The best movies I watched in 2025

By Thomas V. Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Jan 05, 2026

It’s time for my annual list of my favorite films I saw in the past year! Some of these films I discussed with James Majewski on Criteria: The Catholic Film Podcast, in which cases I link to the relevant episode.

The two best films I watched in 2025:

Anthony D’Ambrosio, Triumph of the Heart. Film of the year—an intense drama about St. Maximilian Kolbe and nine other men trying to find meaning and hope in a starvation cell in Auschwitz. A film worthy of its subject, and a challenge to Catholic filmmakers to make more work with this kind of artistic and spiritual integrity. The account of the film’s production is an inspiring one.

Sergei Bondarchuk, War and Peace (1965-67). The single greatest piece of cinema I watched in 2025, not only an outstanding adaptation of Tolstoy’s novel but simply one of the best films ever made. Filmed over 5 years and released in four parts (a total of over seven hours), this was the highest-budget film in Soviet history and featured thousands of actors for the spectacular battle scenes which are every bit as impressive as Jackson’s Lord of the Rings. To get at what makes the film so special, I could compare it to the 1981 miniseries of Brideshead Revisited. That is, in a sense, as good an adaptation as you could ask for—faithful to the book, outstanding cast and setting, etc. But War and Peace adds to mere fidelity an astoundingly creative poetic use of the camera and visual techniques to make the film as vivid as Tolstoy’s prose.

Religious films

Pavel Lungin, The Island (2006). A minor classic of religious cinema, this spiritually edifying (and humorous!) Russian film is about a fictional Orthodox monk and “holy fool” who has special spiritual gifts, but remains racked with guilt over a terrible crime he committed in his youth.

Cecil B. DeMille, The Ten Commandments (1956). The gold standard of Hollywood Biblical epics, gorgeously vibrant in its 2010 restoration.

Tod Polson, The 21 (2024). Beautiful animated short about the twenty-one Coptic martyrs killed by ISIS.

Honorable mention: Richard Fleischer, Barabbas (1961).

War movies

I went on a bit of a war movie kick this summer.

Band of Brothers (2001). The outstanding action sequences in this World War II miniseries, produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, are not just for entertainment purposes. They convey, more effectively than any war movie I’ve seen, the courage it takes to take one small piece of ground, to disable one gun, or to tend to one wounded soldier amid a storm of bullets. Thus it increased my gratitude for those who have served our country on those rare occasions when war was necessary to for self-defense. I preferred BoB to Saving Private Ryan—the former seemed less “Hollywood” in its plot somehow. Also, don’t watch the BoB spinoff, The Pacific—it’s awful. (Content warning: Profanity, gore, and a sex scene in episode 9.)

Shooting War: World War II Combat Cameramen. This documentary produced by Spielberg and narrated by Hanks is the story of the men who deployed alongside American soldiers to photograph World War II (some of whom were well-known Hollywood directors). It’s a ceaseless flow of incredible footage (some of it rather graphic).

Manny Marquez, Make Peace or Die: Honor the Fallen (2024). Catholic filmmaker (and Criteria listener!) Manny Marquez made this very moving documentary for PBS’s Independent Lens about his brother, who lost seventeen friends while deployed as a Marine in Afghanistan, and decided to visit all the families on the tenth anniversary of their deaths to help them and himself heal. It makes a more edifying substitute for the extremely profane (though certainly eye-opening) HBO Iraq miniseries Generation Kill, which I had watched earlier in the year. Make Peace or Die is streaming free on PBS for the next few days after the publication of this article.

These next two movies are a bit more fantastical, but yes, they’re war movies too.

Kenneth Branagh, Henry V (1989). Branagh’s directorial debut is uneven in its pacing but his performance is iconic. Who doesn’t shed a tear at the St. Crispin’s Day speech?

Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi, Shin Godzilla (2016). This was an attempt to make a “realistic” Godzilla movie, in the sense that it depicts the layers of government bureaucracy and procedure involved in dealing with a public disaster on this scale. That may sound boring, but it’s not—the movie has lots of style and attitude, and aside from the monster stuff, its exploration of the implications of Japan’s military dependence on the US is quite interesting. Pairs well with the superb Godzilla Minus One, which was on my list last year.

Other genres

David Lynch, The Elephant Man (1980). This very moving and uplifting film is based on the real Victorian-era life of Joseph Merrick, a man who suffered terrible abuse because of his extreme deformities, yet whose human dignity was ultimately recognized and allowed to flourish by those who rescued him and cared for him with Christian compassion.

Elia Kazan, A Face in the Crowd (1957). A biting satire of mass media, starring a young Andy Griffith as a drunken drifter discovered in a jail cell by a local radio producer (Patricia Neal). His charisma as a musician and raconteur leads him from radio to being a national TV star and political influencer. The performances by Griffith and Neal are incredibly dynamic and riveting. Some bits are pretty racy/edgy for 1957.

Clint Eastwood, Juror #2 (2024). A well-executed 12 Angry Men-style courtroom drama with an intriguing twist in its premise and another thought-provoking, morally challenging twist in its conclusion.

Howard Hawks, Rio Bravo (1959). Starring John Wayne and Dean Martin, this Western is famous for being an early exemplar of the “hangout movie”, in that its pleasures are found more in simply watching a bunch of charming characters interact than in the plot. Slightly racy in moments but ultimately wholesome.

Ernst Lubitsch, The Shop Around the Corner (1940). This romantic comedy based on a Hungarian play, starring Jimmy Stewart, follows a young man and woman who work at the same shop in Budapest and drive each other up the wall in person, while simultaneously falling in love with one another via anonymous letters. Lubitsch’s comedies are generally known for their amorality and sexual undertones, but this one is an exception.

Moonbird (1959). The first independent animated short (10 minutes) to win an Oscar, directed by husband-and-wife team John and Faith Hubley (John was a Disney alum). They secretly recorded their two small boys having an imaginary adventure in their bedroom at night, then made an animation out of it. Watch on YouTube.