Movies are the great escape. “Optimistic endings, passionate romances,” sings the incarcerated dreamer of “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” who looks to old Hollywood movies as an oasis of beauty and faith. Yet in 2025, a year when the drama of entertainment was eclipsed by the cataclysm of reality, the movies we escaped to often had a singular real-world vibrance. The title of “One Battle After Another” aptly encapsulates a moment when the drama often seemed to be spilling from the screen into people’s daily news feeds. (The prison sentence recently given to the Iranian director Jafar Panahi by his country’s regime almost felt like an additional act of “It Was Just an Accident,” his enthralling exposé of despotic cruelty.) In 2025, Variety’s chief film critics, Peter Debruge and Owen Gleiberman, found one movie after another, from “Marty Supreme” to “28 Years Later,” in which escape itself was tinged with the bite of reality. Here are the movies that made us dream, in part because they were powerful enough to wake us up.
From Variety US