Top 10 Movies of 2025 (Sort of)

This end-of-year list may be one of my less reliable recaps. Why pick The Grace Lee Project instead of Yellow Door: '90s Lo-fi Film Club? Why not include a Hong Sang-soo film since I do like him and I watched a half-dozen of his pics? All I can say is that in earlier versions, this was not the case. Outside of the top four recommendations, this list has been in constant flux for weeks. The only constant has been Broker which has always been ranked number one. To see what almost made it (or made it one day but not today), check out the honorable mentions at the end.

1. Broker (2022): Two hardluck scrappers (Song Kang-ho, Gang Dong-won) run a black market adoption scam that gets complicated when a birth-mom (IU) shows up. Hirokazu Koreeda (Shoplifters) directs.

2. 12.12: The Day (2023): This history lesson plays out like a topnotch thriller as it recounts a military coup that followed the assassination of South Korea's president in 1979.

3. KPop Demon Hunters (2025): A international cultural sensation that lives up to the hype, this animation about revealing your true self while fighting evil forces will leave you feeling "up, up, up."

4. Long Live the Island Frogs (1972): Two big-hearted teachers (Shin Il-ryong, Kim Seon-hui) come to an isolated island village to change the lives of the children through power of education...and basketball!

5. Hopeless (2023): Writer-director Kim Chang-hoon's unsparing portrait of a cursed life is as gripping as it is grim. Hong Xa-bin and Song Joong-ki co-star.

6. Man in Love (2014): The illogical romance in Han Dong-wook's kooky crime pic — with a brilliant turn from Hwang Jung-min — is improbably irresistable.

7. Brave Citizen (2023): Because sometimes you need a vigilante film with a female lead (Shin Hye-sun) wearing a cat mask.

8. The Grace Lee Project (2005): This autobiographical doc about a Korean-American woman tracking down a slew of her namesakes starts off as preposterous but ends up profound.

9. Starting Point (1969): One of the trippiest Korean gay films you're likely to see dates back a few decades. (2005's Escape shows the genre continues.)

10. The Kicks of Death (2016): Charles Han Yong-cheol is no Dragon Lee. And why should he be? He's a martial arts star deserving of his own fan club.

Honorable Mentions: The Match (2025), Walk Up (2022), People in the Slum (1982), Yellow Door (2023), and Missing You (2016).

Brave Citizen: Meow Meow

I fell hard for Brave Citizen pretty quickly. Once director Park Jin-Pyo and screenwriter Yeo Ji-na had established this action movie is all about a failed female boxer who's going to combat high school bullying by donning a cat mask then punching the perpetrators, I was completely in. (I was one of those teens who reveled in WWE storylines and Brave Citizen is basically the bargain basement version of a superhero origination story without special effects or delusions of grandeur.) As the central pugilist-turned-teacher So Si-min, Shin Hye-sun does a terrific job at being both downtrodden and determined. You know she deserves better than this secondrate job at a high school where the overaged senior Han Soo-kang (Lee Jun-young) is making life miserable for faculty and students alike because he's rich, sadistic, and has connections in the police force. And you can see how she'd naturally make strong aliances with experienced educator Lee Jae-kyeong (Cha Cheong-hwa) and boyfriend cop Lee Kwon-joong (Lee Chan-Hyeong).

Then once you meet her goofy dad (Park Hyuk-kwon), you just know that she's unlikely to take the safe path to job security if it means overlooking the horrendous hazing being directed at Jin-hyeong (Park Jung-woo) who happens to be the grandson of the sweet old lady (Son Sook) who street-vends the best kimbap in her neighborhood. Is Brave Citizen predictable? Very much so. Farfetched? Oh, hell yes. But I liked watching a cat-masked Si-min overcome obstacles while executing fabulous taekwondo moves, whether the man getting kicked in the face is in the ring or on the sidewalk. This one's a knockout. Sequel please.