The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

Honourable Mentions: John Wick: Chapter 4, The Killer, Poor Things

Few living filmmakers possess the kind of inimitable legacy that Martin Scorsese has. Now 83, Scorsese formed a pillar of the American New Wave with films like Mean Streets and Taxi Driver and has grown into a true ambassador for the medium, helming seminal film after seminal film while also working diligently off the camera in efforts related to preservation and film history.

But Scorsese is also in his twilight, and with that phase of life comes an even greater level of introspection and self-interrogation. He developed The Irishman with Netflix in 2018 - a film that reckons with regret and age to a desolating end - and followed that with an adaptation of David Grann's non-fiction book Killers of the Flower Moon in 2023.

Grann's book dove deep into the exploitation and violence enacted on a systematic level against the oil-rich Osage Nation by white Americans at the beginning of the 20th century, which Scorsese's film unflinchingly depicts, ably aided by fearsome performances from Lily Gladstone, Robert De Niro, and Leonardo DiCaprio.

But what makes Killers of the Flower Moon such an urgent piece of cinema - perhaps the most vital in Scorsese's oeuvre - is how it diverges from Grann's text. The director weaves the story of the Osage's persecution into a dissection of cinema's role as a mythologiser and the various, often destructive guises that has manifested over the years. It's a theme that's brought to a heartrending head in the epilogue, which sees the director himself step into frame - acknowledging his own role as a storyteller - and provide a tacit lament for the time it has taken for cinema to begin readdressing the balance of those formative, historic narratives.

Grann's work is of real salience, but Scorsese's adaptation finds additional and indeed vulnerable weight in its ruminations on artistic regret and pain.