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2025: The Movie(s) of the Year

Slate News

Slate Podcasts

News, News Commentary, Politics

4.66K Ratings

🗓️ 30 December 2025

⏱️ 35 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

If you were to sum up 2025 in a film, which would you pick? The question that nearly wrecked the brain of Slate’s chief movie critic.

Guest: Dana Stevens, Slate’s movie critic.

Dana’s ten best movies of 2025.

Her review of Sinners.

And her review of One Battle After Another.

Want more What Next? Subscribe to Slate Plus to access ad-free listening to the whole What Next family and across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top of our show page. Sign up now at slate.com/whatnextplus to get access wherever you listen.

Podcast production by Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, and Rob Gunther.


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hey there, listeners, it's Mary. I realize you may be still recuperating from the holiday.

0:04.8

Some of you may still be in the middle of the holiday. Those school closures, they last a long

0:08.5

time. But I've got a quick request. Tomorrow is the last day to get Slate Plus half off.

0:15.1

That means you listen, ad free. You get exclusive content. You can read any article on slate.com and you'll tell our bosses

0:24.1

that what we do matters. So if you listen to What Next or TBD every week, hell, if you listen

0:30.4

every day, subscribing to Slate Plus is how you keep us around. Going over to Slate.com slash

0:36.9

what next plus use the code what next 50. That is

0:40.5

What Next 50 to get a year of Slate Plus at half off. That is a full year of Slate Plus for $59.16

0:49.7

a day. If one day of What Next is worth 16 cents to you, sign up now. Let's do this. Here's the rest of the show.

1:03.4

Dana Stevens is Slate's chief movie critic. She's also a co-host of the Culture Gab Fest,

1:09.7

and that means she watches a lot of movies.

1:13.7

Well, I mean, compared to some film critics who just go to every festival and are true, just giant, I don't know what you call them, synagogue mans.

1:21.9

I don't see everything. But sure, as a working film critic, I see a couple hundred new movies a year, probably.

1:27.0

Oh, yeah. How many of you watched in the last week? Oh, yeah, most of the hundred. Dana is slamming them back because the end of the year is list making season. Incidentally, there's a link to Dana's top ten in our show notes. There's so much that's going into it besides what are 10 movies that I really loved, right?

1:44.9

I mean, in a way, you're also writing about the year.

1:47.2

You're trying to provide something to readers that isn't just a kind of bulleted list of unrelated objects,

1:54.1

but as a way of thinking about where cinema is at, what it meant that year to people,

1:58.9

how it did at the box office, you know, what the future

2:01.1

of theatrical screening is. So making those kind of lists, I'm always taking into account,

2:06.5

that sort of thing.

2:09.6

Making lists is very daunting. But then there's coming on what next?

2:15.0

I think your note was, what's the one movie that best exemplifies 2025? And I swear,

...

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