2025 has been a year filled with cinematic moments, thrilling and devastating, cathartic and hilarious. Many of the year’s best films delivered scenes that have since proven difficult to forget. Some, like Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another,” Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners,” and Park Chan-wook’s “No Other Choice,” featured enough memorable moments, line readings, and set pieces to warrant entire lists on their own.
In the hopes of being both brief and comprehensive, here are just the seven best movie scenes of 2025.
The Underground Railroad, “one battle after another”
“One Battle After Another” features several scenes that could be considered among the best of the year, including its climactic three-car chase up those high cobblestone hills. But the film’s Underground Railroad sequence, its manic, nerve-wracking tour through Sensei Sergio’s (Benicio del Toro) immigrant sanctuary organization, is just as breathtaking and awe-inspiring as any other scene you might have experienced on the big screen this year. Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson and cinematographer Michael Bauman shoot the sequence with long, handheld shots that are not only technically stunning, but enhance the dizzying urgency of the entire piece.
And that’s to say nothing of the ongoing banter between Sensei Sergio and Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) throughout the scene, or the compassionate way in which the former — even amid all the chaos of the moment — ensures that Bob meets and learns the name of every immigrant he’s welcomed. There’s a beautiful, messy humanity bursting forth in virtually every frame of “One Battle After Another,” but perhaps never more so than in this sequence.
The final performance, “Hamnet”
There may not be a more powerful piece of cinema released this year than the final 20 minutes of director Chloé Zhao’s “Hamnet.” Through the eyes of Jessie Buckley’s grieving Agnes, viewers see a humble stage performance of “Hamlet.” Although initially confused and irritated by the play’s use of her son’s name, Agnes comes to see the personal details infused into the story by her husband, William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal). She begins to see herself in the play, as do all the other actors in the theater, who collectively mourn with her her doomed hero, named after her late son (Jacobi Jupe).
Some have argued that the ending of “Hamnet” fails because “Hamlet” itself is not a 1:1 reflection of Agnes and Will’s story, but this author would argue that this is precisely why it do work. Agnes finds meaning and catharsis in “Hamlet,” the same way we all do in stories that often bear little resemblance to our own lives. In the dizzying final moments of his new film, Zhao captures this miraculous and profoundly human phenomenon on screen in a series of musical cues, images, cuts and close-ups that together create a euphoric cinematic experience. To watch the end of “Hamnet” is to see one of the most beautiful aspects of human existence rendered fully, in all its power, on screen.
Memento Mori, “28 years later”
“28 Years Later” reaches its devastating emotional climax in its final act. When young hero Spike (Alfie Williams) and his ailing mother Isla (Jodie Comer) finally meet Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), he escorts them to his refuge: a temple made of human bones. There, Kelson performs an exam on Isla and determines that she has cancer and that it has spread to the point that no one can save her.
What follows is a confrontation with death, a recognition that everything must end, in which Kelson gives Isla a more peaceful demise. Guided by stellar performances from Fiennes, Williams and Comer, the entire sequence becomes a strange, morbid and surprisingly moving marvel. It’s one of the best scenes that director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland have ever created, together or separately.
Sammie’s song, “Sinners”
If 2025 has an iconic cinematic scene, it’s probably this one. Writer-director Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” spends much of its first hour patiently building to its blood-soaked and thrilling second half. He sends viewers rushing into this final section with a middle performance by young blues player Sammie (Miles Caton) that is so powerful that it not only evokes the spirits of the past and future, including electric guitarists, DJs and twerk dancers, but also briefly, spiritually burns the roof and walls around him. Coogler stages this sequence as an uninterrupted steadicam shot that winds its way around Sammie’s room, past its many anachronistically dressed spirits and to the rhythm of composer Ludwig Göransson’s incendiary, layered score.
This sequence and its sudden and abrupt departure into the spiritual and metaphorical world represents Coogler’s A Big Swing. To say it connects would be an understatement. As a sports film, it’s flawless. But it works even better as a visual representation of the film’s themes and an acknowledgment of the role music can play in expressing and healing the pain and hope of an entire culture. It sends both “Sinners” and its viewers straight into the stratosphere, if only for a few moments.
Jury Duty, “Sorry, Baby”
Writer-director Eva Victor’s “Sorry, Baby” tells its story in distinct, distinct chapters, none of which will likely linger in viewers’ minds longer than its detour through the jury. A short story in itself, the scene follows Victor’s Agnes as she struggles to find her place in the daily jury selection process. After instinctively raising her hand when the jury members present were asked if any of them had been the victim of a crime, Agnès ends up being questioned indirectly about her university sexual assault and its consequences.
The scene functions both as a testament to the strength of Victor’s sparse writing and as a bittersweet exploration of the rigidity of the justice system, its binary definition of the law, and its inadequacy in caring for victims of rape and assault. Hettienne Park, for her part, gives one of the best single-scene performances of the year as the lawyer who slowly realizes both the nature and complexity of Agnes’ trauma. When this happens, his eventual dismissal of Agnes from the jury comes as both a relief and a slight gut punch.
The Pitch, “Sentimental Value”
There are many things to love about director Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value,” but none more impressive than its lucid and earnest depiction of family dysfunction and generational trauma. Nowhere in the film is this aspect rendered more powerfully than when filmmaker and estranged father Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård) meets his daughter Nora (Renate Reinsve) at a local café and offers her the lead role in his next film, while passing her the thick, finished script. Reinsve and Skarsgård give two of the best performances of the year in “Sentimental Value,” and the power of both their turns is on full display in this scene.
Notice the confusion in Nora’s eyes as she struggles to understand what her father is asking, as well as the disappointment when she realizes she won’t get the apology or reassurance she has long awaited from him. While you’re at it, also note the desperation in Skarsgård’s eyes, the desire to make himself understood by his daughter, limited by his inability to explain himself clearly. There is immense, unexpressed pain in the looks of both actors. The pain of their characters’ disconnection arises suddenly, without warning, and gives this simple conversation the emotional force of a freight train.
The Three-Way Kill, “No Other Choice”
No living filmmaker makes complex blocking as simple as “No Other Choice” director Park Chan-wook. This is true in several scenes in his latest film, notably when the desperate and unemployed protagonist Yoo Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) sets out to kill Goo Beom-mo (Lee Sung-min), one of his competitors for a soon-to-be vacant position. Man-su’s assassination attempt quickly goes wrong, first when Beom-mo discovers his wife’s (Yeom Hye-ran) infidelity, and then again when she squashes Man-su’s hit.
The three inept would-be killers all fight over Man-su’s gun in a sequence that brilliantly uses physical, dark comedy to transform a simple action scene into an exhilarating, maddening thrill ride. Man-su’s subsequent escape down several winding forest roads marks, like the unforgettable hanging scene in 2016’s “The Handmaiden,” another example of Park embracing a kind of cartoonish, live-action sense of physical comedy from “Looney Tunes.” Needless to say, it pays off enormously. The director’s unparalleled understanding and sense of big-screen geography is, to put it simply, on full display throughout this scene and many others in “No Other Choice.”
