John Waters reveals his 10 favourite movies of 2025
Iconic director John Waters has revealed his favourite ten movies of 2025.
Since 2011, the filmmaker behind classic movies such as Pink Flamingos and Hairspray has been giving a rundown of his favourite films of the past 12 months, which has now become an annual tradition.
In the top spot, Waters placed Ari Aster’s Eddington, starring Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone and Austin Butler.
Waters wrote of the movie in Vulture, “My favorite movie of the year is a disagreeable but highly entertaining tale as exhausting as today’s politics with characters nobody could possibly root for. Yet it’s so terrifyingly funny, so confusingly chaste and kinky that you’ll feel coo-coo crazy and oh-so-cultural after watching. If you don’t like this film, I hate you.”
He was also full of praise for Final Destination: Bloodlines, which he placed in second, as well as the entire franchise as a whole.
The director said of the movie, “The best sequel to the coolest cinematic franchise ever. Ferocious, fractured, and filled with so many scary, twisted surprises—this picture goes beyond trash into a new realm of exploitation art.”
Oliver Laxe’s Sirāt also appeared in his top five, with Waters describing the movie as a “jaw-droppingly exciting new cinematic road trip to a rave party in the deserts of war-torn Morocco,” which he said “makes those classics look like slowpokes”.
Mariska Hargitay’s moving documentary, My Mom Jayne, also made Waters’ list. The film explores the wild life of the director’s mother, Jayne Mansfield, which touched Waters deeply, who wrote of the documentary, “A top rate documentary that reveals secret after secret about Jayne Mansfield and her family that will push you to the edge of your seat and possibly make you cry.”
The list was rounded out by Bruno Dumont’s The Empire, which Waters, despite not being a fan of science fiction, found appealing. He explained, “When a brutalist spaceship lands in northern France in this film, I fell to my knees to worship the mutant deities onboard.”
However, the film’s humour was lost on Waters, who added, “I didn’t realize this script was supposed to be funny until I read the press notes after viewing. It is. Sort of. Not funny ha-ha. Not funny peculiar. But funny ha-ha peculiar, just like the director.”
The full list of films is available to view below, and Waters’ full takes on each movie are here.
John Waters’ 10 favourite movies of 2025:
- Eddington – Ari Aster
- Final Destination: Bloodlines – Zach Lipovsky, Adam Stein
- Oslo Trilogy – Dag Johan Haugerud
- Sirāt – Oliver Laxe
- Sauna – Mathias Broe
- Room Temperature – Dennis Cooper, Zac Farley
- Misericordia – Alain Guiraudie
- When Fall Is Coming – François Ozon
- My Mom Jayne – Mariska Hargitay
- The Empire – Bruno Dumont
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