Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.

It’s a new year, the perfect time for me to look back at the best of last year’s movies. What do I look for? Films that are novel, funny, scary, sexy, shocking, and emotionally or intellectually engaging.  And just really well made.  And because of limited space, I’m not including documentaries — like Laura Poitras’s Cover Up or Baz Luhrmann’s dazzling  EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert— nor animation, though I loved Seth and Peter Scriver’s Endless Cookie, or the wonderful French movie Arco. So here are my favourite movies of 2025.

But first, I’m looking at two new movies opening this weekend and next. There’s a zombie apocalypse in Tasmania, and a mom and son drama in LA .

Rosemead

Co-Wri/Dir: Eric Lin

Irene (Lucy Liu) is a middle aged woman and single mom who runs her own printing shop in an LA strip mall. She’s bringing up her only child, Joe (Lawrence Shou). Joe was a top student and athlete (he’s on the school swim team) with a bright future. But when his dad suddenly died he fell into a deep funk. Now he spends most of his days scratching creepy ink drawings of spiders and corpses in his notebooks. He is seeing a therapist to help him recover, but it doesn’t seem to be doing much good. Irene, meanwhile, has problems of her own. She has cancer, and is being treatment with some new, experimental medicines, since nothing has worked in the past. Though she’s frequently coughing up blood, she tells Joe everything is going fine. She doesn’t him to have to worry about her, too. 

But Joe keeps getting worse, obsessing over mass shootings in American schools. Though his best friends are trying to help, things look grim. He has a breakdown in class when they do a armed intruder exercise. Irene finds links to gun images on his computer. And then he disappears entirely, running away from home just weeks before his 18th birthday. Can Irene find Joe and keep him safe? And what will he do if her chemo is unsuccessful?  

Rosemead is a character study of a mom and her son dealing with medical and mental health issues.

No spoilers, but the film is inspired by a true event, that made the headlines. The usually glamourous Lucy Liu plays a frumpy mom who speaks only broken English and Chinese, as she deals with her very real pain. (Her story takes place mainly within LA’s Chinese community) Lawrence Shou is also sympathetic as a teenager dealing with a sudden onset of schizophrenia. Though more grim than heart-lifting, Rosemead is a moving, real-life drama.

We Bury the Dead

Wri/Dir: Zak Hilditch

It’s present-day Tasmania, Australia. Ava (Daisy Ridley) is a recently- married young professional in the US. She has just arrived in Tasmania’s capital, Hobart, to look for her husband. He went there a week earlier for a  business retreat but never came back. The reason is catastrophic.The US military has been testing weapons of mass destruction in the south Pacific, and one, a secret bomb that uses electromagnetic pulses, accidentally explodes, wiping out every last man, woman and child in Tasmania.  

So a number of volunteers, including Ava, arrive there to help clean up and bury the bodies. The Australian military provides direction: the lands south of Hobart are strictly off-limits. Ava is teamed up with a scruffy ne’er-do-well named Clay (Brenton Thwaites) who is rather loose with his axe. He seems to like smashing windows more than burying bodies. Ava has a second motive. She wants to find and bury her husband; she needs the closure that would bring (he flew off to Australia at a crucial point in their relationship.) But the resort he had been staying in was in Woodbridge, a town far south of Hobart. So when they come across an illicit drug dealer’s shiny motorcycle, Ava manages to convince Clay to secretly drive her south to find her husband.  But wait! There’s more. Among all the dead bodies a small percentage are coming back to life. And the army has orders to wipe them all out. Are they humans or zombies? How can Ava and Clay deal with them? And will she ever find her husband? And what will happen if soldiers catch them out of the zone?

We Bury the Dead is a speculative drama about marriage and relationships in the face of a potential zombie apocalypse.  Australians have shown an amazing talent for the scary and grotesque, in movies like Talk To Me. But it’s not really a horror movie. There’s some good acting, an interesting post-apocalyptic storyline, and beautiful scenery.  But although there are some scary parts, these zombies don’y seem that hazardous. Yeah, their eyes are pus-y and they clack their teeth together with a very unnerving sound… but they move slowly and don’t eat brains. So if you’re mainly looking for zombie-scares, I think you should look elsewhere.

Here are my favourite films of 2025

In alphabetical order: 

Christy — this is a biopic about a lesbian female boxer and her abusive husband/manager.This was a collossal flop but I thought it was a great sports melodrama with over-the-top performances by Sidney Sweeney and Ben Foster.

 Eddington

Another flop that many viewers and critics hated, but I think Ari Aster has given us a stunning microcosm of contemporary American politics — starring Joachim Phoenix as the police chief and Pedro Pascal as the Mayor of a small New Mexico town.

Frankenstein

This is Guillermo del Toro’s totally original retelling of the gothic horror classic, starring Oscar Isaac as the mad scientist and Jacob Elordi as his gentle monster.

Hamnet is a lovely fictionalized version of two parents — William Shakespeare and his wife Agnes (Played by Jesse Buckley and Paul Mescul) —  dealing with the death of their son. A genuine tearjerker.

I Swear

Is a touching and hilarious biopic about a man in Scotland dealing with Tourette’s syndrome.

Marty Supreme

…is a frenetic and chaotic look at a champion pingpong player in the 1950s, portrayed as a charming yet infuriating character by Timothy Chalamet, in this whirlwind of a movie.

The Mastermind

Cinematic master Kelly Reichardt’s latest drama about a would-be art-thief turned underground fugitive in the 1970s. Josh O’Connor stars in this diverse ensemble.

Nirvanna, The Band, The Show, The Movie

The infuriating but hilarious Matt Johnson and the even headed Jay McCarrol bring us this mind-boggling back-to-the-future story about a failed Toronto band and its obsessed leader, willing to travel back in time to find success.

Secret Agent

Is an engrossing and surprising political mystery/thriller set during the military dictatorship in Brazil that stars Wagner Moura as a dissident forced to flee to Reciffe to keep his son, and himself, safe.

Sinners

Is a spectacular horror set in the American deep south that combines black music with monsters. It stars Michael B Jordan as twin brother musicians who open a juke joint in a county swarming with both Vampires and the KKK. 

Sirat

Is a mind-blowing road movie about an ordinary Spanish dad and his young son who follows a caravan of ravers and freaks through the western Sahara as he searches for his daughter.

One Battle After Another

Loosely based on a book by Thomas Pynchon, Paul Thomas Anderson’s this political satire looks at a former underground revolutionary cel brought back to life in contemporary California. It stars Leonardo Dicaprio, Sean Penn and Teyana Taylor.

Runners up: 

Girl/Left-Handed Girl

Both Taiawanese coming-of-age stories about a young girl growing up in Taipei.

Wake Up Dead Man

Rian Johnson’s brilliant locked-room murder mystery set within a renegade Catholic Church.

Weapons

A truly original horror story.

Bring Her Back

Another horror, this one from Australia, is very disturbing.

The Testament of Ann Lee

A musical biopic about the start of the Shakers, an ecstatic American sect in the 18th and 19th century that forbade all sexual contact.

Meadowlarks

A deeply moving drama about the tentative reunion of an indigenous family’s brothers and sisters who were forceably separated for decades by the Sixties’ Scoop.

Friendship

A cringe comedy starring Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd.

The History of Sound

An historical drama about two ethnomusicologists who find fleeting love while collecting music in early 20th century America. 

Orphan

Oscar-winner László Nemes ’s heart-wrenching drama about his own father’s life in 1950s Budapest.

Sorry Baby

Writer /director/ actor Eva Victor retelling — with a dark sense of humour —  of a terrible incident in her own life as a New England grad student.

Bury the Dead opens this weekend, and Rosemead next week in Toronto; check your local listings. And all of my Best Movies Of 2025 are playing theatrically, digitally or are coming soon.

This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Saturday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website culturalmining.com.