One Battle After Another Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures

The Austin Chronicle’s Top 10 list, listed alphabetically, is the combined effort of Chronicle film critics Kimberley Jones and Richard Whittaker and film critic emeritus Marjorie Baumgarten, who was this week named the Austin Film Critics Association’s first Member Emeritus.

Avatar: Fire and Ash

Blue Moon

Frankenstein

It Was Just an Accident

Marty Supreme

Nouvelle Vague

One Battle After Another

Peter Hujar’s Day

The Secret Agent

Train Dreams

Kimberley Jones’ Top 10

1) One Battle After Another

Loved Leo’s shambling slapstick, Benicio’s unruffled sensei, but the women – an electrifying Teyana Taylor; newbie Chase Infiniti, showing her teeth; and Regina Hall, a master class in mournful restraint – ruled PTA’s unruly epic. 

2) The Secret Agent

Speaking of movies that deliver both popcorn pleasures and rattling truths about fucked-up power structures! Also: America’s finally waking up to what a stone-cold movie star Wagner Moura is.

3) Marty Supreme

Josh Safdie and Timothée Chalamet craft a midcentury Jewish American character as distinctive and colossal and scathingly funny as anything Saul Bellow or Philip Roth ever put to page. 

Peter Hujar’s Day Credit: Janus Films

4) Peter Hujar’s Day

Ira Sachs dusts off the 50-year transcript of a conversation between two friends and makes magic out of it. I want to watch Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall dance all day long.

5) Sorry, Baby

A movie about being stuck that moved me to tears – but even more revelatory were the laughs. Somebody please greenlight eight more of these from Eva Victor.  

6) Sound of Falling

In Mascha Schilinski’s bravura film, the timelines of generations of women in the same German farmhouse tangle and softly talk to each other. Harrowing stuff, where death is always near and trauma repeats itself.  

7) Train Dreams

Good on Netflix for putting Clint Bentley’s gorgeous picture in front of a gazillion eyeballs – but I will forever treasure seeing it on the big screen at AFS, with a rapt audience: a sacred space.

8) Eephus

Also sacred: baseball! Like the titular pitch, this debut was itself a weird meatball – a comedy that went into extra innings to reveal something more ruminative. 

9) Sentimental Value

Joachim Trier’s ongoing, evolving inquiry into depression really speaks to me … and Labi Siffre was the sweetest way to sing us out the door. 

10) It Was Just an Accident

The second film on my list to center around a missing leg, Jafar Panahi’s explicitly political, unequivocally comic thriller contains multitudes.

Train Dreams Credit: Netflix

Richard Whittaker’s Top 10

1)  Train Dreams

Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar follow up their Oscar-nominated Sing Sing with a poetic adaptation of Denis Johnson’s existentialist novella. The passage of the 20th century becomes a lens to view our own sense of disconnection.

2)  Blue Moon

Ethan Hawke and Richard Linklater push each other into a new phase in their decades-long creative collaboration for this sealed-bottle tragicomedy. The self-immolation of a genius becomes an analysis of aging as an artist.

3)  The Secret Agent

Critic-turned-filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho exhumes Brazil’s violent political history through the story of a college professor and political dissident, played by Wagner Moura. A warning about the chilling ease in which we can become victims.

4)  Avatar: Fire and Ash

Cinema as spectacle, but also cinema as subversive and outspoken political diatribe. James Cameron builds his flick about indigenous tribes facing down the military-industrial complex into a multi-generational epic.

5)  Thunderbolts*

Who knew that Marvel would make the year’s best film about repressed trauma and the dangerous allure of self-flagellation? Of course the MCU’s most dysfunctional band of superheroes are the ones we can associate with.

6)  Gazer

First-time director Ryan J. Sloan and star Ariella Mastroianni blow the roof off the possibilities of modern indie filmmaking with this immersive, grimy New Jersey noir about memory that’s equal parts The Big Sleep, Taxi Driver, and Seconds.

7)  It Was Just an Accident

Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi channels his own experiences being imprisoned for making art into this quietly terrifying depiction of life under a brutal regime, and the high cost of revenge.

8)  Chainsaw Man: The Movie – Reze Arc

The smash hit anime horror series jumps to the big screen with all the gore and chaos intact, but this adaptation of the second volume of Tatsuki Fujimoto’s twisted manga delivers a heartbreaking conclusion.

9)  American Sweatshop

Like last year’s Red Rooms, Uta Briesewitz’s tale of working life in a social media content moderation farm shows nothing graphic but still forces us to examine what damage the internet is doing to us.

10) Materialists

Celine Song channels Bertolt Brecht in her cunning and heartfelt examination of the eternal dichotomy between the emotional and transactional forces within all relationships, set against modern NYC’s dating scene.

Sovereign Credit: Briarcliff Entertainment

Marjorie Baumgarten’s Top 10

1) One Battle After Another

2) Frankenstein

3) Nouvelle Vague

4) It Was Just an Accident

5) Sirat

6) Die My Love

7) Bugonia

8) Sovereign

9) If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

10) Train Dreams

This article appears in December 19 • 2025.

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A graduate of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas, Kimberley has written about film, books, and pop culture for The Austin Chronicle since 2000. She was named Editor of the Chronicle in 2016; she previously served as the paper’s Managing Editor, Screens Editor, Books Editor, and proofreader. Her work has been awarded by the Association of Alternative Newsmedia for excellence in arts criticism, team reporting, and special section (Best of Austin). The Austin Alliance for Women...

The Chronicle's first Culture Desk editor, Richard has reported on Austin's growing film production and appreciation scene for over a decade. A graduate of the universities of York, Stirling, and UT-Austin, a Rotten Tomatoes certified critic, and eight-time Best of Austin winner, he's currently at work on two books and a play.

Marjorie Baumgarten is a film critic and contributing writer at The Austin Chronicle, where she has worked in many capacities since the paper's founding in 1981. She served as the Chronicle's Film Reviews editor for 25 years.