\u2019s compositions evinces a quiet mastery that his showier inheritors will have to grow into\u2014or else get old trying.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

28 Years LaterDirected by Danny Boyle, Cinematography by Anthony Dod Mantle\"\"<\/p>\n

For my money, Danny Boyle\u2019s 28 Years Later was the most visually inventive movie of the year, leveraging the speed and agility of handheld digital cameras\u2014including multiple iPhones\u2014against an epic 2.76:1 aspect ratio capable of evoking an almost intergalactic sense of grandeur. The mid-film set piece in which the characters played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Alfie Williams run for their lives across the Lindisfarne land bridge presents a vision quest gone awry; rarely has a homecoming been staged with such an ardent, life-or-death sense of urgency. The darkened causeway, the indifferent coastline, the hovering specter of the northern lights\u2014this is breathtaking image making, alert to the power of scale in a way that shames most higher-budget blockbusters. In a just world, the ever-resourceful Anthony Dod Mantle would be scooping up cinematography prizes left and right. We\u2019ll see in February whether Nia DaCosta\u2019s sequel The Bone Temple contains anything comparable.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Woman in the YardDirected by Jaume Collet-Serra, Cinematography by Pawel Pogorzelski\"\"\"\"<\/p>\n

You could count the number of contemporary genre directors with better visual instincts than Jaume Collet-Serra on one hand and have a couple of fingers to spare. The only question when it comes to The Woman in the Yard\u2014which was not even screened for critics by its myopic distributor\u2014is what shot to select as an avatar for his artistry.\u00a0 Here, a POV shot belonging to Ramona (Danielle Deadwyler) transubstantiates via a shift in focus into a numinous close-up; meanwhile, the subject of her gaze\u2014the titular woman in the yard\u2014becomes absorbed into her face, setting up a connection that shapes and deepens the meaning of the film\u2019s ensuing mise-en-sc\u00e8ne. It\u2019s getting old having to remind people that JCS is the real deal, but as long as movies as sophisticated, heartfelt, and actually scary as The Woman in the Yard languish in Dumpuary purgatory, it\u2019s worth trying to call attention to the work\u2014which, once seen, speaks on its own behalf.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Adam Nayman<\/p>\n

<\/a>Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book \u2018The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together\u2019 is available now from Abrams.
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