A “best of” movies list devoted to the first half of the year raises an implicit question: Is there a substantive difference between the first half of the year and the second half? We all know the answer: Duh, yes. The second half — the last third, actually — is jam-packed with awards-bait films, and that means that it’s destined to include many of the year’s heaviest artistic hitters. That, by definition, would seem to render the first half of the year a paler, less powerful version of what follows.
Yet that’s honestly not how we think of it.
Our list of the 10 best movies of 2025 so far does include an awards contender or two. But the essence of what’s appealing about this half of the year is that there’s a special mystique to a good movie that, for whatever reason, isn’t considered an awards-race show horse. Will Steven Soderbergh’s “Black Bag” end up as a best picture nominee? We seriously doubt it, but it’s a gem. And we dare you to listen to us — rather than the tidal wave of critics who crashed down on it — when we say that “The Alto Knights” is a Mob saga built to last. Inevitably, there’s a termite-art quality to the best films of the year so far. Here are Variety chief film critics Peter Debruge and Owen Gleiberman’s choices for 10 that stood out from the pack.
The Alto Knights
Criminally underrated. Written by Nicholas Pileggi and directed by Barry Levinson, it’s no “GoodFellas” or “Bugsy,” but it’s a bracing true-life drama — intricate in its violence, layered in its sociopathology — that carves out a place in the arena of Mob manners and mores. It’s about the gangsters you used to see in tabloid-newspaper photographs — the old men in glasses and fedoras who ruled the Italian underworld in the ’50s and ’60s. Robert De Niro plays two of them, and though he was raked over the coals for it (“Why couldn’t they just get two different actors?”), what De Niro brings off in this astonishing double performance is an acting master class. As Frank Costello, he’s fatally civilized (courtly, political, trying to live in the real world), while his Vito Genovese is the selfish hothead firecracker. It’s the familiar Charlie/Johnny Boy, Michael/Sonny split, which De Niro, embodying these Mobster frenemies, elevates into a nearly mystical portrait of the underworld id and ego. Yes, the film was a big bomb, indicating that the slow-burn Mafia blood opera is no longer a money genre. But let’s call “The Alto Knights” its riveting swan song. —Owen Gleiberman
