As has become annual tradition, former President Barack Obama named his favorite 2025 movies, music and books on Thursday, sharing in a social media post that “Sinners,” “One Battle After Another” and “Hamnet” were among his film highlights of the year.
“As 2025 comes to a close, I’m continuing a tradition that I started during my time in the White House: sharing my annual lists of favorite books, movies and music,” the former president wrote on X. “I hope you find something new to enjoy — and please send any recommendations for me to check out!”
Read Obama’s full list of favorite movies from 2025 below:
- “One Battle After Another”
- “Sinners”
- “It Was Just an Accident”
- “Hamnet”
- “Sentimental Value”
- “No Other Choice”
- “The Secret Agent”
- “Train Dreams”
- “Jay Kelly”
- “Good Fortune”
- “Orwell: 2+2=5”
As 2025 comes to a close, I'm continuing a tradition that I started during my time in the White House: sharing my annual lists of favorite books, movies, and music. I hope you find something new to enjoy—and please send any recommendations for me to check out! pic.twitter.com/T9LFt5fnKG
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) December 18, 2025
As the only documentary on Obama’s list, “Orwell: 2+2=5” is a particularly interesting choice. Named by TheWrap’s Steve Pond as the year’s “timeliest” documentary, the Raoul Peck-directed feature uses the British author George Orwell’s final years, 1948 to 1950, in which he finished “1984” in a sanitarium on a remote Scottish island, as a jumping-off point for an examination of the playbook for totalitarianism as it was practiced in Orwell’s dystopian classic but also by governments around the world over the past century. That includes the United States under President Donald Trump.
“The guideline for me was that I didn’t want to make a film exclusively about Donald Trump,” Peck told TheWrap in an interview earlier this year. “When I started the movie, we were all pretty much sure that Kamala Harris would be president, and the film was as urgent for me as it is now with Trump. I don’t make films for just a moment. I make a film the same way Orwell wrote, in a way that is as efficient today as it was in his time.”
Themes of political unrest and authoritarianism are similarly seen in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” and international entries like “It Was Just an Accident” and “The Secret Agent.”
“No Other Choice,” meanwhile, examines the world’s current state of late-stage capitalism run by a few powerful billionaires. (Distributor Neon even cheekily invited all Fortune 500 CEOs to a special screening to face the toxic culture they’ve created, positing, “This is truly a film that speaks to you.”)
But it wasn’t all Important Films With a Message for Obama this year. He also highlighted heartrending family dramas like “Hamnet” and “Sentimental Value,” the summer’s horror blockbuster “Sinners” by one of Hollywood’s most prominent Black filmmakers and even the unlikely fantasy-comedy from Aziz Ansari, “Good Fortune.”
