Best of 2025
A day in the life of Peter Hujar, a bungled museum heist, and Meredith Monk’s six-decade career were the subjects of some of our favorite art films this year.
Still from Peter Hujar’s Day (2025), dir. by Ira Sachs (image courtesy Janus Films)
A day in the life of Peter Hujar, a bungled museum heist, Meredith Monk’s 60-year career — these subjects brought to life on camera defined our 2025 in art films, a notoriously gelatinous genre. Editor-at-Large Hrag Vartanian found inspiration in a new documentary on late organizer Toni Cade Bambara, while critics Eileen G’Sell and Dan Schindel reflect on a disquieting film about Nazi cinematographer Leni Riefenstahl and a documentary about the friendship between three single-mother artists: painter Lois Dodd, printmaker and illustrator Eleanor Magid, and the late sculptor Louise Kruger. These essential films, listed in no particular order, stand as testaments to both the turmoil and hope this year represented for all of us who love art and the moving picture. —Lakshmi Rivera Amin, associate editor
TCB: The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing, directed by Louis Massiah and Monica Henriquez
A moving documentary about a giant in the field of Black feminist thought and activism, the story of Toni Cade Bambara charts the second half of the 20th century and its relationship to social justice and multicultural ideas quite effectively. An academic who was always involved in activism, her 1980 novel The Salt Eaters even dives into the impact of activism on Black and other BIPOC communities. Covering the Black Arts Movement, among so much else, this Louis Massiah and Monica Henriquez-directed film will leave you energized by all she did and encourages us to continue. Bambara may have left us all too early (in 1995 at the age of 56), but her work and ideas continue to inspire. Kudos to the Blackstar Film Festival for being the ones to launch this at a world premiere in August. —Hrag Vartanian
“Tessitura,” directed by Lydia Cornett and Brit Fryer
Still from “Tessitura,” dir. Lydia Cornett and Brit Fryer, duration: 18 mins. (image courtesy Chicken & Egg Pictures)
Named for the musical range comprising most notes of a vocal part, this short documentary follows three contemporary transgender opera singers — Breanna Sinclairé, Lucas Bouk, and Katherine Goforth — whose capacities challenge both traditional conventions and the presumption that opera itself is an inherently conservative art form. Revealing the gender-fluid history of this classical genre, Tessitura echoes far longer than its 18 resonant minutes. —Eileen G’Sell
Monk in Pieces, directed by Billy Shebar
Meredith Monk discussing music and movement, with a frame from “16 Millimeter Earrings,” in Monk in Pieces (2025), dir. Billy Shebar (image courtesy 110th Street Films)
That artist Meredith Monk is not a household name says much about the sexism she has faced in her 60-year career, as this documentary reveals in no uncertain terms. For those unfamiliar with the avant-garde, multidisciplinary artist, this film serves as an apt corrective, a vibrant mosaic of her life and work that both honors her prolific output and celebrates her singular vision. If the world wasn’t ready for her in the ’80s, then maybe it is now that she’s in her 80s. —Eileen G’Sell
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Riefenstahl, directed by Andres Veiel
Still from Riefenstahl (2025), dir. Andres Veiel, in which Leni Riefenstahl checks her appearance for the recording of the three-part documentary Speer und Er by director Heinrich Breloer (1999) (© Bavaria Media)
“What is the opposite of politics?” asks a journalist of Leni Riefenstahl in 1980, to which she responds, “Art.” Plumbing the life and work of Nazi cinema’s Grand Dame, Riefenstahl makes a quiet and disquieting case for the insidious potential of the moving image, whose seductive power can be easily harnessed to heinous political agendas. Including rarely seen archival footage, the documentary plainly exposes Leni’s barbarism, while never denying her artistic brilliance or the inevitably tangled nature of fascist art and ideology. —Eileen G’Sell
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Windward, directed by Sharon Lockhart
Still from Windward (2025), dir. Sharon Lockhart (© Sharon Lockhart, 2025; image courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin)
Depicting the rugged terrain of Newfoundland’s Fogo Island, the 12 tableaux comprising Sharon Lockhart’s new documentary are at once meditative and beguiling — applying the artist’s meticulous photographic composition to new cinematic purposes. As our eyes rove the screen, following the frolicking local children, Windward presents a singular vision of humans both at peace — and of a piece — with natural landscapes. You’ll never see a kite — or gull — in the same way again. —Eileen G’Sell
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The Mastermind, directed by Kelly Reichardt
Still from The Mastermind (2025), dir. Kelly Reichardt (image courtesy Mubi)
Art theft is back in style, as seen with the recent Louvre heist. That event was prefigured by a much less glamorous vision in The Mastermind, courtesy of US cinema’s chief realist Kelly Reichardt. Against the backdrop of the roiling political tensions of 1970s America, one dim bulb decides he can swipe some Arthur Doves from a local museum and get away with it. It turns out he does not have what it takes to make it as a mastermind in Nixonland. —Dan Schindel
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Blue Moon, directed by Richard Linklater
Still from Blue Moon (2025), dir. Richard Linklater, featuring Ethan Hawke as Lorenz Hart (image by Sabrina Lantos, courtesy Sony Pictures Classics)
Like a Carson McCullers story set at Sardi’s, this film is as sad as it is funny, rewarding anyone who adores the phonic echo of a beautiful word — written, sung, or spoken. Outwardly depicting Lorenz Hart’s fall from grace within the boisterous, increasingly conservative milieu of Broadway theatre, this film provocatively engages the questions of just what art is meant to do and whom it is meant to serve — questions no less relevant to the censored American art world today. Ethan Hawke as Hart is transformative. —Eileen G’Sell
Peter Hujar’s Day, directed by Ira Sachs
Still from Peter Hujar’s Day, dir. by Ira Sachs (image courtesy Janus Films)
One early winter Thursday in 1974, writer Linda Rosenkrantz recorded her friend, photographer Peter Hujar, as he recounted his activities over a 24-hour period. Sachs’s latest feature transforms the transcript into a thing of slow cinematic splendor, unfurling in tableaux within Rosenkrantz’s boho ’70s apartment. Both an offbeat buddy film of the highest order and a tender portrait of Hujar’s hustle prior to art-world fame, Peter Hujar’s Day reminds us that, between two brainy, brilliant friends, no topic can ever be boring, and even the most mundane experience can inform an artist’s output. —Eileen G’Sell
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Artists in Residence, directed by Katie Jacobs
Still from Artists in Residence (2025), dir. Katie Jacobs, with Eleanor Magid (left) and Lois Dodd (right) in conversation (image courtesy Heel and Toe Films)
Colorful yet clear-eyed, this poignant documentary chronicles the friendships and creative output of three single-mother artists — painter Lois Dodd, printmaker and illustrator Eleanor Magid, and the late sculptor Louise Kruger — who moved into a house in New York’s Bowery district in 1959. Exploring the sexism inherent to both mid-century America and the bohemian, but exclusionary, New York art world, Artists in Residence acknowledges the toll of the women’s choices to prioritize their art, while celebrating their audacity and respective legacies. —Eileen G’Sell
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A Want In Her, directed by Myrid Carten
Still from A Want in Her, dir. Myrid Carten (image courtesy NOISE Film and TV)
What do we owe the ones we love — no matter what they have taken from us? And what does an artist owe her art, in terms of emotional versus literal truth? In this bleak yet poetic debut documentary, a young artist and filmmaker returns to Ireland in search of her alcoholic mother Nuala. Excavating their wrenching family past, Carten reckons with the fraught nature of incorporating personal trauma into creative work, but also the cathartic possibilities of collaboration. The stark beauty of Ireland’s natural topography is set against that of a crumbling home in which addiction looms like a winged beast. —Eileen G’Sell
