Sunday Special: The Best Movies of 2025

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 28 December 2025

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As 2025 comes to an end, The Sunday Special is looking back on the year in culture. This week, on our final episode of the podcast, we’re talking about movies. The potential acquisition of Warner Brothers by Netflix has dominated entertainment news in recent weeks, but the year in movies has been about a lot more than corporate mergers. Alissa Wilkinson, a movie critic for The New York Times, and Nicole Sperling, a culture reporter based in Los Angeles, join Gilbert Cruz to talk about what really matters: the movies we loved this year. Movies discussed in this episode include: “One Battle After Another” “Sinners” “A Minecraft Movie” “Superman” “Weapons” “Wicked: For Good” “Zootopia 2” “Avatar: Fire and Ash” “Marty Supreme” “It Was Just an Accident” “The Testament of Ann Lee” “Come and See Me In the Good Light” “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning”

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Gilbert Cruz, and this is the Sunday special.
0:10.4	We're spending this last couple of episodes of the year looking back on some of the big
0:15.6	cultural moments of 2025. Today, we're talking movies.
0:24.4	I have two extremely knowledgeable colleagues here with me.
0:27.5	Alyssa Wilkinson is a movie critic at the Times.
0:28.6	Hello, Alyssa.
0:29.4	Hello, Gilbert.
0:32.3	And Nicole Sperling reports on the movie business,
0:34.4	and she joins us from Los Angeles,
0:35.5	very appropriately.
0:36.5	Welcome, Nicole.
0:38.2	Hello, how's it going, guys?
0:39.6	It is going great.
0:51.5	So, in the grand and very long tradition of movie podcasts, I am going to start with an incendiary question that probably has no clear answer.
0:59.4	Is this the last year for movies? No. It better not be. We'll be out of a job,
1:06.8	Gilbert. Absolutely not. The pipeline is full. We have no idea what will happen when this massive deal closes,
1:28.6	whoever becomes the buyer, and we can, of course, talk about all that stuff. But no, we've got movies. People go to movies. It still is a business. People love movies. People love movies. We all love movies. Nicole, you're referring to the deal. When you say the deal, you're talking about the Warner Brothers deal. Who's going to end up with Warner Brothers in the end? Is it going to be Netflix? Is it going to be Paramount?
1:30.2	We're definitely going to talk about that.
1:34.6	But I want to spend most of this episode talking about the actual, actual movies.
1:37.8	And we'll get into Wither Netflix.
1:42.4	Alyssa, you put out your list of the best movies of 2025.
1:44.9	So I want to start with your number one movie.
	...

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