John Waters Reveals His Top 10 Films of 2025 – ‘Eddington’ + ‘Sirat’

by Alex Billington
December 3, 2025
Source: Vulture

“Ferocious, fractured, & filled with so many scary, twisted surprises—this picture goes beyond trash into a new realm of exploitation art.” This is what he has to say about the most recent Final Destination movie making his Top 10. One of the most exciting “best of the year” lists that kicks off this time of the year is from filmmaker John Waters – his Top 10 favorite films in a list that is unlike any other. For 2025, Waters has put together an appropriately eccentric, entirely peculiar and decidedly unique list of his favorites from the last 12 months. His list last year had The Brutalist, Joker 2, Emilia Perez, and Babygirl on it, which caused quite a stir. This time around he’s got a bit of everything – a horror movie, a social commentary satire, the brilliant Sirat set in Morocco, a documentary, and a bunch of foreign films that impressed him, including the Oslo Trilogy which pretty much no one in the US has seen. After years of publishing this list elsewhere, Waters is now submitting it every year to Vulture instead. Peruse his 10 cinema favorites from 2025 below.

Waters includes a short one/two-sentence explanation with each pick, so head to Vulture to read all of his thoughts on his Top 10 of 2025. I’ve included a few of his comments in quotes below for some of the films where he said some interesting things. Without further ado, here are John Waters’ Top 10 Films of 2025:

1. Eddington (dir. Ari Aster) “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.”
2. Final Destination: Bloodlines (dirs. Zach Lipovsky & Adam B. Stein)
3. Olso Trilogy (dir. Dag Johan Haugerud) “Three terrific Norwegian films directed by the newest heir to Ingmar Bergman’s throne concerning how complicated yet hopeful and similar all homo and hetero loves and lusts really are. The smartest dialogue about romance in a long, long time.”
4. Sirât (dir. Oliver Laxe) “Tragedy after tragedy of unspeakable intensity make this script the best feel-bad acid adventure ever filmed. It’ll blow your mind…”
5. Sauna (dir. Mathias Broe)
6. Room Temperature (dirs. Dennis Cooper & Zac Farley)
7. Misericordia (dir. Alain Guiraudie) “An impossibly perverse thriller where murder, closet incest, and the inappropriate attraction to one guilty man collide, leaving the audience stunned by sexual plot twists and a lulu of an ending. Yikes! This one’s off the rails!”
8. When Fall Is Coming (dir. François Ozon)
9. My Mom Jayne (dir. Mariska Hargitay) “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.”
10. The Empire (dir. Bruno Dumont)

What do you make of Waters’ Top 10 list for this year? Have you seen all of the films he lists this year? I’m a fan of a few of these as well – including Sirat, the Oslo films, and I’d say I mostly enjoyed Final Destination: Bloodlines. The only one I have never even heard of before is that indie horror called Room Temperature, about a family preparing their annual haunted house tradition. Waters says: “A purposely tedious & tender poetic head-scratcher of a film focusing on a family setting up their neighborhood home for a Halloween horror house. Just when you begin hating this film, you’ll suddenly realize—huh?” His comments on all of these films are as amusing as his picks, and as always I’m glad he confidently speaks his mind clearly about why they all resonated with him. There are usually some strange and one-of-a-kind films to discover in his selection, and Waters is always introducing us to some of the most underrated films of the year. As usual, it is good to pick at least one of these (or maybe three of four!) you haven’t seen yet, and give it a look to see if it impresses/intrigues you as much as it did him. You never know. Thoughts on these 2025 films on his list?

Find more posts in: Awards, Discuss, Indies, Looking Back