The 10 Most Underrated Movies of 2025

Based on the tepid box-office numbers this year, there are only two possibilities: Either the movies of 2025 were uniformly awful, or a lot of good films got a bad shake in multiplexes.

I vote for the latter. I saw so many interesting, funny, strange, and thoughtful 2025 films in theaters (and on streaming) whose releases merit comparison to the proverbial tree falling in the woods. They opened, they closed. They streamed, nobody talked about them, they fell off the front page of Netflix or Amazon’s Prime Video, and that was that.

These movies deserved better — so today I’m singling out ten such underrated 2025 titles. Back in my podcasting days, my show did an annual awards episode where we gave out the “They Didn’t Get It Award.” It was an inelegant name for exactly this; the films that came and went with little fanfare (or, in some cases, inexplicably poor reviews).

One article won’t balance the scales completely here, but maybe it will get at least a few people to circle back and check out some of these films that they avoided (or maybe didn’t even know existed) when they were first released to theaters or streaming. (The nice part about a streaming flop is a lot of those titles remain available in perpetuity, so it’s relatively easy to catch up with them.) Maybe these movies didn’t get their due the first time around. But there’s still time to fix that.