The 25 Best Movie Roles of 2025
There were a number of great roles in 2025 and picking just 25 great performances wasn’t easy.
Some performances of 2025 were so superb that they are easy to name right off the top of the bat. Rose Byrne (If I Had Legs I’d Kick You), Imogen Poots (The Chronology of Water), Timothée Chalamet (Marty Supreme), Ethan Hawke (Blue Moon), Sean Penn (One Battle After Another), Zoey Deutch (Nouvelle Vague), Glenn Close (Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery), Jessie Buckley (Hamnet), Paul Mescal (Hamnet), Michael B. Jordan (Sinners), Amy Madigan (Weapons) and Brad Pitt (F1: The Movie) shoot right up to the top 12. Eva Victor (Sorry, Baby) was another fantastic performance which leaves us to pick just 12 more of the year’s greatest turns to come up with 25.
In the supporting arena, Stellan Skarsgård (Sentimental Value) and Hailee Steinfeld (Sinners) were superb. In the leading category, roles like Laura Dern’s in Is This Thing On? and George Clooney’s in Jay Kelly were nearly perfect additions to these two Oscar winners’ careers. Oddly enough, Tim Blake Nelson’s turn in the indie Bang Bang was grossly overlooked, but it clearly ranks as one of the best performances of 2025. Joel Edgerton (Train Dreams) and Jacob Elordi (Frankenstein) were two of the greatest male performances of the year, both films from Netflix with the former a lead role and the latter a supporting one. Great female roles of the year included Amanda Seyfried (The Testament of Ann Lee) and Emma Stone (Bugonia) as well as Teyana Taylor (One Battle After Another).
The last two great performances we’ve chosen for the year are: Chase Infiniti (One Battle After Another) and Jeremy Allen White (Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere). Of course, festival films also featured great performances that were in movies which have yet to be released such as Gabriela Ochoa Perez in Charliebird and Skye Alyssa Friedman in Lemonade Blessing.
Rose Byrne ran away with the year’s flat-out best performance but Imogen Poots and Timothée Chalamet were close behind. This year’s Oscar race will be a very competitive one and there were so many other great turns that could be rewarded for the year in film besides the ones we’ve mentioned. Byrne and Poots delivered performances with raw intensity in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You and The Chronology of Water and Chalamet was a ball of energy in his terrific movie, Marty Supreme. When it comes to flat-out movie stars, Julia Roberts just missed this list with her excellent work in After the Hunt. Look for a complete list of the year’s 10 best films next weekend after we’ve seen Avatar: Fire and Ash.
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