It’s been over twenty years since legendary filmmaker John Waters, who has brought us such films as Pink Flamingos, Hairspray, Cry-Baby, Serial Mom, Cecil B. Demented, and Pecker (among others) has brought a new movie to our screens (that was 2004’s A Dirty Shame) – but it’s not for a lack of trying. Waters wants to make a movie called Liarmouth, he just hasn’t been able to secure funding for it. But even after all this time without a new Waters movie, he’s still on our hearts and minds… and we’re always interested to see what his annual “top 10 movies of the year” list is going to be like. As JoBlo’s own Mathew Plale once noted, Waters’ list is always an eclectic one, filled with movies on the fringe that we may have never even heard of, as he is ever a champion for the maligned. Last year, his list got a lot of attention because he included Joker: Folie à Deux on it and told the haters, “Die, dumbbells, die!” Now, Vulture has published Waters’ best of 2025 list – and the top two spots went to Ari Aster’s Eddington and the horror sequel Final Destination: Bloodlines!
For his top two entries, Waters wrote,
Eddington (Ari Aster): My favorite movie of the year is a disagreeable but highly entertaining tale as exhausting as today’s politics with characters nobody could possibly root for. Yet it’s so terrifyingly funny, so confusingly chaste and kinky that you’ll feel coo-coo crazy and oh-so-cultural after watching. If you don’t like this film, I hate you. Our reviewer Chris Bumbray gave Eddington a 5/10 review, so he better tread carefully in Waters’ presence.
Final Destination: Bloodlines (Adam B. Stein, Zach Lipovsky): The best sequel to the coolest cinematic franchise ever. Ferocious, fractured, and filled with so many scary, twisted surprises—this picture goes beyond trash into a new realm of exploitation art.
The rest of Waters’ list, which you can read at the Vulture list, consists of Oslo Trilogy (Dag Johan Haugerud), Sirāt (Oliver Laxe), Sauna (Mathias Broe), Room Temperature (Dennis Cooper, Zac Farley), Misericordia (Alain Guiraudie), When Fall Is Coming (François Ozon), My Mom Jayne (Mariska Hargitay), and The Empire (Bruno Dumont). As Waters notes, New York City may be the only place someone might have been able to see all of his top ten this year.
Are you a fan of John Waters? What do you think of him naming Eddington and Final Destination: Bloodlines the two best movies of 2025? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
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