Everybody knows about One Battle After Another, Frankenstein and Sinners, but today I’m highlighting 2025 movies that have slipped below the popular radar. You may not have seen Hollywood commercials for these films, but they are novel, well-crafted and mesmerizing. And you can stream all of them at home.
Here are the 8 Most Overlooked Films of 2025:
- A Little Prayer: This exquisitely-acted family drama, by the writer-director of Junebug, explores the dynamics between parents and their adult children, and the profound frustration of seeing problems that you can’t fix. David Straithern and Jane Levy lead the year’s best ensemble cast. Best Movies of 2025. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube.
- My Dead Friend Zoe: This deeply affecting dramedy might be the best film on the transition from wartime military service to civilian society since The Best Years of Our Lives. The screenplay, by first-time director Kyle Hausmann-Stokes, himself a decorated Army paratrooper who served in Iraq, is brilliant. Best Movies of 2025. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango.
- Caught by the Tides: Sweeping over decades of modern Chinese history, the auteur Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides reveals profound changes in Chinese society by implanting a personal story within an epic sweep. Writer-director Jia has built Caught by the Tides from footage shot over the 21 years as he made other movies. In a tour de force, actress Tao Zhao delivers an exquisite portrait of resilience. Best Movies of 2025. Criterion (included) Amazon, AppleTV, Fandango.
- No Sleep Till: In this engrossing art film, a hurricane is about to hit downscale Florida beach towns; the tourists are already gone, and workaday Floridians prepare to evacuate or hunker down. The storm is merely the setting for a compendium of short stories, as writer/director/editor/producer Alexandra Simpson, in her feature debut, reveals essential truths about her characters, one or two at a time – a lost crush, a solitary obsession, a resuscitated friendship. Each chapter is so authentic, I had to keep reminding myself that I wasn’t watching a cinema verité documentary. Best Movies of 2025. hoopla (free), Amazon,
- To Kill a Wolf: In this character-driven indie drama, a reclusive woodsman in the Pacific Northwest finds a seventeen-year-old runaway collapsed in the forest. He nurses her back to health, but she’s not forthcoming about why she’s there, so he has a mystery to solve. Meanwhile, the audience is on to other mysteries – why is he living such an isolated life and why is his relationship with local community members so charged? As he takes the girl on a road trip to her most recent residence, the answers, one by one, are revealed. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube.
- Made in Ethiopia: This scintillating documentary is a brilliant exploration of clashing cultures and economic imperialism. Chinese entrepreneurs build a mammoth new industrial park, essentially a gleaming sweatshop, in Ethiopia. What could possibly go wrong? PBS, PBS POV.
- Twinless: In this refreshingly original dramedy a young man has been rocked by the sudden death of his twin brother and meets another participant in his grief support group who reminds him of his dead brother. That new friend is played by James Sweeney, Twinless’s writer director, who has written a character of remarkable ambiguity and vulnerability. Reflecting both the sweetness and edginess we find in life, Twinless is one of the smartest and most satisfying comedies of recent years. Best Movies of 2025. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango
- Architecton: This documentary is the film most unlike the others on this list. It is cinema as high art and surprisingly entertaining. Almost narration-free and elevated by Evgueni Galperine’s original music, Architecton is director Viktor Kossakovsky’s immersion into rocks – rocks arranged and moved by Nature and by humans. The visual experience is hypnotic. HBO Max (included), Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango,
