Weapons, Predator: Killer of Killers, Superman Courtesy of Warner Bros.; Hulu/Courtesy Everett Collection; Warner Bros./Courtesy Everett Collection Share on Facebook Share on X Google Preferred Share to Flipboard Send an Email Show additional share options Share on Reddit Post a Comment Share on Whats App Share on Pinterest Share on LinkedIn Print the Article Share on Tumblr Logo text Welcome to one of the first "best of lists" of 2026. It's also hopefully the last "best of list" of 2025. Genre movies, the movies that Heat Vision celebrates, covers and reports on, had a banner year in 2025. Look no further than Thursday's DGA nominations, which saw Ryan Coogler snag a slot for his period vampire movie Sinners and Guillermo del Toro earn one for his adaptation of Frankenstein. You could even make a case that Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another is a kind of ersatz action thriller - and if you're willing to push it, argue Chloe Zhao's Hamnet is a ghost story (although we won't). It was a mixed bag for the genre that had dominated movie culture for close to a decade and a half. Superhero comic book movies had four releases, but they varied wildly in quality (we still maintain that Fantastic Four: First Steps had the year's best score) and didn't engender the kind of fervor they once did. Horror, on the other hand, did dominate, with some of the most original voices and indelible imagery coming from the scary movie genre. Even the stuff that didn't work was interesting (Good Boy, a good half hour short stretched to feature length). Horror factory Blumhouse had a lot of movies, some of them were even hits, but none seemed to have left a lasting impact. And kudos to the cross-over material, such as The Long Walk, a gritty watch with excellent performance, and Companion, a fun romp with sci-fi elements that deserved a wider audience. Action movies, however, were mostly MIA in 2025. Where was the fun, the spectacle, the body count? Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning did boast set pieces that are mini-movies unto themselves, precise time pieces that click gears into place for a satisfying tick, tock, boom. But the movie itself was bloated and expository-laden, a meh ending to a great action series (at least they say it's the end). Sisu: The Road to Revenge made up for a lot of the genre's lost ground, providing pulpy exploitation fun and feeling like it was being made by a ten-year old who was playing with toy soldiers. We've tried to watch as much as we could. We may have missed some, maybe some of your favorites, so feel free to let us know. Without further ado, the (hopefully, probably?) last Top 10 movies lift of 2025, Heat Vision style. 28 Years Later (Sony) Image Credit: Columbia Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection Logo text At its best, (that run back to safety amid the Aurora Borealis), 28 Years Later felt like the franchise's answer to Mad Max: Fury Road, taking a beloved property and elevating its tension and production value in ways you couldn't have imagined back when the original opened. Director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland's decades-in-the-making sequel mostly lived up to the pent-up demand, though the sharp left-turn in the middle of the movie left some audiences feeling duped. Then again, that's built into the DNA of the franchise (remember the army base act in 28 Days Later)? Superman (DC Studios/Warner Bros.) Image Credit: Warner Bros./Courtesy Everett Collection Logo text James Gunn didn't thread a Superman needle as much as jam a firehose to it and open it full throttle. A movie that swings from high highs to low lows, it was also the one big superhero movie with actual cool moments (almost anytime Mr. Terrific was onscreen, especially that beach fight sequence) and memorable character moments (almost anytime Metamorpho or Jimmy Olsen were on screen) that, at its best, captured the fun of a Superman story. KPop Demon Hunters (Netflix) Image Credit: Courtesy of Netflix Logo text If you told us a year ago that a movie featuring a K-pop group would be in the Heat Vision Top 10, we would have revoked your geek credentials. But then came along this confection, a mélange of Korean mythology, anime, martial artistry, and soul-sucking demons. And, it's a musical! Directed by Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans, the movie was years-in-the-making but somehow felt perfectly timed to our now, blasting you with a gleeful energy and pop concert visuals and sucking you into its tractor beam of loony teenage angst and butt-kicking. The most infectious movie of the year. Black Bag (Focus Features) Image Credit: Claudette Barius/Focus Features Logo text Movies about spies used to dangerous and sexy. Well, in the hands of director Steven Soderbergh and writer David Koepp, working in top form, they were once again. A delectably stylish movie follows an intelligence officer (Michael Fassbender, showing us he needs to be seen more often) that has to find a traitor in his midst ... and the list of