Over the previous few months, the CAPC group has compiled a listing of our favourite popular culture artifacts from the earlier yr. Not like most year-end lists, we don’t declare that these are the “greatest.” Fairly, these are the issues that introduced us essentially the most pleasure and satisfaction all through the final 12 months.
For 2025, our favourite movies embrace the most recent from Iran’s best residing director, a meditative have a look at one man’s life, a priestly homicide thriller, and one thing about Ok-Pop and demon hunters.
Eephus by Carson Lund
The premise is straightforward: baseball. Alright, to present a extra detailed synopsis, Eephus is a couple of group of males enjoying one ultimate rec league sport of baseball earlier than their native area is torn down. The movie’s confines are restricted nearly utterly to the boundaries of the sector and the sport. We see the gamers arrive and heat up, we watch them play, and we see them enterprise off after the sunshine grows too dim to maintain going.
Eephus has maybe the smallest stakes of any film on this checklist, however its themes are weighty. We’re inherently social creatures, searching for out and stitching collectively neighborhood wherever we are able to. However neighborhood is usually a tenuous factor as soon as a uniting thread is minimize. Our social establishments massive and small are very important for our communal flourishing, however these establishments appear to be more and more dying out. Trying past simply neighborhood, Eephus additionally considers our relationship to the issues we love: the areas, the actions, the eccentricities. For we’re additionally creatures who treasure issues, typically issues which have little that means to others. Like a patchy, run down baseball area. Or our favourite glove worn skinny from years of use. Or the power to play a sport like baseball, to imbue this objectively insignificant exercise with substance. So what can we do when the issues we love lastly fade? How can we treasure them of their final mild?
On this approach, Eephus turns into a contemplation of devotion. It’s about neighborhood, about mourning, about our reluctance to maneuver on, concerning the ephemeral issues that carry us into relationship with each other. And, on the finish of the day, it’s additionally only a baseball sport.
—Micah Rickard
Frankenstein by Guillermo del Toro
Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of Mary Shelley’s basic work proved to be a large hit for Netflix, shortly changing into one of many ten most-streamed films of the yr regardless of solely being launched in November. Some highlights of this new movie embrace some breathtaking visuals and a relatively gripping efficiency from Oscar Isaac.
Thematically, the movie made some uncommon and important departures from Shelley’s work, stripping away lots of the monster’s corrupt and spiteful qualities to remodel the story right into a extra simplistic story of an evil creator preventing a superb creation. Whereas in keeping with del Toro’s earlier work and tendencies to humanize monsters, Shelley’s work painted the monster with considerably extra nuance. These themes might grow to be extra troubling when contemplating how Shelley’s authentic work analogized the creator and monster’s relationship to God and man, although del Toro shied away from making these comparisons as straight.
Its cultural recognition might level to the attractiveness of straightforward oppressed vs. oppressor story traces, even once they lack the issues of many actual world dynamics.
—Josiah DeGraaf
It Was Simply an Accident by Jafar Panahi
Jafar Panahi’s It Was Simply an Accident is my favourite movie from 2025. It confronts us with uncomfortable questions and ethical quandaries that it is aware of it may possibly’t remedy. However perhaps one thing like grace and justice will shine by way of as we wrestle with these questions.
The Iranian movie follows Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), a person who was beforehand imprisoned and tortured by the federal government for protesting lacking wages. Now, he’s simply making an attempt to maneuver on together with his life regardless of the power again ache that serves as a relentless reminder and a seamless wound of his struggling. However the previous gained’t depart him alone. Sooner or later he thinks he acknowledges certainly one of his captors, not by his face (Vahid’s head was coated throughout his torture) however by the squeak of the person’s prosthetic leg.
Being thrown again into his trauma panics Vahid, and he acts rashly, kidnapping the person and threatening to bury him alive within the desert as retribution. As the person pleads innocence, nonetheless, Vahid’s vengeance is obstructed by indecision. What if he’s bought the flawed man? Thus begins a street film, as Vahid tracks down different victims with the purpose of verifying that that is certainly their torturer. Whereas stuffed with an ethical stress, It Was Simply an Accident can also be a surprisingly humorous movie, with absurd photos and conditions typically arising out of Vahid’s innate goodness.
Panahi’s movie is about resisting evil and making an attempt to rebuild a life after. It’s concerning the private deformation that outcomes from societal injustice. It’s about mercy and the unsure penalties that observe. It’s gripping, probing, self-aware, and very important.
—Micah Rickard
Kpop Demon Hunters by Chris Appelhans and Maggie Kang
When Netflix launched the animated musical KPop Demon Hunters in June, nobody was anticipating it to show into a worldwide cultural juggernaut. Inside a number of quick months, although, it turned the most-watched movie in Netflix historical past, surpassing 500 million views earlier than yr’s finish. The film impressed six of the yr’s prime ten trending Halloween costumes, reshaped Korea’s tourism map, and acquired quite a few awards and nominations. The associated music album broke main data, together with changing into the primary soundtrack to have 4 songs on the Billboard Scorching 100 Prime 10. It’s no surprise KPop Demon Hunters was named TIME’s 2025 Breakthrough of the 12 months.
The movie’s success is due largely to the big recognition of its songs, however the animation fashion and thematically wealthy storyline little doubt contributed. In reality, the script’s exploration of sin and disgrace, in addition to the character of idolatry, resonate with everlasting truths that talk to our want for redemption. Right here’s hoping the sequel, slated for a 2029 launch, proves a worthy successor to the unique.
—Cap Stewart
The Mastermind by Kelly Reichardt
It’s the primary breath of the Seventies, and America is raging. Because the Vietnam Battle continues, numerous younger males are pulled away from their households and mates and compelled into service, whereas numerous others embrace the counterculture in campus protests and on the open street. None of that actually impacts actuality for JB Mooney (Josh O’Connor), although. He has his personal desires that start with stealing a number of Arthur Dove work from his native museum. As for what comes after the artwork heist, properly… JB may not have thought that far forward.
O’Connor offers a sly, self-critical efficiency (in reality, he’s proving significantly adept at such portrayals) that casts JB as a captivating schemer who, beneath all of it, is misplaced in his personal self-centeredness. His indifference to present occasions runs deeper than simply his planning—he can’t be bothered by them, and he’d relatively not be bothered by his household, or by the legislation. He’d relatively simply insist on his personal actuality.
Kelly Reichardt has crafted one other indie movie that gives a lot to think about beneath its obvious simplicity. Within the heist’s aftermath, The Mastermind opens as much as think about the results of JB’s solipsism amid the cacophony of Seventies America. The movie is by turns playful and contemplative, humorous and insightful. It doesn’t make its themes apparent or specific, as a substitute permitting the viewers to easily exist in its cozy world. However there’s loads to chew on for individuals who don’t need to cease fascinated by it after the credit roll.
—Micah Rickard
Superman by James Gunn and The Unbelievable 4: First Steps by Matt Shakman
The discharge of each movies in brief succession this July varieties an interesting case research in our tradition’s rising want for earnest heroes. In a transfer away from the tongue-in-cheek nature of previous profitable superhero movies, these protagonists supplied a extra conventional method, whether or not within the tacky “boy scout” nature of Superman or the relative lack of quips from Marvel’s first household. This retro method was significantly current in Marvel’s advertising for Unbelievable 4, which leaned closely into its ’60s aesthetic.
Regardless of the non-equivocally heroic nature of those protagonists, all of them confronted pushback of their tales from a world that didn’t fairly perceive them. Their conquer such pragmatic cynicism could also be learn as meta-commentary on a brand new imaginative and prescient for superheroes that each main comedian e book movie studios are presently leaning into. Whereas each movies supplied common field workplace performances, their constructive opinions level to viewers curiosity in this sort of method. Earnestness holds the day over DC’s previous grit and Marvel’s previous quips, not less than for now.
—Josiah DeGraaf
Prepare Desires by Clint Bentley
Amid wars and rumors of wars, 2025 was a loud yr, and 2026 will in all probability be simply as deafening. Films can present invigorating calls to carry quick to hope, however we additionally want films to supply calm areas for reflection. That’s what Clint Bentley’s Prepare Desires offers us.
Prepare Desires watches the lifetime of Robert Grainier, a fictional, unheralded man who labored as a logger within the Pacific Northwest all through the early twentieth century. Bentley’s movie prioritizes poetic narration over dialogue and arresting imagery over plot mechanics. Grainier works. He loves. He grieves. He wrongs. He watches. He regrets. He dies. And we’re invited to journey with him, to witness the profundity of his small life.
However description can’t do justice to what Prepare Desires achieves. The expertise of the movie is acquired first as an opportunity to breathe, to decelerate from our hectic tempo of life. It then turns into an expression and reminder of the aching great thing about the world round us, whilst that magnificence is consistently fading just like the grass. Because it unfolds, it turns into a contemplation of heartache and survival, and an exhortation to reside with surprise, attentiveness, and care.
—Micah Rickard
Wake Up Useless Man by Rian Johnson
Many viewers have referred to as the third installment in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out franchise the most effective of the three. Whereas I wouldn’t go fairly that far—I feel the thriller plot within the first movie was tighter and higher structured—I’d nonetheless agree that Wake Up Useless Man is particular. Together with Johnson’s trademark quirky characters and sharp social commentary, we get a gripping—and well timed—battle between two very completely different variations of Christianity.
The distinction between the boastful Monsignor Wicks (Josh Brolin) and the compassionate Father Jud (Josh O’Connor) is woven seamlessly and fantastically into the movie, however essentially the most highly effective second is the one which stops the story chilly. It’s the second when Father Jud drops every thing to take heed to, and pray with, a girl in want. “It’s the turning level of the movie,” as Kristin Du Mez places it. “Greater than a plot twist, it adjustments the movie from one factor into one thing else solely.” Because the detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) reminds everybody greater than as soon as because the plot unfolds, tales matter, and Johnson appropriately sensed that what our culturally and politically fraught second actually wants is a narrative concerning the love on the coronary heart of religion.
—Gina Dalfonzo
Depraved: For Good by Jon M. Chu
In case you have a daughter in elementary faculty, then Depraved: For Good has in all probability been in your radar. My fourth-grades has been singing Ariana Grande’s model of “Common” nonstop because the first Depraved movie got here out two years in the past, so sure—this sequel was extremely anticipated in our home. (Glinda vitality’s all over the place: “Toss Toss,” quoted with a hair sway, is ceaselessly quipped in our home.)
What I cherished about For Good, particularly as a mother, was that it finally centered not on romance or spectacle however on friendship. In a popular culture world that usually treats feminine friendship as disposable—or as mere “woman drama”—Depraved insists on one thing higher: friendship will be formative, life-altering, and even make us holy.
Within the Christian creativeness, friendship is rarely merely social. It’s vocational. Jesus referred to as his disciples mates, and people friendships helped change the world. God varieties us by way of the individuals who problem us, love us, and alter us—typically even towards our will. That’s why the lyric that’s grow to be a family chorus for us—“Who can say if I’ve been modified for the higher?”—hits so deeply. After we are in reciprocal relationship, we actually can say we’ve been modified for the higher.
And that’s what this story does so properly. Elphaba and Glinda’s friendship is the purpose; it’s not a subplot to some seemingly extra “vital” story. Their love carries ethical weight, and their goodbyes—and their willingness to sacrifice for each other—are genuinely transferring. (Sure, I cried.) And in basic Oz vogue, it’s additionally a reminder that the world is excellent at labeling ladies “depraved” once they refuse to be handy.
I left the theater grateful, not just for the music and spectacle, but additionally for the message my daughter is absorbing alongside the best way: that being good isn’t the identical as being appreciated, and that friendship can kind you “for good” within the truest sense. Additionally, I remorse to tell you that after once more, the soundtrack has overtaken our kitchen, our faculty automobile line, and doubtless each my daughter’s and my total character till additional discover.
—LuElla D’Amico
