Methodology

Our formula considers four factors to generate a rating for each movie. Here they are, ranked from most to least important:

• Audience Score: Do viewers like the movie?
• Interest Score: Are people reading about, searching for it or leaving reviews for it?
• Cast Score: How notable or award-winning is the cast?
• Recency Score: Did it come out recently?

For these first three metrics, if a film is in the top 15% of our Top 100 list, we give it a special badge. We use data from Yahoo and reliable movie sources including JustWatch to calculate our scores, and only include films that got a wide theatrical or streaming release in the U.S. in 2025. Learn more about what goes into each metric in the full methodology.