The highest scores on IGN’s review scale are 9 for “Amazing” and 10 for “Masterpiece.” This year, only sixteen films received the highest marks from IGN’s roster of critics, and of those, only two films received a perfect score of 10.
Horror movies were particularly well received by our reviewers, as were indie films, but the most obvious throughline with all of these picks is that they were films made by great directors such as Paul Thomas Anderson, Spike Lee, Guillermo del Toro, Ryan Coogler, and Kelly Reichardt, just to name a few. Surprise! Great directors usually make great movies.
Here are IGN’s best reviewed movies of 2025, starting with all the 9s:
“We’re the Real Monsters”
From one of the most iconic creatures in cinematic history to blues-lovin’ vampires and a new breed of the Infected, this was a big year for monster movies. And by monsters, we mean humans; there are no Xenomorphs or killer sharks to be found on this list.
Guillermo del Toro finally realized his decades-long ambition to adapt Frankenstein, which IGN’s Scott Collura called “a crowning achievement for the beloved genre director and one of the most effective adaptations of the Mary Shelley story ever put to film.” In his review, Collura hails del Toro for going “for a tale of tragedy, romance, and redemption rather than a straight horror flick. Which isn’t to say that there isn’t plenty of gore or creepy moments, but that’s the trimmings of this film, as blood-red as they are. No, del Toro’s really interested in – to paraphrase the Creature – why violence so often feels inevitable. And what it takes to stop it.”
Oscar Isaac’s Victor Frankenstein and Charles Dance as his nasty dad are the true monsters in the film, with the Creature being written by del Toro and, in a revelatory performance, played by Jacob Elordi as “a sympathetic, sad-sack SOB who just wants a friend. That the actor also seems to be channeling the body work of GDT regular and creature-player extraordinaire Doug Jones only accentuates how different Elordi’s Creature is from past incarnations.”
Ryan Coogler also found the humanity in the monsters of his film Sinners, with Eric Goldman writing in his review: “They’re sufficiently creepy and bloodthirsty, but Coogler also leans hard into the idea that vampires, in many cases, are depicted as seductive, sexual creatures – and there’s an allure to joining their undead ranks.”
“The vampires of Sinners share something of a hive mind. Amid all the racism and other senseless reasons humans turn on each other for – which Smoke, Stack, and their loved ones are especially familiar with given where they live – here is a society that moved beyond such petty hatred. If you’re a vampire, you’re accepted, regardless of your skin color. You only need to watch out if you’re not one.”
And there’s Weapons, Zach Cregger’s darkly funny horror-thriller that examines an entire community of people. “The mystery of a mass disappearance and its impact on a small town unfold in a fascinatingly layered way that gives every character a chance to shine; the wise decision to break their stories up into multiple, time-scrambling chapters creates multiple cliffhangers that set up a shattering finale,” Tom Jorgensen wrote in his review.
“From that primal starting point, Weapons unfurls itself in time-hopping chapters that afford the story a tremendous sense of scope in spite of its relatively diminutive setting. Each segment takes its time to dig into how the disappearances have affected the lives of those closest to the situation, and Cregger takes care to introduce the audience to the characters in quiet, personal moments of struggle. No one person’s perspective feels more important than any other’s; what’s revealed by these various vantage points makes us constantly reassess our own view of Weapons’ bigger picture.”
Across the pond, director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland revisited post-apocalyptic Britain in 28 Years Later. The movie introduced the Alpha, a subspecies of the Infected who procreate and run around buck naked and buck wild; they’re returning for the upcoming sequel, 28 Days Later: The Bone Temple. “These crazy-ripped, nigh invincible hulks immediately ratchet up the tension any time they’re on screen, with finishers that would make even Sub-Zero exclaim ‘flawless victory’ in satisfied wonder,” Tom Jorgensen wrote in his review. “But as is often the case in zombie fiction – here, let me just lean in and whisper real quick… maybe we’re the real monsters,”
In the film, generations of young Brits have had to grow up too quickly and have only ever known life with the Rage Virus. “The way Holy Island’s citizens are lionizing Spike’s ascension to the hunter role, good-natured though it is, has a haunting, violence-begets-violence quality to it, underlined by the montages of child soldiers and the war poetry of Rudyard Kipling peppered into the edit,” according to Jorgensen.
Elio: The Pixar Box Office Bomb We Loved
Pixar Animation once had the Midas touch at the box office, but in the wake of flops like The Good Dinosaur and Lightyear, they’re no longer a sure thing commercially. That’s too bad, because we found their most recent film, Elio – about a boy who wants to venture into outer space to live with aliens – to be an audience-pleaser despite its dismal box office performance.
