Every year, the awards gods decree that a certain group of films are the most noteworthy. Many of the same titles end up appearing on every list of critics association awards, guild nominations and Oscar projections. This means that dozens of other titles end up getting lost along the way, thanks to having an all-too-brief stint in theaters only to swim into the sea of streaming releases as one in a vast school of tasty catches.
Overlooked can mean many things. Sometimes it means that critics weren’t onboard, even if many viewers disagreed. Or maybe a movie had upwards of 90% on Rotten Tomatoes, like Kristen Stewart’s “The Chronology of Water,” but got overshadowed during its initial limited release in a brutally tough theatrical market for indie films. Or maybe, like “Jingle Bell Heist,” it’s from a category like “holiday movies” that doesn’t get much respect. In addition, there are many horror and other genre films that are just as well-crafted as a lot of awards bait but can end up getting lost in the shuffle.
Here are Variety‘s picks for the 2025 releases that are worth re-considering and seeking out.
A Mob drama so reviled by the critics that I felt a touch embarrassed every time I talked about how much I liked it. But it’s seriously good! What seemed to push everyone’s buttons was Robert De Niro, having portrayed about 100 gangsters in his life, now deigning to play two of them…at once. In this true-life war of the New York underworld, he embodies a pair of lifelong frenemies: Frank Costello, who is courtly and political, trying to live in the real world, and also Vito Genovese, the sociopathic firecracker who doesn’t want to be controlled by anyone. The reviewers treated this as a joke, as if it were “GoodFellas” meets “The Patty Duke Show,” but just watch what De Niro brings off; he creates a master class in the nuances of Mob psychology. The movie, directed with straight-ahead gusto by Barry Levinson, was written by “GoodFellas’” Nicholas Pileggi, and it’s one of the only films to dig behind the façade of the gangsters you used to see in tabloid-newspaper photographs — the old men in glasses and fedoras who ruled the Italian American underworld in the ’50s and ’60s. “The Alto Knights” was a big enough bomb to indicate that this kind of Mob movie has come to its end as a genre, but if you’ve been a connoisseur of it, you owe it to yourself to see what amounts to an essential gangster chronicle. — Owen Gleiberman