Welcome to the 2025 SiftPop.com Sifties!
This year, the SiftPop writers came together to nominate five movies for Best Narrative Experience. A film’s narrative often plays a large role in its overall quality, and we wanted to recognize that with this award!
Marty Supreme plays like a parable, one where a hotheaded, self-overconfident young man repeatedly screws over everyone in his path en route to learning that living life for yourself isn’t sustainable long term. It’s a movie full of vignettes, in which our main character Marty flies from situation to situation, ping pong game to ping pong game, swindle to swindle… loss to loss. But watching him navigate each one of these moments is exciting, because he repeatedly manages to wriggle his way out of situations, until he can’t anymore. And by the end, the way theme ties into narrative and emotion is unlike anything we’ve seen from any other Safdie brothers movie.
A story in three distinct parts, One Battle After Another manages to remain fresh and interesting no matter what is happening. The first act is the most politically sound of the three, speedrunning the language and aesthetics of revolution. The second act is essentially a madcap, slapstick comedy. Leonardo DiCaprio gets a chance to flex his comedic muscles, and it’s entertaining to watch all the comedic setups play out. And the final act brings all the emotions together and reminds us of the real heart of the film. It’s great to watch how Paul Thomas Anderson weaves all three sections together narratively.
If there’s a single thing about Weapons that works, it’s its narrative experience. You think you’re in for one type of movie as you watch Justine’s life post-disappearance, but once that first perspective change hits, it’s a lean-forward-in-your-seat moment. And then the film continues to ramp up from there. It keeps you on your toes with the mystery, while never missing a moment to scare you or make you laugh, all the way to the reveal and culmination of evil’s story.
It almost becomes a tradition that we get another Knives Out universe film, and it is a straight-up banger. And this time, instead of covering immigration/racism, or billionaires being dumb, “but not dumb, it’s almost brilliant, just dumb” way, Rian Johnson decided to tackle one of the least controversial subjects, faith. And before you think he’s lost his edge, because he chose to tackle such an easy subject this time around, hear me out. Wake Up Dead Man is one of the most nuanced movies about faith out there. You will love it whether you are a Christian, a Buddhist, an atheist, or anything else, because it doesn’t try to convince anyone about anything, it looks honestly at all our players, what ideas they represent and why. It takes someone smart to make religion the front and center of their movie without making that the only thing it’s about, and still make you root for most of the characters, religious or not. It’s brilliantly shot, lit, scored, performed and has the best phone call scene of 2025, which is the heart of this movie. You know the movie is on another level when you know who did it and couldn’t care less, because you are enjoying the ride.
In many ways Sinners wears its cultural themes on its sleeve. Its jaw-dropping, centerpiece-breaking barriers of time and space on screen are its thesis statement; art is universal and transcends any limitation of the moment. We all feel it in our own way, and we’re all drawn to it, but we don’t all have the best interests of art or artists at heart. The rest of the film is an exploration of that thesis statement as it relates to lines of division in humanity, and specifically the line of the oppressed creating art from pain, and oppressors seeking to monetize that art and pain for selfish purposes. Putting the core of this messaging in its characters to create a movie that both explores those who seek to live through the pain of their circumstances, and the broader realities of the world that inflicts those circumstances makes for a story that is so specific it can only be universal, like a true piece of art. The inclusion of Remmick as the oppressed who was absorbed into the system of oppression only drives home the fact that Ryan Coogler knew exactly what he was doing when he chose to turn a story of Black lives in the Prohibition era into a vampire movie, and he deserves all the accolades for how thoughtful and deeply resonant Sinners is.
Make sure to check out the previous 2025 Sifties winners, and check back tomorrow for the winner of Best Performance!