In 2025, a time of intense political turmoil and division, James L. Brooks released his first film in 15 years, a political rom-dramedy looking back on the year 2008 through wistful, Obamacore-clouded eyes. Despite a stacked ensemble that includes Jamie Lee Curtis and Albert Brooks, Ella McCay is easily one of the worst movies of the year for many reasons, not least of which is a line in which a character proclaims 2008 as "a better time, when we all still liked each other." (Obvious follow-up question: Who is "we"?) Even more glaring is the fact that its protagonist, played by Emma Mackey, becomes the de facto Anyparty governor of Anytown, USA — her political party is never identified, the state she lives and serves in is never named.
The revisionist non-specificity demonstrates zero interest in meeting The Moment, though plenty of other films released this year have at least attempted to engage with it more directly. This isn't to say all of them pulled off their aims. But before seeing Ella McCay, I'd been mulling what it even means for a film to be "successful" in tackling sociopolitical issues in this climate, when each new day conjures up utterly ridiculous and dystopian realities just as bizarre as any screenwriter might possibly imagine, if not more so. Brooks' film at least makes clear what definitely doesn't work in this space: nostalgia, and a posturing of neutrality.
Beyond that extremely low bar, parsing how to assess work that engages in politics is hardly straightforward, and admittedly dependent on a wholly subjective perception of what The Moment is and requires. The output has been a mixed, yet fascinating bag. Entertaining mainstream movies like Wicked: For Good and The Running Man gestured overtly at radical ideas through their protagonists' anti-authoritarian struggles, but ultimately offered little besides oversimplified stick-it-to-the-man rallying cries. In contrast, two great movies which both happen to star Josh O'Connor — The Mastermind and Wake Up Dead Man — kept political themes simmering in the background but deployed them to meaningful emotional effect.
Some of the more confounding and messy projects this year were made in the spirit of "challenging" the audience — getting the people going, as it were. This can usually be done a couple of ways: didactically or, as is the case with Luca Guadagnino's After the Hunt, obtusely. The thorny campus melodrama stars Julia Roberts as Yale professor Alma, who begins to unravel after her star student Maggie (Ayo Edebiri) accuses her colleague Hank (Andrew Garfield) of rape. It's deliberately ambiguous in nearly every aspect of its storytelling — to the point of incomprehension rather than subversion.
Less vague but much weirder were Ari Aster's Eddington and Yorgos Lanthimos' Bugonia, which both truthfully depict the chaos that's gripped American politics in recent years. Eddington stars Joaquin Phoenix as the sheriff of a small, rural New Mexico town in the early months of the pandemic, and astutely captures the absurdities and discord of that time — the social distancing, the fights over masking, the dangerous online conspiracy theory rabbit holes that sucked many people in as they isolated. Bugonia, too, feels intimately ripped from real life, as Teddy (Jesse Plemons), a conspiracy theorist who admits to having cycled through "the whole digestive tract" of ideologies (alt-right, alt-left, Marxism, etc.), dictates his many grievances to Michelle (Emma Stone), the pharmaceutical CEO he's kidnapped, because he's convinced she's an alien. (It sounds completely unhinged, until you remember the hoopla around Pizzagate.)
Sometimes getting a vibe right — and in these cases, that vibe is the ball of utter confusion we're swirling in — is enough to carry a movie. But Aster and Lanthimos have made plain their intentions of puncturing the "echo chamber" with their respective projects, and neither fully pulls that off. (Fittingly, Aster is also a producer on Bugonia.) For one thing, expecting any movie to meaningfully shift someone's perspective about "the other side" is a tall order when the leader of one "side" — or at least, one of many — is disseminating A.I. slop videos trolling his critics. But in Eddington, as with After the Hunt, presenting uncomfortable scenarios and contemptible characters takes precedence over storytelling. (Eddington also shortchanges its sole Black character, a cop played by Micheal Ward, by relegating him to the role of one-dimensional stand-in for Black Lives Matter-era anxieties when the news of George Floyd's murder breaks.)
To its credit, Bugonia isn't ambiguous at all; the ending — spoilers incoming — follows the same basic plot twist as the Korean movie it's inspired by, Save the Green Planet!, revealing that Michelle the CEO is indeed an alien who was sent to earth to assess "the human experiment" and has deemed it a failure worthy of extermination. But its defeatist attitude nearly undoes everything that came before it, and contrary to feeling "challenged," I was irked by how smug the conclusion felt. Is that all that there is?
Other projects this year seemed to reflect filmmakers' attempts to look inward politically, and while they didn't always look hard enough, the results were still worth examining. Aziz Ansari's directorial debut Good Fortune, an enjoyable if clunky movie with a brilliant comedic turn from Keanu Reeves playing a guardian angel, is It's a Wonderful Life meets Trading Places. Ansari's character Arj, a struggling gig economy worker living out of his car in Los Angeles, swaps lives with Seth Rogen's wealthy tech bro Jeff, and the film mines comedy and occasional pointed commentary out of the many indignities Arj deals with as a courier and factory worker.
For a middle-brow Hollywood comedy, there's a refreshing frankness about wealth inequality; it features unsubtle references to Amazon-related news stories, including a pro-union subplot. But the film clears a bare minimum and Ansari has readily acknowledged his situation is much closer to Jeff's than Arj's, which may account for why Good Fortune's critique ultimately lets the machinations of capitalism off the hook. Once Jeff and Arj's lives are switched back, the gig worker's financial circumstances are barely improved from the beginning of the movie, yet the message seems to be that Arj just needs to have a more positive outlook and channel it into activism. (Spike Lee's Highest 2 Lowest is undercut by a similar predicament in addressing wealth disparity.)
That disconnect between filmmaking intent and impact is what keeps Paul Thomas Anderson's thrilling One Battle After Another from being as politically potent as some have argued it is. This is at least partially by design; he told the Los Angeles Times that he avoided "put[ing] politics up in the front" in service of presenting characters the audience would care about, and aptly noted that as timely as OBAA may seem, history is always repeating itself. (Fascism, he said, "doesn't go out of style.") Fair enough — but it's notable that he pointedly portrays white middle-aged malaise, an underground effort to shelter migrants from law enforcement agents, and a secret society of white nationalists.
Less assured is his treatment of Black radicalism, which comes across as inadvertently disjointed or, less charitably, dismissive. In writing Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), a character who anchors the first third of the film before all but disappearing for the rest of it, Anderson pulls from markers of Blaxploitation and the sordid history of white men's fetishization of Black women to craft a thinly realized revolutionary — a figure whose hypersexuality is inextricable from her acts of rebellion. Taylor's magnetic and committed performance hints at how these tensions might have been more deeply explored, but it can't fully overcome the script's scattershot references and hurried characterization. (Here it also seems worth observing that while Anderson has been in a long-term relationship with Maya Rudolph, even casting her in small roles in Inherent Vice and Licorice Pizza, Black women characters have not been featured as prominently in his films before OBAA.)
It seems the moment requires more than just presenting questions and what-ifs. It needs a stance, a commitment to an ethos and to the story it's ostensibly trying to tell, and an honesty about consequences. Ryan Coogler did this with Sinners, crafting a story that's richly entertaining while being acutely critical of the capitalistic and cultural forces that have leeched off Black Americans for centuries. Ditto Kleber Mendonça Filho's thriller The Secret Agent, a sprawling yet intimate film about political refugees living under aliases during Brazil's military dictatorship. In one scene, a resistance leader named Elza (Maria Fernanda Cândido) expresses sympathy toward former educator Marcelo (Wagner Moura) and his father-in-law Sr. Alexandre (Carlos Francisco) for the death of Marcelo's wife, and vows that Brazil will pay for it. "I disagree," Sr. Alexandre replies plainly. "With all due respect. It'll pay nothing. It won't pay s***."
Of all these films, Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi's It Was Just an Accident may be the one most directly connected to the present moment, in no small part because the line between fiction and reality has been blurred by outside forces. Earlier this month, Panahi was handed a year-long prison sentence in Iran, as well as a two-year ban on all international travel. This isn't the first time Panahi, a longtime outspoken critic of the Iranian government, has been targeted; many of his films have been made in secret, including his 2011 documentary This Is Not a Film, which he shot while under house arrest and awaiting the results of an appeal of a six-year prison sentence and 20-year ban from making films.
In Accident, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), a former political captive, comes across a man he's convinced was one of his tormentors and kidnaps him to enact violent vengeance. (Plot details ahead.) The man, Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi), insists he's got the wrong person, and Vahid, now unsure, enlists some of the other victims to see if they might help identify him. Panahi puts the concept of justice under a microscope as they debate his identity and the usefulness of retaliation. Eventually, the man finally confesses out of desperation, arguing that he was simply following orders. He also adds that he at first held a guilty conscience, but he "got used to it with time."
Time hangs over Accident like a dark cloud, and the astounding final scene suggests Vahid will never be able to get away from the traumas he's endured. Understood a different way, it may also imply Vahid's ultimate decision — to show his tormentor mercy — while morally admirable, may have been in vain. On an episode of the podcast Filmspotting, co-host Adam Kempenaar said of Accident, "It's one of those films … that is fundamentally about asking those questions — asking big, moral and ethical questions, but it also has clarity. It has conclusions. It leaves open some interpretation at the end … but within that, there is also clarity in what we see the characters do."
This is the thing: the masks have come fully off in political discourse, with all the -isms and -phobias no longer cloaked under thin layers of coded language and niceties. Families are being torn apart, jobs are being lost for criticizing the current administration, governmental systems have been effectively dismantled and rendered useless. Nuance is always welcome, but now is not the time for vagueness or subtlety in art that dares to wade into these issues. The expectation is not for movies to change the world, but to help make sense of it, even just a little. The films that brought us closest this year are the most likely to withstand time.
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