“Eddington,” a neo-Western thriller about a standoff between a small-town sheriff and mayor in Eddington, New Mexico, heads filmmaker John Waters’ list of the “Top Ten Movies” of 2025, released this week in New York Magazine and Vulture.
Directed by Ari Aster and starring Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone and Austin Butler, “Eddington” examines the political and social turmoil caused by an election pitting the town sheriff against the incumbent mayor at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Released by A24 in July, the film touches on such hot-button topics as conspiracy theorists, Antifa, armed terrorists, a cult leader, Black Lives Matter, child trafficking, Big Tech, mask mandates and freedom of choice, with murder, mayhem and a Pueblo reservation mixed in.
“My favorite movie of the year is a disagreeable but highly entertaining tale as exhausting as today’s politics, with characters nobody could root for,” Waters writes. “Yet it’s so terrifyingly funny, so confusingly chaste and kinky that you’ll feel coo-coo crazy and oh-so-cultural after watching. If you don’t like this film, I hate you.”
Waters reviews films from around the world to compile his annual list of favorites, which typically mix commercial American fare with ‘alternative’ offerings and foreign films. Always one of the first year-end movie rankings, his list is eagerly awaited by film industry insiders and mainstream audiences alike.
More than half the movies on Waters’ list this year were filmed outside the United States. The full list includes:
2. “Final Destination Bloodlines” (directed by Adam B. Stein and Zach Lipovsky): This is the sixth installment in a horror series that started in 2000, featuring plots involving people who escape death after a visionary has a premonition of impending disaster. After avoiding their foretold fates, the survivors are later killed in a series of bizarre accidents caused by an unseen force. Waters says “Final Destination Bloodlines” is “the best sequel to the coolest cinematic franchise ever” and “goes beyond trash into a new realm of exploitation art.”
3. “Oslo Trilogy: Dreams/Love/Sex” (Dag Johan Haugerud): Three Norwegian films contain “the smartest dialogue about romance in a long, long time,” Waters says.
4. “Sirāt” (Oliver Laxe) Waters calls this “cinematic road trip to a rave party in the deserts of war-torn Morocco…the best feel-bad acid adventure ever filmed.”
5. “Sauna” (Mathias Broe): Broe’s first feature is about an affair between Johan, a gay male who works in a Copenhagen bathhouse, and William, a trans man who meets him there.
6. “Room Temperature” (Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley): A “tender poetic headscratcher” about a family in southern California that turns its prefabricated home into a haunted house attraction for Halloween.
7. “Misericordia” (Alain Guiraudie): An “off the rails” queer comic thriller with plot twists involving murder, incest, a village priest and “the inappropriate attraction to one guilty man.”
8. “When Fall is Coming” (François Ozon): In this French drama, a retired woman’s life in Burgundy takes an unexpected turn when a friend’s gay son is released from prison and she hires him.
9. “My Mom Jayne” (Mariska Hargitay): A “top-rate documentary” that recounts Hargitay’s efforts to understand and embrace the public and private legacy of her mother, Hollywood icon Jayne Mansfield.
10. “The Empire” (Bruno Dumont): Dumont also wrote this film about a small French village that becomes the undercover battleground of extraterrestrial knights. Waters says he’s not a science fiction fan, but “when a brutalist spaceship lands in northern France in this film, I fell to my knees to worship the mutant deities onboard. I didn’t realize this script was supposed to be funny until I read the press notes after viewing.”
John Waters will wrap up his annual holiday tour of spoken-word performances, “A John Waters Christmas,” on Dec. 23 with a sold-out show at Baltimore Soundstage, 124 Market Place.
