{"id":480149,"date":"2025-12-30T13:49:10","date_gmt":"2025-12-30T13:49:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/480149\/"},"modified":"2025-12-30T13:49:10","modified_gmt":"2025-12-30T13:49:10","slug":"the-best-movie-scenes-of-2025-including-one-quentin-tarantino-would-hate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/480149\/","title":{"rendered":"The best movie scenes of 2025, including one Quentin Tarantino would hate."},"content":{"rendered":"

In Slate\u2019s annual Movie Club<\/a>, film critic Dana Stevens emails with fellow critics\u2014for 2025, Justin Chang, Alison Willmore, and Bilge Ebiri\u2014about the year in cinema.<\/p>\n

Hi, guys!<\/p>\n

Funnily enough, I was already mulling over my favorite moments from this year\u2019s movies before I got your last post, Alison. But damn it\u2014you included words like hopeful and joy, and that is decidedly not the vibe that dominates the scenes and shots I\u2019m thinking of.<\/p>\n

Especially the first one, which largely has to do with one tiny, isolated performance. Matthew Lillard\u2019s monologue in Mike Flanagan\u2019s The Life of Chuck is the actor\u2019s only scene in the film, and it\u2019s quite short. (Naturally, one of the reasons I\u2019m thinking about it nowadays is because of that stupid kerfuffle this month over Quentin Tarantino bad-mouthing Lillard and several others<\/a> during a podcast interview.) In it, Lillard\u2019s character is just marveling at how quickly life on Earth appears to be unraveling. The Life of Chuck\u2019s first section is pretty much a depiction of the apocalypse, as we witness what appears to be the end of, like, everything. (The film takes some wild turns after that.) As Lillard goes through a litany of all the catastrophes that have happened\u2014wars, riots, governments overthrown, volcanoes in Germany\u2014he speaks with a combination of bemused disbelief and abject grief, at times seeming to break into laughter only for it to turn out he\u2019s actually crying. This is not an actor I tend to think of as having a lot of range, but he goes through pretty much every single human emotion there is in the course of about two minutes, all while the camera remains close on his face. It\u2019s magnificent, a bravura feat of acting\u2014in a film that eventually goes to all sorts of other places, so that by the end we\u2019ve almost forgotten that its opening act was a disaster flick.<\/p>\n

I also find myself thinking of a brief bit\u2014a shot, really\u2014in Sierra Falconer\u2019s Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake)<\/a>, a marvelous standout from this year\u2019s Sundance Film Festival that was, for my money, the directorial debut of the year. The movie has an anthology structure, and in the first episode, we watch 14-year-old Lu (Maren Heary) as she winds up stuck at her grandparents\u2019 lake house while her free-spirited mom elopes with a somewhat scuzzy boyfriend. Roaming the lake, Lu discovers a stray loonlet after a storm, and she and her grandparents nurse the baby bird back to health. Lu herself feels left behind, of course, by her own mom. The moment I\u2019m thinking of occurs after the loonlet\u2019s mother finally shows up: We see the young girl berating the older bird for abandoning its offspring. Now, this might sound heavy-handed, especially the way I\u2019ve just described it! But the way Falconer shoots it demonstrates real cinematic intelligence. The camera remains some distance away, and we don\u2019t even really hear what Lu is saying to the bird; we catch just a word or two. The director thus acknowledges the predictability of the girl\u2019s little outburst\u2014which makes it that much more heartbreaking. The moment combines both Olympian remove and intimate humanity, and it does so playfully. I haven\u2019t been able to stop thinking about it since I saw the picture in early January. I tend not to be crazy about anthology-style films, but Sunfish really won me over, and Falconer feels like a director we\u2019ll be hearing more from in the future.<\/p>\n

And then of course there\u2019s Hamnet<\/a>, a movie I guess you folks didn\u2019t much care for, but which stands near the very top of my best-of list, alongside Train Dreams<\/a> and Caught by the Tides<\/a>. There are several incredible moments in Hamnet, including a final outreach of hands in the very last scene<\/a> that Justin already mentioned and which never fails to generate an audible shudder with audiences whenever I see the movie. But the moment I\u2019m thinking of comes some time before that, when Paul Mescal\u2019s Will Shakespeare is rehearsing the \u201cGet thee to a nunnery\u201d speech from Hamlet with his actors, and keeps berating them to do it again, because they\u2019re not getting it right. Finally, he charges in and does it himself, and Mescal delivers Shakespeare\u2019s words with such spittle-flecked self-loathing that he practically redefines one of the better-known soliloquies in English literature right before our eyes. (By the way, while I\u2019m very happy that Jessie Buckley is getting a ton of acclaim for her extraordinary performance in Hamnet, I am a little shocked that Mescal has gotten so little traction.)<\/p>\n

\n I think I actually let out a little giggle the first time I watched Matthew Lillard\u2019s monologue, because I was so excited by what I was witnessing.<\/b>\n<\/p>\n

As much as I enjoyed One Battle After Another, I didn\u2019t quite love it as much as everyone else has. But there is one moment right at the very end that has really stayed with me, when Leonardo DiCaprio\u2019s Bob Ferguson is finally reunited with his daughter, Willa, played by Chase Infiniti. We\u2019ve already had all the crazy chases and the (rather convenient) shootouts and all that other spectacular stuff. Willa has just killed a professional assassin. Now she\u2019s got her gun trained on her dad and looks ready to shoot him\u2014almost as if she doesn\u2019t recognize him, even though it\u2019s been only, I think, a day since they were separated. He yells their preestablished passwords, but it doesn\u2019t seem to have any effect at first. I love the way Infiniti plays this scene. We see the anguish and confusion on her face. Here\u2019s a young woman who has just found out that her mother, who she thought was a dead hero, is in fact alive and an informer, and that her father isn\u2019t really her biological father. Yes, Bob is still the man who raised her, who has been there for her all these years. But who is he really? Her whole life has been a lie, her world has been upended, and she no longer has any idea whom to trust. The actress doesn\u2019t have to say any of this; we see it in her face, and we understand. That\u2019s acting!<\/p>\n

These are all bleak, dark moments, but they do make me happy\u2014so maybe I am answering the question in the right spirit after all. One can always find joy and hope in great artistry. That\u2019s sort of the point of art. I think I actually let out a little giggle the first time I watched Lillard\u2019s aforementioned monologue, because I was so excited by what I was witnessing.<\/p>\n

Following up on all your lovely tributes to Rob Reiner, I do want to say something about him and other directors who had that \u201canti-auteurist\u201d touch that Justin mentions. At the risk of repeating what everyone has said, I\u2019ll note that losing Reiner feels like a direct hit on Generation\u00a0X\u2019s memory palace. Stand By Me was the talk of my eighth grade class. (And it happened to come out right as we were all getting into Stephen King.) I\u2019ll always remember going with my mom to see The Princess Bride on opening night, because I had just gotten glasses a week earlier, and I forgot my glasses at home, so I initially experienced that movie as a bit of a blur. (And of course my mom berated me all night for forgetting my glasses.) A Few Good Men is one of a small handful of movies I rewatch about once a year. I even remember how stunned we were when North bombed; it seemed at the time as if Reiner could do no wrong.<\/p>\n

One of my college roommates once observed, with only a slight hint of snideness, \u201cIsn\u2019t it weird that our three most successful directors right now are Laverne, Opie, and Meathead?\u201d Referring, of course, to Penny Marshall, Ron Howard, and Rob Reiner, three regular hitmakers who came up as iconic TV actors (and whose paths often crossed\u2014Reiner and Marshall were actually married for a while). I believe he said this sometime in 1992, after we\u2019d seen Marshall\u2019s A League of Their Own. There were obviously other directors during this period who were regularly producing a wide spectrum of financially successful midrange studio pictures\u2014your Robert Zemeckises, your Barry Levinsons, your Chris Columbi, a couple of whom had come up through the Steven Spielberg Blockbuster Mentorship Program\u2014but perhaps their days in the salt mines of network television gave Reiner and Co. a certain facility with actors and a respect for the more mundane aspects of their craft.<\/p>\n

I recalled my old roommate\u2019s words often in 2025, because I spent a decent chunk of the year delving back into Howard\u2019s filmography for a big interview<\/a> I did with him. (By the way, he hates being called Opie.) It was quite wonderful revisiting all of those movies, many of which had been huge hits in their day and some of which are classics now. Howard didn\u2019t quite have the uninterrupted run of iconic bangers that Reiner did, but he\u2019s probably had the longer, deeper run. (And his Imagine Entertainment occupies a place in the industry not entirely dissimilar to that of Castle Rock.) His broad filmography encompasses massive hits like Splash, Cocoon, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas, as well as acclaimed dramas like Apollo\u00a013 (which got an IMAX rerelease this year and is, believe me, even better than everyone remembers<\/a>), A Beautiful Mind, Cinderella Man, and Frost\/Nixon. He continues to make good films too: The excellent Thirteen Lives sadly got the royal Prime Video streaming shaft in 2022, and the wonderfully wild and intense Eden got a relatively small release this year.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n Alison Willmore
\n The Scariest Part of Weapons Is What It Refused to Explain
\n Read More<\/b>\n <\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

As much as I\u2019ve enjoyed these filmmakers\u2019 work over the years, I probably also held them at a certain remove as a young film snob, precisely because they were popular, mainstream, and versatile. Alison, you put it perfectly when you say that Reiner\u2019s films were \u201csuch load-bearing parts of popular culture, so influential and beloved in their respective genres, that it\u2019s easy to forget that they weren\u2019t always there and that someone had to make them.\u201d And these filmmakers, although they were highly recognizable as celebrities, so rarely tooted their own horns. (Maybe this too was a product of their having been TV stars, back when \u201cTV star\u201d was a term of borderline mockery.)<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. \n <\/p>\n

    The Scariest Part of Weapons Is What It Refused to Explain
    \n <\/a>\n <\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Because they hop genres and tones, we don\u2019t really think of these directors as having any distinctive style or unifying themes\u00a0\u2026 but that turns out not to be true. Maybe they haven\u2019t been auteurs in the traditional sense. But watching their movies together over a more condensed period of time, one gains an appreciation for their directorial touch and their sensibility. That happened to me with Howard\u2019s work: I realized that his movies have a vivid sense of place, and they\u2019re often about communities under extreme pressure. Reiner\u2019s films, meanwhile, often portray characters struggling with their own, sometimes-outdated codes and attitudes\u2014be those preconceived notions of male\u2013female relations, ideologies, or beliefs in institutions. (It might be why he made a number of films about lawyers and politicians.) These directors haven\u2019t generally been writers, but they\u2019ve worked closely with writers, and they often have had the power to shape their scripts\u2014especially in a Hollywood that gave them the time and space to develop these movies properly, instead of forcing them to cut corners and rush things into production. Maybe the reason why these filmmakers\u2019 works aren\u2019t quite hitting the way they used to is because that Hollywood doesn\u2019t really exist anymore.<\/p>\n

    Which means that I\u2019ve now gone on and on and finally made my way back around to the same theme we\u2019ve been talking about all along\u2014a rapidly changing industry and our own constantly shifting relationship to it, as both critics and movie-loving civilians.<\/p>\n

    Still, they want us on that wall. They need us on that wall.<\/p>\n

    Bilge<\/p>\n

    Read all of the entries in Slate\u2019s 2025 Movie Club<\/strong><\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

    Get the best of movies, TV, books, music, and more.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Slate\u2019s annual Movie Club, film critic Dana Stevens emails with fellow critics\u2014for 2025, Justin Chang, Alison Willmore,…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":480150,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[171,213889,53,12757,46541,212823,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-480149","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movie-club-2025","10":"tag-movies","11":"tag-stephen-king","12":"tag-sundance","13":"tag-the-oscars","14":"tag-united-states","15":"tag-unitedstates","16":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115808840621079846","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480149","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=480149"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480149\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/480150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=480149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=480149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=480149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}