The Best Cast Movies of 2025

The introduction of the Academy Award for “Best Casting” has a lot of people wondering: What the heck does that mean?

The art of casting a motion picture goes beyond the accumulation of big above-the-line stars. It’s the art of giving a face, a posture, a voice and a personality to every human being we see on screen. Casting a bunch of big names is great, of course, but if you ask me, the true test of great casting is in all the smaller roles which, typically, receive no acclaim, but are largely responsible for selling the reality of the story. No matter how brilliant the leads are, if they exist in a world where nobody else is believable, it’s going to distract from their performances and detract from the overall film.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at the films this year — Oscar-contenders and otherwise — where every role, no matter how small, was brilliantly performed, and fleshed out the story in a believable, brilliant way.

“Eephus”

Carson Lund’s practically-perfect baseball drama “Eephus” is a film about the little guys. Not in the Hollywood sense where all the little guys are all movie star handsome and destined for greatness by the end of Act Three, but in the sense that they’re just normal dudes who like baseball, but have no future in the sport.

When their local baseball diamond is about to get bulldozed, and the next-closest diamond is just far enough away it’s not worth the bother, they gather for one last game, which to some is a matter of principle, and to others is taking too damn long because they just want to go home.

Lund assembles a cavalcade of fascinating, unassuming actors with distinct personae, from the players to the casual passers-by who watch the game for a while, don’t understand it, and move on with their lives. It’s a film about community which would have fallen apart without exceptional casting.

“Hedda”

Nia DaCosta’s bold and serpentine new adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” is a showcase for Tessa Thompson, playing the title role of a Bohemian woman trapped in a marriage of convenience, which just got inconvenient. In the play she spends most of her time at home, with only a couple of guests, while important events take place off-stage at social functions. In DaCosta’s film, which also moves the story to the 1950s and updates it to highlight themes of race and queerness, all that partying is moved inside Hedda’s house, for an extended, Gatsby-esque bacchanalia.

As such, “Hedda” is a film filled with people. Revelers and scholars and lotharios and sticks in the proverbial mud. The density of the cast creates an environment for the protagonist which is both upsettingly public and incredibly isolating, so that there’s no hope for escape and no chance for true intimacy. And all the parts are played to the nines.

“The Long Walk”

Not many casts this year had gigs as punishing as “The Long Walk,” or at least that’s how it looks. Francis Lawrence’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel, about a group of young men forced to trudge until they die of exhaustion or get shot for falling behind, is an oppressive story about a terrible, terrifying physical grind.

Not only is (almost) every actor constantly marching, they’re also constantly on-screen, because with the exception of a brief prologue and sparse flashbacks, “The Long Walk” takes place on an open road with nothing to cut to. So we have to get to know these people, even the ones who die early, and every pathetic young man in Lawrence’s film is powerfully characterized. Even the ones who don’t talk much, or at all, are in the background of most shots, suffering just as much as the film’s excellent two leads, Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson. The film does not work without the right cast, not even for a moment. Thankfully it’s a brilliant piece of design work, a movie where all of the pieces fit right.

“The Luckiest Man in America”

Released earlier in the year and largely overlooked, Samir Oliveros’ excellent biopic “The Luckiest Man in America” stars Paul Walter Hauser as Michael Larson, a loser who connives his way onto the popular game show “Press Your Luck” in 1984. The show included a game mechanic where the contestants have to pause a seemingly random light show, and either win big if the lights land on prizes, or lose everything if the lights stop on the dreaded “Whammies.” Larson, however, figured out the patterns weren’t random, and went on an epic run of unstoppable victory, causing the television executives to panic and do everything in their power to stop his winning streak and save their jobs.

It’s a memorable and unusual piece of TV history, but transforming it into a transfixing film was no easy feat. “The Luckiest Man in America” gives Hauser the opportunity to do stellar, complex work but the film’s genius is its emphasis on the people in Larson’s orbit. His scheme, which is technically legal but not in the spirit of the game (athough that “spirit” is, itself, fundamentally exploitative), has a ripple effect that jeopardizes the livelihoods of countless people, and those people each get center stage throughout the film. There’s a palpable desperation in all of these performances, many of which are cast playfully — Johnny Knoxville as the living embodiment of a TV faceman is a stroke of brilliance — and all of whom shine.

“Nouvelle Vague”

Richard Linklater’s obsessively-detailed ode to the French New Wave casts its many, many, many characters under a microscope. “Nouvelle Vague” takes place in France in the mid-20th century, in a community packed to the gills with important film critics and filmmakers, many of whom the typical audience member won’t recognize, but all of whom are — even if they only appear in one or two shots — impeccably cast to embody the real-life individuals and their aesthetics. Linklater goes out of his way to cast Roxane Rivière as Agnès Varda, and she’s the perfect Varda, and I didn’t count but I’d be surprised if she has more than 45 seconds of screen time.

And we have the iconic stars: “Breathless” director Jean-Luc Godard, played by the hitherto unknown but masterful Guillaume Marbeck, and his two leads, Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo, played by Zoey Deutch and Aubry Dullin. They’re all playing people whose personalities and performances are definitive building blocks of motion picture history. Finding actors who looked the part would be hard enough (Dullin, especially, is a dead ringer), but to capture their swagger, their alchemical charisma — or in the case of Godard, his insufferable pretentiousness — is an almost unthinkable feat. And “Nouvelle Vague” pulls it off, in every scene, with every character.

“One Battle After Another”

I wasn’t a fan of “One Battle After Another.” I’ve been describing it as the type of film the vampires might have made in “Sinners,” channeling all the significance and personality of every major multicultural touchstone through the highly questionable, often out-of-touch lens of mediocre white men, pushing to the sidelines most of the oppressed characters around whom the story — and indeed the film’s whole world — allegedly revolves. But whatever your opinion, it’s got one heck of a cast, right?

“One Battle After Another” yields an annoying amount of the spotlight to its mediocre middle-aged white leads, while ostensibly telling a story about the heroism and hardships of marginalized groups, but it tries to, and almost succeeds at mitigating that problem by enlisting the best possible actors for every conceivable role. The ill-fated members of the French 75 are all played by alluring actors, suggesting they inhabit a bigger and more interesting world than we get to see. And when DiCaprio’s burnout, inexplicably aggrandized Bob turns to Benicio del Toro’s Sergio St. Carlos for help in a crisis, they navigate a rich and complex underground for undocumented immigrants, so unthinkably compelling it’s hard to imagine why Paul Thomas Anderson isn’t putting them front and center.

But again, whether you love it or think it’s “meh,” Anderson’s film finds space (maybe not enough, but space nevertheless) for brilliant, underappreciated actors like Regina Hall, and wisely gave a lead role to newcomer Chase Infiniti, a bona fide discovery who acts opposite titans and proves she’s already one of them.

“Queen of the Ring”

Another overlooked gem from early 2025, Ash Avildsen’s “Queen of the Ring” is a biopic about Mildred Burke, a pioneer of women’s wrestling who played an outsized role in the development of the industry, the sport, and the personality of what has become one of America’s favorite pasttimes.

“Queen of the Ring” stars Emily Bett Rickards, best known from the TV series “Arrow,” where she didn’t get to fight very much. Avildsen’s film rectifies that inequity by concentrating on the actor’s physicality, giving her a spotlight to flex her muscles, literally and figuratively. And since “Queen of the Ring” is a film about women wrestlers, struggling to find a place in a society and culture that devalues and condescends to them, Avildsen casts an incredible group of women to play these early revolutionaries, giving actors like Deborah Ann Woll and Francesca Eastwood the chance to explore the physicality of their craft in ways few other film or TV shows make space for.

And although “Queen of the Ring” is, from a dramatic perspective, a little on-the-nose and clunky, the cast of magnetic, liberated performers he assembles elevate the material into something truly inspired. Also, bonus points for recognizing the brilliance of Toni Storm before everyone else in Hollywood. “Queen of the Ring” is a film about recognizing great women with talent that, in turn, recognizes great women with talent.

“Rental Family”

Brendan Fraser’s first major role since winning an Academy Award finds him in Japan, playing an actor who built his whole career on playing token white guys. His career changes dramatically when he’s hired by an agency which needs actors to pretend to play real roles in people’s lives, like best friends, funeral guests, penitent adulterers and absentee dads.

Hikari’s kind, sometimes saccharine drama is an ode to the craft of acting, and illustrates the roles people play in our lives, and the empathy we glean from these artists, whose whole job is to connect with us on a human level. To that end the film would have flopped if the cast wasn’t impeccable, but the cast is impeccable, so thank goodness for that. Fraser pops in and out of the lives of many minor characters in “Rental Family,” each of whom have their own distinct problems and a desperate need for connection, and if any one of them didn’t feel real, the whole production would have collapsed. It’s a mixed-bag movie, but the casting deserves serious accolades.

“The Secret Agent”

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s “The Secret Agent” isn’t about a secret agent, it’s about living under the unyielding weight of corruption and fascism, where every action is either a revolutionary act or a concession to power, and even the happiest, smallest personal moments can be interrupted by harsh reminders that you aren’t actually free.

So although Wagner Moura gives an incredible performance as a former college professor living under an assumed identity, the movie relies on its larger cast to sell the desperate reality of living in Brazil in the late 1970s. Corrupt police, the privileged bourgeois, the exploited poor, the closet queer community, the incompetent middle-men assassins.

Everyone in “The Secret Agent” is brilliant and contributes the film’s intricate tapestry, but the film wisely casts the late, yet immortal Udo Kier in his final, haunting role. It’s a tiny part, and he’s only on-screen for a couple of minutes, but he plays a Holocaust survivor who the criminal police chief thinks was a Nazi, and has to suffer the indignity of being praised for his own oppression, just to run his business and stay in the government’s good graces. It’s just one of many perfectly cast roles in “The Secret Agent,” but Kier is emblematic of the film’s overall philosophy, where every character is a world in themselves, and every story matters.

“Sinners”

It’s hard to oversell the brilliance of Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners,” a handsome socially-conscious historical epic that’s also a claustrophobic badass vampire siege film. Coogler spends half of his ample runtime introducing audiences to a vast panoply of vital, complex characters and sends them into a trancelike nirvana which transcends space and time, incorporating them all into the past, present and future of Black culture. Then it stuffs them in a pressure cooker, besetting them on all sides by supernatural monsters who are living, breathing metaphors for social homogenization and corporate IP slurry.

And of course none of that would work had Coogler not cast the hell out of this genre-bending masterpiece. The racist monsters and the monsters who aren’t as enlightened as they think they are, all of whom are convinced they know better than Black people about their own lives, are wicked, wretched people who are believably, horrifyingly convinced of their own greatness. The people of color trying, and succeeding, to carve out a place for their own happiness and success and artistry, a sea of distinct faces and personalities. Sex and euphoria and violence and fear, each writ large and small on the out of this world ensemble.

For years, Coogler has made films about characters living in vast, populated worlds, where every story is but one of countless others. “Sinners” is his greatest accomplishment, on almost every level.

“Train Dreams”

People don’t look the way they used to. There are a million reasons for that, not limited to developments in health care and fashion, but it’s palpable either way. Clint Bentley’s “Train Dreams,” which takes place in the early 20th century, isn’t a glamorous interpretation of the past. It’s a down to earth, pastoral, “you are there” portrayal of individuals whose lives weren’t important enough to document in detail, and who only exist today in stray photographs of weathered, hard-living people who wear their whole lives on their faces.

Casting an ensemble for a film like “Train Dreams,” and committing to the reality of the film and its era and the individuals living within it, is no small feat. Bentley’s film pulls it off, admirably, populating its world with rugged individuals living hard lives and finding, briefly, peaceful moments. And also enduring, often briefly, sometimes for years on end, unpredictable shocks and horrors. The camps full of loggers, each of them outcasts in their own way, many of them poets, make Joel Edgerton’s quiet, loving loner look right at home, and make “Train Dreams” a truly transportive experience.

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