It feels like forever ago and it feels like yesterday that we last did this, but what else is new?
I happened to be overseas at a pretty bad time for some of the big Northern Hemisphere summer movie releases this year, and so completely missed the likes of Supergirl, Masters of the Universe, Disclosure Day, and Toy Story 5. Had I caught them all, this post would’ve been out even faster, but as it stands it still feels like I’ve seen a deluge of interesting premises unfold on big, very big, small, and very small screens alike these last few months.
Whether those premises result in compelling cinema has been another story: this particular batch of ten films lacks an outright dud, but still feels like a roughly even split between “eh, maybe” to “absolutely, 100%, see you at the end of the year for the awards”.
For the last five years, this now-traditional first batch of minuscule movie reviews has reliably appeared later and later into the year; mid-May, however, is so late I’m almost getting nostalgic for the awful 2020/21 days. Back then the schedule was so dry that every new release film felt like a huge win, regardless of quality, leading up to a spring-loaded 2022 slate that launched me to 20 movies by the time June had begun.
Of course that’s not what’s happening right here in 2026; Pokémon’s 30th anniversary and a steadily unfolding all-time year for Capcom have simply provided ample writing material, so I haven’t had to break away too much from either my particular genre wheelhouse or the major hyped-up film releases of the year so far. I didn’t even need to look for a streaming-only movie to fill any gaps: for the second year running, these first ten films were all theatrical visits.
The release schedule is definitely about to ramp up for the American summer, but right before things really get going, here are some micro-thoughts on what I’ve seen up till now in 2026.
As we close out another year, it’s worth taking one final beat to appreciate how good we had it in the cinema in 2025. Despite how much time (and money) I spend watching movies in a given year, this final countdown is often something I just smash out in one session in the post-feverish haze right after I’ve put my whole life force into the Games list, and before the New Year’s celebrations begin. This year I couldn’t quite do that; it was just so difficult to cut the list down to a mere ten, let alone decide which film to put above the rest in a slot that really felt quite arbitrary in 2025. We definitely did have it good.
IMAX’s first full year back in Sydney since the advent of Letterboxd culture was a properly stacked one; I visited six times in 2025 and loved every session, and that’s because the year delivered high-end action on a scale rarely seen. There was plenty of sub-genre variety within that action, too, so even though that’s probably the biggest theme throughout the list, I never felt things were getting too samey. It’s also pleasing to realise as I type this that just one movie on the list was a streaming exclusive.
Anyway, from the 31 new-release films I saw in 2025 (not including anything released after December 15th, sadly), these are my ten favourites. Thanks for reading this year.
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VR BEST OF 2025 DISCLAIMER
This list represents my opinion only. I am not asserting any kind of superiority or self-importance by presenting it as I have. My opinion is not fact. Nobody ever agrees with me 100%. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.
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10. K-Pop Demon Hunters
Coming in for its fourth and final main-list mention this month – a tied Vagrant Rant record – the unlikely flint that re-ignited the K-Pop scene for yet another new generation kicks off our final top ten. It rises above an extremely competitive field thanks to the inimitable, whimsical Sony Animation style that, as the Spider-Verse movies have made abundantly clear, tends to bowl critics over en masse. Just as heartwarming, however, is the career boosts for the large squad of talented would-be (and in some cases former) K-Pop stars with great vocals and/or production talent that didn’t quite fit into the industry. Much like the last big Sony movie from this team, KPDH does feel like it ends way too quickly, but the journey there is a blast.
9. Weapons
Marketed as a horror movie, formally a mystery caper, secretly a dark comedy; Zach Cregger’s Barbarian follow-up is a slippery film to categorise, but it absolutely hums along for the majority of its run time. You might accuse the pulp-novel-esque structure, which shifts perspectives like book chapters, of cutting the story’s tension a bit, but it also enriches the small-town community vibe, lines up some killer callbacks, and shares the spotlight among a committed cast who each take out a Jenga piece until everything comes crashing down. Immensely engaging to unravel as you watch, just as meaty to unpack thematically afterwards, Weapons officially makes Cregger a directorial voice worth keeping an ear on.
Ah, the fun one that no-one reads – presumably for fear of spoilers, which is absolutely fair. Speaking of which, I had the opposite problem to that of my characters countdown this year: too many scenes to choose from, so I had to cut some good ones. I’d shout out the cut ones up here as honourable-honourable mentions, but then I’d be putting spoilers before the spoiler warning, and we can’t have that.
Quality action films provide the bulk of the movie moments that will stick with me from 2025, despite – perhaps because of – the fact that the memorable scenes from those action films aren’t necessarily all about the action. In fact they’re quite often about family (found or unavoidable), clashing ages or ideologies, and they are almost always enhanced by music choices. Or, you know, really well-filmed stunts.
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VR BEST OF 2025 DISCLAIMER
This list represents my opinion only. I am not asserting any kind of superiority or self-importance by presenting it as I have. My opinion is not fact. Nobody ever agrees with me 100%. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.
MASSIVE SPOILERS FOLLOW.
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10. Line Dance – The Accountant 2
The overwhelming strength of this unlikely and uneven pulp action sequel is the comedic chemistry between leads Ben Affleck and Jon Bernthal, and I firmly believe the plot is worse off for the restraint shown towards their brotherly relationship. And sure, there’s a pretty good sequence of the two trying to talk about deep stuff on a couple of deck chairs, but the one where the two essentially forget the plot and just drink, banter, attempt to dance, and eventually fight a smarmy barfly is heartwarming Hollywood gold. I can’t prove it, but I have a sneaking suspicion the scene was written and added late in production, once the crew realised how good Affleck and Bernthal played off each other on screen.
9. The Guardian and the Widow – Thunderbolts*
Say what you will about the MCU, but the ability of its marketing department to hide big elements of its movies/shows has been famous for a while now. Thunderbolts* concealed the superpowered individual most important to its plot, the permanent death of a returning character, and its “real” title (though the latter move is probably less successful) from every piece of pre-release hype, and yet had no issue going ham on footage of the film’s most emotionally affecting sequence – yet it still works. As New York (once again) threatens to crumble around them, Yelena Belova and her fake spy dad Alexei Shostakov have an impassioned heart-to-heart so well-acted by Florence Pugh and David Harbour that it overshadows the literal shadow entity wreaking havoc around them. It brought me to tears, and almost makes the mishandled Black Widow movie better in retrospect.
2025 was a pretty rich year for quality films, although this time around my draft document for potentially memorable movie characters looked a tad smaller than normal. These ten plus the honourable mentions represent almost the entire shortlist, which means I jotted down a potential candidate at a rate just under once every two 2025 films I saw. I suppose this year featured a bunch of direct sequels with largely unchanged ensembles (MI: The Final Reckoning, Wicked: For Good, The Accountant 2), films where a memorable cast wasn’t really the point (The Naked Gun, Wolf Man, F1), and films where no one character stood out because everyone was so well-realised (Sinners, Fantastic 4: First Steps, the How to Train Your Dragon remake).
Also, unusually for a character list, roughly half the entries are either hiding some major secret, are absent from their films’ trailers, or both, which necessitates some mild spoiler talk to even discuss why they’re so memorable. The plot gloves aren’t completely off, but veteran moviegoers may pick up on a twist or two by implication, so be warned.
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VR BEST OF 2025 DISCLAIMER
This list represents my opinion only. I am not asserting any kind of superiority or self-importance by presenting it as I have. My opinion is not fact. Nobody ever agrees with me 100%. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.
MILD SPOILERS MAY FOLLOW.
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10. Akasa – Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle
As shounen anime arc villains go, Demon Slayer’s Akasa is one of the more memorable ones I’ve seen: even before getting into the significant amount of screen time his chequered backstory receives inside the confines of Demon Slayer‘s long-in-development Infinity Castle movie, his design is just really cool. Within a sea of seemingly insurmountable foes rocking gimmicky weapons and hidden power sets, this dude just beats people with his bare hands; that’s usually the realm of heroic characters. Then there’s the fact that virtually every viewer wanted to see Akasa’s demise after his final-act rudeness at the end of the Mugen Train movie – which, let’s not forget, was at one point the highest-grossing animated film of all time. Did the visually stunning sympathy play work? That’s up to the viewer, but either way the kid makes an impression.
9. Mickey 18 – Mickey 17
This guy does feature in a Mickey 17 trailer, although not the one I saw initially; regardless, the appearance of the 18th edition of corporate clone-fodder Mickey is one of that chaotic plot’s many inciting incidents, and turns the amber light in front of Robert Pattinson’s most outlandish performance tendencies fully green. As the movie gets more complex and unravels a bit as a result, Pattinson remains an unhinged joy to watch, playing a nervous wreck and a daredevil against and alongside himself to riotous results. An unpredictable plot isn’t always the best move when your world-building is thin on the ground, but an unpredictable character in the hands of either Pattinson or writer-director Bong Joon Ho has yet to be anything other than a magnificent spectacle.
Just one month into 2025’s second half and a dense whirlwind of blockbusters has almost completely blown through town; I honestly can’t remember the last time we had this many big-deal action movies packed into one season – and they were all pretty good! Five of these ten event movies cried out for IMAX, and I obliged on four of them without regret. The remainder of the list isn’t quite as universally strong, but you can’t win ’em all.
Maybe it’s related to all the big movie hype, but I feel like I’ve heard a lot more mentions of Letterboxd on my podcast feeds and in person this year; the app has reached a new level of mainstream presence and so it’s probably worth mentioning I’m on there @vagrantesque. I only catalogue and update lists on there, though. Actual movie thoughts still live right here.
This usually-biannual format of lightning-quick movie reviews has been going on for eight years now, but not since the very first one all the way back in 2017 have I been able to say that I saw all ten of the films on the page in actual cinemas. Perhaps due to all the bountiful writing material surrounding Nintendo Switch 2 hysteria, I had the luxury of taking my time to get this first batch out, so I didn’t have to jump on any streaming-only releases just to make March or April. Of course if there was a major streaming release with buzz around it that would have been a different story, but here we are.
We’ve got bountiful action, a couple of thrillers, a notably coherent Marvel comeback push, more than one runtime epic, and even a bit of horror sprinkled into this group of films – and the year is only just getting started!
Superhero movies are dead; long live superhero movies.
They will be back – and soon – but for this brief moment in history, we had a real spicy year for varied cinema.
For reasons that may have made themselves apparent in yesterday’s list, I didn’t quite have as much 2024 free time to devote to spontaneous cinema adventures as I had in previous years. This meant at several points throughout the year I was more sensitive to early movie reviews than usual, and ended up completely missing the likes of Moana 2, Alien: Romulus, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, Joker: Folie à Deux, and all three of the new Sony Spider-Man spin-offs. If a sharply positive or at least mildly interesting review did not come across my feed for a new movie and/or a friend didn’t reach out to see it, more often than not I just moved on.
I still reached bang-on 30 new-release films watched in 2024; these are my ten favourites.
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VR BEST OF 2024 DISCLAIMER
This list represents my opinion only. I am not asserting any kind of superiority or self-importance by presenting it as I have. My opinion is not fact. Nobody ever agrees with me 100%. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.
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10. The Fall Guy
A supremely silly yet triumphant time at the movies, ascended stuntman David Leitch and his team of action veterans bring abundant life to one of the most underrated – and unlucky – films of the year. The Fall Guy features plenty of real-life spectacle with a wink or two at the camera, elevated by a Sydney setting that allows for much more than novelty: all the tourist-y hallmarks of the city, as well as some of its lesser-known quirks, are used to their fullest to stage pretty crazy sequences. But the best thing about this well-made gem is its cast; Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Hannah Waddingham, and Winston Duke are all fabulous, but every scene shared by Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt is electrifying. Hilarious, adrenaline-charged fun.
9. Deadpool & Wolverine
Speaking of winks at the camera, the single comic book movie to make it on here does so because everything maligned about the recent Marvel Cinematic Universe movies works incredibly well in the context of a seasoned fourth-wall obliterator. It’s kinda hard to stick the well-worn “too many jokes, weird stakes, unimaginative villains” MCU tags on a movie starring Ryan Reynolds’ already-iconic interpretation of Deadpool, especially when Hugh Jackman plays his even more iconic Wolverine mostly straight as a foil. That pitch makes for a solid core, but the inventive – and pretty impressive – action scenes add plenty of gravy, and the myriad extended cameos not only land on multiple meta-levels, but give us some of the most memorably camp MCU performances in years.
We’re already into the second half of the 2024 countdowns, so let’s get serious.
The spoilers usually get fairly perilous around this point, but only three of my ten favourite movie scenes this year could reasonably be called climactic ending sequences – and only one of those actually contains a final shot. I can’t quite draw a common pattern through them otherwise: we’ve got a fair amount of tension, some gritted teeth, a bit of action and some comedy thrown in too. A pretty fun year, I’ve got to say.
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VR BEST OF 2024 DISCLAIMER
This list represents my opinion only. I am not asserting any kind of superiority or self-importance by presenting it as I have. My opinion is not fact. Nobody ever agrees with me 100%. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.
SPOILERS AHEAD!
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10. The Car – Deadpool & Wolverine
For all its strengths as a fourth-wall-shattering comedy, Deadpool & Wolverine does bring quite a few memorable action scenes along for the ride. The opener single-handily brought *NSYNC back into relevance (well, for people who didn’t already have Bye Bye Bye on their workout playlists – hypothetically), and the side-on bus brawl against an army of Deadpool variants both sends up one-take battles and exists as a perfect example of one. My pick would be the set piece that takes place between those two, where the two title characters have it out inside a run-down car. Not only do you get plenty of creative moves due to the cramped space, but the inciting incident is a seething Hugh Jackman monologue that briefly reminds the audience just how good of an actor he is.
9. Vault Escape – Inside Out 2
In an otherwise admirably-balanced film where even the funny scenes are also tugging at the heartstrings a bit while working hard under the surface to set up a ton of necessary exposition as naturally as possible, only one scene pushes the comedy level all the way forward the whole time. And sure, what may have been a hilarious surprise was partially spoiled by trailers – especially the presence of a YongYea-voiced generically edgy videogame hero from the PS1 days locked away in Riley’s conceptual vault of shame – but for me the funniest part was mostly unspoiled: a direct-to-camera children’s television pastiche known only as Pouchy. I was laughing uncontrollably at every frustrating pause bemusing the main cast in the background.
For our first dip into cinematic countdowns this year, we have a real eclectic mix of villains, protagonists, and a weirdly high percentage of villain-protagonists. It’s perhaps a bit of a light one for memorable comic relief, which traditionally is well-represented here via cameos and supporting cast members, but maybe that says something about the kind of focused film we were able to enjoy repeatedly throughout 2024 as big-ticket ensembles were few and far between.
While not as spoiler-heavy as the next movie countdown, sometimes I do need to spoil plot moments to talk about why I find certain characters so compelling, so tread lightly.
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VR BEST OF 2024 DISCLAIMER
This list represents my opinion only. I am not asserting any kind of superiority or self-importance by presenting it as I have. My opinion is not fact. Nobody ever agrees with me 100%. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.
SPOILERS MAY FOLLOW.
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10. Kid – Monkey Man
Man, I just love this shot (so did Monkey Man’s marketing team, naturally). The film’s unnamed protagonist doesn’t talk a whole lot, and a significant portion of what might be called his character arc amounts to getting beaten up a bunch, but the astonishing behind-the-scenes story of how Dev Patel and his team got this grimy revenge fantasy flick made is so ludicrously lined with hurdles and pitfalls that it can’t help but come through in the writer-director’s own determined, unwavering lead performance. It’s a wonder to behold, and if it wasn’t so believable Monkey Man would probably just go down in history as yet another John Wick clone.
9. Gambit – Deadpool & Wolverine
I still can’t believe this happened. In a movie that already features a Chris Evans fake-out and an audacious, suspiciously prophetic Wesley Snipes one-liner, Ryan Reynolds and Kevin Feige set straight yet another controversial superhero take from X-Men Origins: Wolverine by putting a properly comic-accurate Gambit on screen – from inherently silly purple headgear to heavily exaggerated Cajun affect. Like, they actually did it. They even cast Channing Tatum, which arguably only works as a joke in a movie so reliant on pummelling the fourth wall that it fully expects its audience to remember that Tatum tried to get a Gambit movie off the ground many years ago. I say “as a joke” because Tatum is clearly so excited to be there that he makes the character work anyway, both as a card-throwing badass and a reliable source of comedy.
Vagrant Rant 