My 100 Favorite First-Time Watches from 2025

Me contemplating what the hell I'm going to put on this list every year.

Happy New Year! Yes, I'm still alive, alert, awake, and enthusiastic - though the recent activity on here would seem to imply otherwise. It turns out maintaining a blog with even just monthly posts is harder than it looks, and I've gained a great amount of appreciation for those who do this kind of thing regularly while still having a life outside the internet. Apologies for the lack of content since August, and here's hoping there will be some more regular posts throughout 2026.

I'm perfectly happy to throw 2025 in the dumpster, all things considered, but there were plenty of highlights as well, and I'd like to celebrate some of my film discoveries of the year to kick off 2026. I'll have more thoughts on the year in film and my personal year in the forthcoming blog post dedicated to my favorite films of 2025, so for now I'll just focus on this list of 100 first-time watches that I enjoyed seeing in 2025.  

Around September or October I started worrying that putting a list of 100 films together was too much and considered dropping it to 50. I may do that in the future as I continue to seek out films further off the beaten path instead of the well-known classics, and it becomes harder and harder to find hidden gems that you really feel passionate about. However, for 2025 I had a strong finish to the year in terms of positive responses to older films and didn't have an issue filling this list with titles I enjoyed, found interesting, and would recommend highly. In fact, I did a monthly breakdown, and 14 films I saw in December made it on here, the most of any month. There were 12 films from January as well, so it appears I did a good job bookending the year with some high quality films.

At the start of last year, I put together a list of 100 films to watch in 2025 - mostly of titles that were easily accessible via streaming services and sounded particularly interesting to me, for whatever reason. I was worried that this list would be a repeat of that one, but don't worry - while there's plenty of crossover, over half of the entries on this list were films not on that watchlist. Much like last year, the monthly expiring titles from the Criterion Channel did a lot of lifting, but there's some hidden discoveries from channels like TCM and streamers like MUBI, Tubi, and Shudder also.

I don't know if there's one single director whose filmography I fell in love with like Joe Dante or Hal Hartley or Peter Bogdanovich in years past, although I think I'll easily associate this year with my discovery of Henry Jaglom. His film New Year's Day was the first film I saw in 2025 (bet you can guess what day I watched it) and remained one of my favorite things I watched throughout the year, and I also greatly enjoyed Eating and intend to watch more of his work in the near future. There's also a handful of horror films from 1975 on this list, which I watched for the purpose of an abandoned 50-year anniversary project - maybe I'll pick that up this year for the horror films of 1976. In connection with that, there's several gialli I enjoyed catching up with throughout the year that made my list. My one disappointment of my film-watching journey in 2025 is that, after really loving some pre-code films I saw in late 2024, I didn't dig into that era of film as much as I could have.

There's a lot of variety on this list, ranging some classics everyone's seen that for some reason I'm just catching up with (Who Framed Roger Rabbit?) to recent restorations (Hollywood 90028 and Girls Town) to true hidden gems I'd never heard of before this year (Shot, What's Up Connection), and I think there should be something for everyone here. Last year I wrote a couple sentences about each film, and unfortunately I didn't find enough time to pull something like that together again this year. However, I've wrote extensively about several of these films in previous blog posts, and I've posted reviews on Letterboxd for the vast majority of them, and would encourage anyone interested to consult those for my thoughts on these films.

Stay tuned this weekend for Part 2 of my 2025 film-watching wrap-up as I'll reflect on the new releases of 2025, plus a "musical interlude" in between like last year. For now, please enjoy my 100 favorite first-time watches from 2025 (listed alphabetically), and I'm hoping at least a few of these may pique your interest to check out in 2026.

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The American Friend

(1977, dir. Wim Wenders)

Anne at 13,000 Ft.

(2019, dir. Kazik Radwanski)

As Tears Go By

(1988, dir. Wong Kar-wai)

Autumn Sonata

(1978, dir. Ingmar Bergman)

Autumn Tale

(1998, dir. Éric Rohmer)

Baba Yaga

(1973, dir. Corrado Farina)

Best in Show

(2000, dir. Christopher Guest)

The Big Clock

(1948, dir. John Farrow)

Blood on the Stars

(1975, dir. Wil Aaron)

Bona

(1980, dir. Lino Brocka)

Cape Fear

(1962, dir. J. Lee Thompson)

Cash on Demand

(1961, dir. Quentin Lawrence)

La Céremonie

(1995, dir. Claude Chabrol)

Charade

(1963, dir. Stanley Donen)

Compensation

(1999, dir. Zeinabu irene Davis)

Cooley High

(1975, dir. Michael Schultz)

Cotton Comes to Harlem

(1970, dir. Ossie Davis)

Crimes of Passion

(1984, dir. Ken Russell)

D.E.B.S.

(2004, dir. Angela Robinson)

Dead Man

(1995, dir. Jim Jarmusch)

Death Game

(1977, dir. Peter S. Traynor)

Desire

(1936, dir. Frank Borzage)

Desperate Living

(1977, dir. John Waters)

Disconnected

(1984, dir. Gorman Bechard)

Don't Torture a Duckling

(1972, dir. Lucio Fulci)

Down with Love

(2003, dir. Peyton Reed)

Drowning by Numbers

(1988, dir. Peter Greenaway)

Duelle

(1976, dir. Jacques Rivette)

    

Eating

(1990, dir. Henry Jaglom)

Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas

(1977, dir. Jim Henson)

 

Experiment in Terror

(1962, dir. Blake Edwards)

Exte: Hair Extensions

(2007, dir. Sion Sono)

A Face in the Crowd

(1957, dir. Elia Kazan)

Falling in Love

(1984, dir. Ulu Grosbard)

A Fish in the Bathtub

(1998, dir. Joan Micklin Silver)

Footprints on the Moon

(1975, dir. Luigi Bazzoni and Mario Fanelli)

Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed

(1969, dir. Terence Fisher)

The Friends

(1994, dir. Shinji Sômai)

The Friends of Eddie Coyle

(1973, dir. Peter Yates)

The Fury

(1978, dir. Brian De Palma)

Ghostwatch

(1992, dir. Lesley Manning)

Girlfight

(2000, dir. Karyn Kusama)

Girls Town

(1996, dir. Jim McKay)

Glen or Glenda

(1953, dir. Edward D. Wood, Jr.)

Helter Skelter

(2012, dir. Mika Ninagawa)

Hollywood 90028

(1973, dir. Christina Hornisher)

Humpday

(2009, dir. Lynn Shelton)

The Intruder

(1962, dir. Roger Corman)

Irma Vep

(1996, dir. Olivier Assayas)

It's a Zabriskie, Zabriskie, Zabriskie, Zabriskie Point

(2023, dir. Daniel Kremer)

It's My Turn

(1980, dir. Claudia Weill)

Jungle Fever

(1991, dir. Spike Lee)

Kings and Desperate Men

(1981, dir. Alexis Kanner)

Linda Linda Linda

(2005, dir. Nobuhiro Yamashita)

The Linguini Incident

(1991, dir. Richard Shepard)

Living in Oblivion

(1995, dir. Tom DiCillo)

A Lizard in a Woman's Skin

(1971, dir. Lucio Fulci)

Lost in London

(2017, dir. Woody Harrelson)

The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra

(2001, dir. Larry Blamire)

Love Letters

(1983, dir. Amy Holden Jones)

The Major and the Minor

(1942, dir. Billy Wilder)

Marty

(1955, dir. Delbert Mann)

The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)

(2017, dir. Noah Baumbach)

Mike's Murder

(1984, dir. James Bridges)

Mona Lisa

(1986, dir. Neil Jordan)

Murder by Contract

(1958, dir. Irving Lerner)

The Music of Chance

(1993, dir. Philip Haas)

My Dinner with Andre

(1981, dir. Louis Malle)

The Narrow Margin

(1952, dir. Richard Fleischer)

Nashville

(1975, dir. Robert Altman)

New Year's Day

(1989, dir. Henry Jaglom)

The Novelist's Film

(2022, dir. Hong Sang-soo)

Personal Problems

(1980, dir. Bill Gunn)

Quiet City

(2007, dir. Aaron Katz)

Race with the Devil

(1975, dir. Jack Starrett)

The Rain People

(1969, dir. Francis Ford Coppola)

Rebels of the Neon God

(1992, dir. Tsai Ming-liang)

Runaway Train

(1985, dir. Andrei Konchalovsky)

Safety Last!

(1923, dir. Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor)

Le Samouraï

(1967, dir. Jean-Pierre Melville)

Seeds

(1968, dir. Andy Milligan)

Shampoo

(1975, dir. Hal Ashby)

Shot

(1973, dir. Mitch Brown)

Simone Barbès or Virtue

(1980, dir. Marie-Claude Treilhou)

Slacker

(1990, dir. Richard Linklater)

The Stuff

(1985, dir. Larry Cohen)

Summer of '42

(1971, dir. Robert Mulligan)

A Summer's Tale

(1996, dir. Éric Rohmer)

Support Your Local Sheriff!

(1969, dir. Burt Kennedy)

Switchblade Sisters

(1975, dir. Jack Hill)

Take Care of My Cat

(2001, dir. Jeong Jae-eun)

A Tale of Winter

(1992, dir. Éric Rohmer)

Tea and Sympathy

(1956, dir. Vincente Minnelli)

To Live and Die in L.A.

(1985, dir. William Friedkin)

What Have They Done to Your Daughters?

(1974, dir. Massimo Dallamano)

What's Up Connection

(1990, dir. Masashi Yamamoto)

Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

(1988, dir. Robert Zemeckis)

Who Saw Her Die?

(1972, dir. Aldo Lado)

Woman in Chains

(1968, dir. Henri-Georges Clouzot)

Zabriskie Point

(1970, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni)