John Waters Reveals His Top 10 Favorite Movies of 2025

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Ignacio Weil

Entertainment - December 11th 2025, 17:00 GMT+1

The Empire 2024 cropped processed by imagy — 10. The Empire (dir. Bruno Dumont)

It’s hard not to grin at the idea of a brutalist spaceship casually landing in the French countryside, and that’s exactly the kind of absurdity that hooked Waters. He may claim he’s “not a fan of science-fiction,” but this one cracked through his defenses like a cosmic prank. The movie leans into its deadpan oddness so deeply that Waters didn’t even realize it was *supposed* to be funny until he checked the notes afterward — which only adds to the charm. It’s that “funny ha-ha peculiar” energy, the kind that never begs for laughs but still leaves you smirking at the sheer commitment to weirdness. You watch it and think, “Of course *Bruno Dumont* made this,” and then you watch it again and think, “Of course *John Waters* loved this.” | © Tessalit Productions

My Mom Jayne cropped processed by imagy — 9. My Mom Jayne (dir. Mariska Hargitay)

What really grabbed Waters about *My Mom Jayne* is how the film doesn’t settle for surface-level nostalgia — it dives into the unvarnished, sometimes painful truths hiding behind Jayne Mansfield’s glittery iconography. Every “secret after secret” feels like a trapdoor into an emotional basement you didn’t expect to visit, and Waters clearly appreciates a documentary that can take him “to the edge of [his] seat” without relying on shock tactics. There’s tenderness woven between the revelations, moments that almost dare you *not* to get misty-eyed. You can feel Hargitay navigating her mother’s legacy with equal parts bravery and curiosity, and that sincerity is exactly what makes the film hit Waters so hard. It’s glamorous, yes — but vulnerable enough to earn his praise. | © HBO Documentary Films

When Fall Is Coming cropped processed by imagy — 8. When Fall Is Coming (dir. François Ozon)

If Waters is out here using the word “touching,” you know something unusual is happening. *When Fall Is Coming* sneaks up on its emotions, letting a mother and son — both bruised by life in wildly different ways — drift into a story that’s tender without pretending to be wholesome. Waters seems especially drawn to how Ozon refuses to judge these characters: a retired sex worker, an ex-con gay son whose temper doesn’t always stay buried, and the messy, morally sideways bond they’ve built. The film even flirts with the idea that murder might be “the right thing to do,” which is exactly the sort of amoral curveball that would make Waters perk up in the theater. What he loves here is the blend of compassion and danger — affection sharpened by darkness, and darkness softened by love. | © FOZ

Misericordia 2024 cropped processed by imagy — 7. Misericordia (dir. Alain Guiraudie)

This is the kind of movie that feels engineered in a lab specifically to delight Waters: perverse, chaotic, and proudly uninterested in respectability. The way he describes it — “murder, closet incest, and the inappropriate attraction to one guilty man” — suggests a story that doesn’t tiptoe near taboo so much as sprint full-speed into it. And that’s precisely why it lands with him. Guiraudie doesn’t stack shocks just to be edgy; he builds a thriller where every twisted impulse comes baked into the emotional logic of the characters. By the time the “lulu of an ending” crashes in, you understand why Waters finds it irresistible. It’s the cinematic equivalent of staring at a gorgeous train wreck and realizing you can’t look away. | © CG Cinéma

Room Temperature 2025 cropped processed by imagy — 6. Room Temperature (dir. Dennis Cooper & Zac Farley)

Waters’ affection for *Room Temperature* comes from that wonderful collision of boredom and brilliance the directing duo seems to engineer on purpose. He calls it “purposely tedious,” which sounds like an insult until he follows it with “tender” and “poetic,” and suddenly you get it: the movie wants you to sit in the monotony of a family prepping their home for a Halloween horror house until something quietly uncanny blooms under your skin. That “huh? I love it” moment he describes feels built into the architecture of the film, like a trapdoor you fall through only after declaring you’ve had enough. It’s weird, yes — almost defiantly so — but in a way that slips from irritation into fascination. And that slow transformation is exactly what makes Waters call it “maybe … just maybe, great.” | © Anna Sanders Films

Sauna movie 2025 cropped processed by imagy — 5. Sauna (dir. Mathias Broe)

There’s a brazen honesty in this film that must have had Waters smiling in his seat — *Sauna* doesn’t dress up its story as lofty or pretentious, it just plunges into sex, identity, and what happens when love is messy and real. That “hunky, hip gay male” working in a Copenhagen bathhouse, the unexpected romance with a trans man, the whole “cockeyed cunnilingus” bit — it’s risqué, raw, unapologetic. It refuses to sugarcoat reality or sanitize desire, which seems exactly the kind of cinematic provocation Waters cheers for. The film treats its characters with dignity even while dipping into taboo realms, proving that intimacy and identity can be explored with nuance and heart. There’s no neat redemption arc, no easy morality — just human longing, curiosity, vulnerability. That’s probably why Waters ranks *Sauna* among the year’s boldest: it dares to tell a queer love story on its own terms, messy edges and all. | © Nordisk Film Production

Sirāt cropped processed by imagy — 4. Sirāt (dir. Óliver Laxe)

If you told me a “jaw-dropping road trip to a rave party in the deserts of war-torn Morocco” would end up on Waters’ favorites, I’d raise an eyebrow — yet *Sirāt* seems to hit that sweet spot between chaos, trance, and existential despair that he adores. This isn’t a polished Hollywood journey; it’s a raw, hypnotic plunge into grief, hope, and desperation under blistering sun and cold sand. Waters calls it the “best feel-bad acid adventure ever filmed,” and honestly, once you've seen how the film leans into tragedy, loss, and a relentless hunt through ravers and desert for a missing girl, you get why. Its blend of brutal realism and surreal atmosphere — techno beats in the dunes, ordinary faces caught in extraordinary grief — challenges comfort and demands feeling. The movie draws you close, makes you squirm, and doesn’t let you look away. It’s not just a film: it’s a haunting pulse that stays with you — an existential trip with no guarantee of return. | © Los Desertores Films AIE

Cropped The Worst Person in the World — 3. Oslo Trilogy (dir. Dag Johan Haugerud)

What seem like modest Norwegian dramas quietly doing their thing end up snagging Waters’ attention — because *Oslo Trilogy* doesn’t shout, it whispers. It reminds him (and us) that love — homo, hetero, whatever — is just complicated, hopeful, sensitive, and often ridiculous. The trilogy’s strength lies in its painfully everyday truths: fumbling lust, awkward desire, tender confessions, heartbreaks that sneak in over coffee rather than explosions. The dialogue rings real — sometimes clumsy, sometimes dazzling — but always honest, like overhearing a confession in a dim bar. Waters admires that bravery: telling stories about love and lust without varnish, without glamor, without easy closure. There’s a subtle kind of radical normalness there. In a year full of aliens, horror, and wild road-movies, *Oslo Trilogy* stands as a gentle, human anchor — and maybe that’s exactly why Waters wanted it on his list. | © Oslo Pictures

Cropped Final Destination Bloodlines — 2. Final Destination: Bloodlines (dir. Zach Lipovsky & Adam B. Stein)

You’d think Waters — self-professed champion of the weird and trashy — would sneer at a big horror-franchise reboot. But this one, he says, “goes beyond trash into a new realm of exploitation art.” And I get it. *Bloodlines* is ferocious, fractured, and full of twisted surprises — it revives a familiar myth of Death with dark humor and shattering horror, and doesn’t pretend that its victims are innocent or its scares polite. It’s frantic, kinetic, a blood-splattered ballet of fate catching up to the damned. Instead of sugar-coating terror, it revels in it; instead of sanitizing death, it makes it grotesque and necessary. Waters seems to respect that audacity — the film doesn’t ask permission to shock, it just does it, with style, cruelty, and a wink. In a cinematic landscape polite about fear, *Bloodlines* is rude, loud, and gloriously unrepentant. | © New Line Cinema

Cropped eddington — 1. Eddington (dir. Ari Aster)

This is the one — the film Waters saved the most venom and affection for. *Eddington* isn’t designed to be likable. Its characters are exhausting, bleak, morally bankrupt or morally lost; the story is as ugly and chaotic as today’s politics; the tone swings between anger, horror, satire, and a kind of twisted comedy that leaves you uneasy. Waters loves it because it dares to be disagreeable. He doesn’t want to soften your discomfort — he wants to drag you through a mirror of chaos and force you to squint. It’s “terrifyingly funny, confusingly chaste and kinky,” he says — a cocktail of weird genres and even weirder sensibilities, a movie that feels like the mood swings of a nation unraveling under its own contradictions. Watching it, you don’t root for anyone; you feel them, maybe cringe at them, but you stay glued. And maybe that’s the whole point: art that doesn’t comfort you, but wakes you up, unsettles you, makes you question everything. That’s why *Eddington* isn’t just his favorite film of 2025 — it’s a cinematic dare, and Waters dared you to watch along. | © A24

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John Waters has always been cinema’s beloved agent of chaos—part cult legend, part charming provocateur. He built his legacy on boundary-pushing films with a sly smile, so when he shares his favorite movies of the year, people pay attention. It’s like getting recommendations from the cool uncle who insists you skip the “respectable” stuff and dive straight into the weird.

His 2025 list is exactly that kind of joyful zigzag: unpredictable, opinionated, and refreshingly unserious. Waters moves from polished hits to scrappy underdogs without blinking, reminding us that movies are meant to be fun, messy, and delightfully strange. Agree with him or not, his picks make you want to watch something unexpected—just to keep up.