The Oscars are today and while I do write about my favourite movies every year, I thought this year we would do something different. Instead of the typical Best Actor/Actress/Director etc. awards, let’s offer something else. Let’s offer awards for movies that rarely get recognition by the Academy. Let’s offer awards for Best Action, Best Horror, and Best Comedy, then add Best No One Saw This, and Best Pre-2025.
For ‘2025 movies’, we are limiting ourselves to 2025 theatrical releases, which means if a movie came out at a 2024 film festival, but got a 2025 theatrical release, it is eligible. These are also only movies I saw – there are many I didn’t get to. I watched 271 movies in calendar 2025 and 109 of them were released in 2025. There are only so many hours in the day.
There are going to be five nominees in each of the five categories.
The Rumble in the Bronx Award for Best Action Movie
Sisu: Road to Revenge
Director: Jalmari Helander
Starring: Jorma Tommila
This is the sequel to 2023’s revenge action movie ‘Sisu’ and if anyone hasn’t seen it, it’s on Netflix right now. The basic premise is a Finnish man named Aatami Korpi is searching for gold in Finland during World War 2. Korpi’s entire family was killed earlier in the war by the Red Army, and then he went on a one-man mission to hunt down as many enemies as possible. Then the Nazis piss him off, and you can imagine what the rest of the movie is like.
‘Sisu: Road to Revenge’ picks up in 1946. Korpi has returned to the house where his family was killed, and he’s determined to de-construct the house and take the materials to another area of Finland to rebuild. When the Soviets find out Korpi is alive, they send men to kill him, and you can imagine what the rest of the movie is like.
These are over-the-top action movies not in the same action style as ‘John Wick’, but very much in the spirit of ‘how is this guy not dead?’. I mean, where else are you going to see a guy blowing gasoline into a tank engine that has dynamite strapped to the back of it so he can do a front flip in the tank to cross a border?
Right? Right.
Demon City
Director: Seiji Tanaka
Starring: Toma Ikuta, Masahiro Higashide
In order to enjoy an action movie, the first question I ask myself is ‘did I enjoy the action?’ It seems straightforward, but sometimes we may forget that action movies need to have good action.
‘Demon City’ is an adaptation of a famous Japanese manga (I had never heard of it). It is another revenge action movie where Shûhei Sakata (played by Ikuta) sees his family murdered (of course) and is also shot. He wakes up from his coma over 10 years later and the revenge narrative starts.
You know how an action is a good action movie? When you watch dozens of action movies every year and you see something you’ve never seen before. Have you ever seen someone stab a fire extinguisher with a butcher knife and then throw the fire extinguisher at someone’s knee? Well:
The action scenes in this movie absolutely rock. Is the story very familiar? Yes. Do dozens of people get violently stabbed in stylish ways? Also, yes.
Last Bullet
Director: Guillaume Pierret
Starring: Alban Lenoir, Stéfi Celma
Netflix is a treasure trove of non-English action movies, and the Lost Bullet trilogy is included. Coming from France, the Lost Bullet movies (Lost Bullet, Lost Bullet 2, and now Last Bullet) focus on a man named Lino, who worked as a car mechanic. But he builds armoured cars for criminals, is eventually arrested, and when he’s released, he has to work for the police as a mechanic to reinforce their cars.
Last Bullet is about tidying up hanging threads and taking care of corrupt cops. It is an action movie, but the action mostly revolves around incredible (and practical) car chase sequences. Have you ever seen someone soup up a tow truck so it can unleash a barrage of explosives on the cars behind them? Well:
The entire trilogy is full of thrilling car chases, but ‘Last Bullet’ one-ups everything in the two movies that came before it.
Warfare
Directors: Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland
Starring: D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Will Poulter
This qualifies as an action movie in that it is a war movie about Navy SEALs getting trapped in enemy territory during the Iraq War. It is a true story and there are action sequences, but the purpose of the movie isn’t the action, it’s the time between the action. It is about how a squad interacts and passes time when they’re not getting grenades lobbed at them or are covering from machine gun fire. The action sequences are harrowing, and the most memorable parts, but that’s not the focus of the movie.
I won’t add video here because it doesn’t really need it. If you’ve seen any war movie about Afghanistan or Iraq, you have a good idea what the action looks like. But the action isn’t the point, and that’s what elevates ‘Warfare’ above so many from that era of war movies.
Ballerina
Director: Len Wiseman
Starring: Ana de Armas, Gabriel Byrne
‘Ballerina’ is an entry in the ‘John Wick’ franchise focusing on Eve (Ana de Armas) and her ascension from a ballerina to an assassin. I think there are two things true about ‘Ballerina’:
- It is too long. If they cut the entire storyline involving Eve’s sister, nothing is lost, and it’s 20 minutes shorter. If this movie is a tight 1 hour, 45 minutes rather than over 2 hours, it’d be better off.
- The action sequences are phenomenal and stand up to nearly anything from the ‘John Wick’ main franchise, particularly anything from the first two movies.
The scene of the flame thrower vs. the fire hose is the one we see in trailers and social media, but the grenade fight also stands out. Eve is trying to buy weapons as John Wick does in the earlier movies, but is ambushed. She is only able to grab some grenades to defend herself, and it is a sequence full of kills like this:
Oh yeah. That’s the good stuff.
The Candyman Award for Best Horror Movie
Note: It should be said that Sinners, Weapons, and 28 Years Later are three of the best horror movies of 2025. However, they were all massive success at the box office and are all being celebrated with awards. We will set them aside to focus on lesser-known titles.
The Ugly Stepsister
Director: Emilie Blitchfeldt
Starring: Lea Myren, Thea Sofie Loch Næss
One of the best horror movies of the decade, ‘The Ugly Stepsister’ is a Norwegian black-comedy horror based on Cinderalla. It is about the expectations on young girls/women as far as their looks are concerned, and this is a horror movie, so think about what extreme measures might be taken in the name of beauty and success in a horror movie; it’s much worse than you think.
I won’t link a video here – this film genuinely grossed me out at times – but there is the infamous slipper scene from Cinderella. The twist here is that the feet of Elvira, our main character, don’t fit the slipper. Then we get this:
The subsequent 15 minutes are… something. It is not a movie for the squeamish – I watch dozens of horror movies every year and ‘The Ugly Stepsister’ is one of very few that made my stomach churn. But the grossness is the horror element; the actual movie is vey well directed, written, and acted. Like I said, it’s one of the best of the decade.
Presence
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Starring: Lucy Liu, Julia Fox
The hook for this movie is that it all takes place in one house, and the film is shot from the perspective of the titular Presence, or the ghost haunting the house. It is an admittedly slow-burn of a movie, but it’s also under 1 hour, 30 minutes long, so it’s not wasting your time.
There is no need for a video here because the third act is where everything starts to come together and it shouldn’t be ruined here. There are few horror movies that can make it feel like I stopped breathing for 20 minutes, and the third act of ‘Presence’ did exactly that. It doesn’t rely on gore or violence, opting to build tension and dread before it explodes. If that is more your style of horror movie, this is definitely at the top of the watch list.
Companion
Director: Drew Hancock
Starring: Sophie Thatcher, Jack Quaid
In a glimpse of either the Now or the Not-Too-Distant-Future, ‘Companion’ is a horror/thriller about life-like AI robots purchased by human beings to be the boyfriend/girlfriend/whatever of the human being. This movie starts with Iris (Sophie Thatcher) and Josh (Jack Quaid) going to a lake house to spend a weekend with friends. There are a handful of twists in this movie, so we won’t link videos or still images because just about anything relevant would spoil the movie, but given what is going on in the real world around us, it is either timely or too late. Regardless, the movie itself is excellent and one of the best of 2025.
V/H/S Halloween
Director: Anna Zlokovic, Paco Plaza, and Others
Starring: Samantha Cochran, Teo Planell, and Others
For those unfamiliar, the ‘V/H/S’ series are annual releases that are an anthology of short horror movies. Sometimes there are over-arching themes, and like most anthologies, some of the stories are much better than the others.
That is true for ‘V/H/S Halloween’ where there is an over-lapping story/theme across each of the short movies, but the individual movies vary in quality. Personally, the two that stuck out are Coochie Coochie Coo and Ut Supra Sic Infra. The first is about a pair of high school students who are trick or treating and get trapped in a house of horrors, and the second is about the investigation of a mass murder. Personally, I am a fan of ‘there is something wrong with this house’-type of horror movies, and Coochie Coochie Coo does that:
Getting trapped in a house and thinking you found the front door, but the front door has disappeared? Oof. Tough luck.
Again, some of the short films work better than others, but ‘V/H/S Halloween’ is, from start to finish, one of the better of the franchise.
Bring Her Back
Director: Danny and Michael Philippou
Starring: Sally Hawkins, Billy Barratt
Full disclosure: horror movies as explorations of trauma rarely land for me. It takes very sharp writing and very good acting to get me invested because so many of this ilk absolutely suck pond water.
‘Bring Her Back’ does not suck pond water. In fact, it is one of the trauma-exploration movies that works very well. Two orphaned stepsiblings are taken in by a woman (Laura, played by Hawkins) who had a daughter die years earlier, and is currently fostering a young, mute boy named Oliver. Laura is still grieving her dead child, the title of this movie is ‘Bring Her Back’, and this grieving woman now has three more children in her care. You can probably guess where this goes.
There are a few effective sequences of genuine horror in the movie, but what makes it work is the young actors who play the stepsiblings. They are great together whether caring for or yelling at each other, and it brings both warmth and distance to a movie that needs it. Hawkins is tremendous as a desperate, grieving mother, and the step-siblings are tremendous as kids trying to survive tragedy and thrive together.
The Animal House Award for Best Comedy
The Naked Gun
Director: Akiva Schaeffer
Starring: Liam Neeson, Pamela Anderson
What made the original ‘Naked Gun’ movies work was that Leslie Nielsen was a serious actor who played his role very seriously but they are extremely silly movies. Getting that tone right isn’t easy, but Neeson nailed it and the jokes/writing backed him up. There is no need to spoil the funniest parts, but there is a good running gag about people constantly handing him a cup of coffee no matter where he is, like this:
And like this:
These are a couple very stupid gags, and there is a plethora of them in this movie, but it also has a few laugh-out-loud sequences. It may not be as good as the absolute best of the Nielsen movies, but this is probably as good as you can get.
Friendship
Director: Andrew DeYoung
Starring: Tim Robinson, Paul Rudd
Fans of Robinson’s work on ‘I Think You Should Leave,’ ‘Detroiters,’ or ‘The Chair Company’ will enjoy Friendship. It is a movie about, uh, friendship, and specifically friendship of middle-aged guys and what it means when one person doesn’t want to spend time with the other anymore.
Full disclosure: I found Robinson’s television work to be much better than this movie. There are some genuinely funny sequences, but it veers more towards dark/sad comedy than it does towards the typical goofy/outlandish comedy that Robinson is known for. That can make it hit-or-miss for audiences, but there is a ‘Subway’ sequence – like, the sandwich store – that was about the funniest thing I saw in a movie in 2025. This is good, not great, but a good comedy is perfectly fine by me.
One of Them Days
Director: Lawrence Lamont
Starring: Keke Palmer, SZA
In any buddy comedy movie, if the buddies don’t have both great chemistry together and great comedic chops individually, the movie falls apart. The best thing about ‘One of Them Days’ is that there is great chemistry between Palmer and SZA, and both have great comedic chops. Any of the great writing aside – and there is – those two are what make it a sublime comedy.
Set over the course of a single day, ‘One of Them Days’ is about Palmer and SZA needing to raise money to pay rent because SZA’s boyfriend blew their money instead of paying it to the landlord. The chemistry and chops are evident throughout, and this scene with SZA’s boyfriend is just one example:
“I can make it wave at me” is a good line, but the delivery from SZA is what makes it great, and this is the kind of thing that permeates the whole movie. Not only one of the best comedies of the year, but one of the best of the decade.
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
Director: Rian Johnson
Starring: Daniel Craig, Josh O’Connor
This one probably doesn’t need much of an introduction. If you’ve seen any of the ‘Knives Out’ movies, you’ve probably seen this one. It is functionally a comedy, but this might be the least funny of the trilogy. That isn’t a diss, either; the heartbeat of the movie is the heart in the characters and performances from both Craig and O’Connor (especially the latter). There are silly characters as there are in any Knives Out movie, which is why it can be designated at least partially a comedy, but it is a movie about faith, or the lack of it, among other things. It is a great movie, I’m just not sure it’s a great comedy, but because it has comedic elements, the fact that it’s a great movie means it has to be listed here.
The Roses
Director: Jay Roach
Starring: Benedict Cumberbatch, Olivia Colman
Sometimes, a movie takes you by surprise. There was some Sunday afternoon I had free time, was seeing what was streaming, and saw this. I like both Cumberbatch and Colman, and I remember seeing some trailers, so I gave it a shot, and absolutely loved it.
This is a remake (re-imagining?) of a movie from the 1980s based on a novel, and it’s about the division of a married oddball couple. That division starts with Cumberbatch’s character Theo going from successful architect to industry pariah after a terrible incident with a building he designed, and his wife Ivy (Colman’s character) going from a stay-at-home mom to world-renowned restauranteur. The role-swap leaves Theo at home to raise their kids, which makes Ivy jealous because he gets to spend all his time with them, while Theo gets jealous of Ivy’s professional success.
There is both physical comedy and sharp barbs traded between Theo and Ivy, and that mixture is what elevated it for me. It didn’t seem to land with critics, but it landed for me, and the dark comedy worked extremely well in this.
The Green Knight Award for Best No One Saw This Movie, But You Should
The Ugly Stepsister
Director: Emilie Blitchfeldt
Starring: Lea Myren, Thea Sofie Lock Næss
We already discussed ‘The Ugly Stepsister’ earlier so we won’t take up time here. It is an elite horror movie, though anyone with a squeamish stomach may not enjoy it.
Demon City
Director: Seiji Tanaka
Starring: Toma Ikuta, Masahiro Higashide
This is another movie we’ve discussed, so we won’t go long. Narratively, there is nothing here that reinvents the revenge-action genre, but the action sequences are simply fantastic, and that’s the most important part of any action movie.
The Assessment
Director: Fleur Fortuné
Starring: Elizabeth Olsen, Alicia Vikander, Himesh Patel
As someone without kids, movies about having kids have a tough time landing with me. ‘The Assessment’ not only landed with me, but cracked me in the face with a sack of doorknobs.
In a dystopian future where adults are, wait for it, assessed for their suitability to have children, two would-be parents (Olsen’s character Mia and Patel’s character Aaryan) get a visit from Virginia (Vikander’s character), who is the person doing the assessing. Virginia will live with the couple for seven days to judge their suitability. The twist is that Virginia begins acting like a small child. She throws tantrums, destroys things, refuses to eat supper (or eats it as small children do), and generally pushes the potential parents to their absolute limits. Watching Vikander, a woman in her mid-30s, act like a four-year-old is worth the price of admission alone:
Watching the mental state of the parents be stressed to its breaking point as Virginia acts like this day after day is an unforgettable experience. There is so much more to the movie than just Vikander acting like a toddler, but it’s what puts it over the top.
Dream Eater
Director: Jay Drakulic, Alex Lee Williams, Mallory Drumm
Starring: Alex Lee Williams, Mallory Drumm
Canadian horror movies are alive and well, and ‘Dream Eater’ is one of the latest entrants that proves this maxim. In this film, a boyfriend and girlfriend go to a remote cabin – always a great idea – because the boyfriend (Alex, played by Alex Lee Williams) has a type of insomnia. They want an isolated location to study his sleep habits – another great idea – and it starts to dawn on them that there is a supernatural force at work. This is a movie that thrives on atmosphere and tension rather than blood and gore, so again, if that is your type of horror movie, check this out.
The Toxic Avenger
Director: Macon Blair
Starring: Peter Dinklage, Peter Tremblay
It is a wonder if this movie would have been a much bigger success 10 years ago when Dinklage was at the height of his fame, but the remake of ‘The Toxic Avenger’ was nonetheless wildly entertaining.
Dinklage’s character is Winston, a single parent doing his best to raise his stepson after his mother dies, but Winston is dying from a disease, and they live in a town where a pharmaceutical company is doing irreparable harm to the environment. After being thrown in some toxic waste, Dinklage becomes the titular Toxic Avenger, hellbent on exposing the company for its horrific deeds while he’s built as a folk hero by the people around town despite his grotesque appearance.
This is functionally a body horror, but it’s played much more as a comedy, and the two genres blend very well. The theme of corporate corruption and destruction is obvious, but it’s Dinklage as ‘Toxie’ that makes the movie really work.
The Matrix Award for Best Pre-2025 Movie
All About Eve (1950)
Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Starring: Bette Davis, Anne Baxter
A movie I should have seen years ago, ‘All About Eve’ features Eve (Anne Baxter) as a young up-and-coming star on Broadway with Margo (Bette Davis) as the older performer who is on the downside of her career. Eve burrows her way into Margo’s life, trying to replace Margo as the top star on Broadway. This has long been considered an all-time classic, and once I finally saw it, I understood why.
The Handmaiden (2016)
Director: Park Chan-wook
Starring: Kim Min-hee, Kim Tae-Ri
The basic premise is that a rich Japanese woman named Lady Hideko (Min-hee) hires a younger woman named Nam Sook-hee (Tae-ri) to be her handmaiden. The hook is that the new handmaiden has been sent by a con man to work her way into the household so that the con man can eventually marry Lady Hideko and take her fortune. That is the basic premise.
What the movie is actually about would require a short story-length article on its own. This is about con men and wealth, desire, sexuality, and about a half-dozen other descriptors. Whatever you think this movie is really about, it’s about 10 more things, and sometimes those kinds of movies lose themselves and don’t tie together. ‘The Handmaiden’ is an exception, and it is exceptional as a result.
Satan’s Slaves (2017)
Director: Joko Anwar
Starring: Tara Basro, Bront Palarae
In 1980s Indonesia, a family lives together in a house. Simple enough. The mother has an illness, and the resulting healthcare costs are bankrupting the family. Familiar enough. The mother dies and then all hell breaks loose. Now we’re cooking.
Without spoiling much, this is a horror movie about a cult, but it’s also about how siblings band together in the face of tragedy. The father is out of the house for most of the movie trying to resolve their financial situation, so the kids have to take care of themselves and the threats they face. It is unsettling and unrelenting, a combination that grabs the audience by the throat and doesn’t let go for 90 minutes.
Inherit The Wind (1960)
Director: Stanley Kramer
Starring: Spencer Tracey, Friedrich March
In one of Tracey’s final performances (he only made four movies after this), he stars as a lawyer named Henry Drummond who goes to a small town in the 1920s to defend a man charged with teaching Charles Darwin to the kids in his class. A movie about faith and free speech, it shines when the characters give their soliloquies because both the writing and acting are razor-sharp across the board.
The final scene in the courtroom, as with all good courtroom movies, is the stand-out, but the ideas of what can be said and what can be taught were a hot-button topic in the 1920s, the 1960s, and still today. Tracey helps elevate any movie, but the secondary characters and the script bring it all together in a very tidy, thoughtful package.
The Shadow Strays (2024)
Director: Timo Tjahjanto
Starring: Aurora Ribeiro, Hana Malasan
An Indonesian action movie from 2024, a young assassin named 13 (Ribeiro) investigates the death of a neighbour because she has becomes friends with that neighbour’s son. The investigation, as with many movies of this ilk, reveals a larger web of crime, and 13 starts killing her way to the top.
As with Demon City, the action in The Shadow Strays is what makes it a great action movie. Have you ever seen someone break a baseball bat in half and then cut someone’s throat with it? Well:
Notice how she doesn’t use the end of the baseball bat that’s in her hand after she breaks it in half. She grabs the half out of his hand and then goes for the throat. It’s the little things that really make action movies sing.
This is just one 10-second clip in a movie where dozens of bad guys die in elegantly horrific ways. Anyone in search of a great action movie that actually has a compelling story and good actors, look no further.
Cliffy's hell-hole 