The Best Movies of 2025, According to Glamour Editor

You might be on the fence to see Hamnet given the premise—that the grief William Shakespeare feels over the loss of his son is so immense it leads him to write the greatest tragedy in the English language. For me, it was the power of Chloé Zhao’s direction and Paul Mescal (William Shakespeare) and Jessie Buckley (Shakespeare’s wife, Agnes), two actors who almost never choose a bad project, that convinced me. But I won’t sugarcoat it: This is a HARD watch. Shakespeare may be the inspiration, but this is really Agnes’s story and Buckley’s movie. And when the worst possible thing happens, I felt Agnes’s despair so intensely I had to stop myself from letting out a guttural, nearly feral scream I felt bubbling below the surface. (Granted, I may have been particularly traumatized: I’m a mother to boy-girl twins; sweet 11-year-old Hamnet is…was…a boy-girl twin.)

However, as anyone who has ever seen Hamlet performed live knows, there is beauty in tragedy. There is so much love in this film—the love of a partner, the love of a parent, the love of a child, the love of a sibling—that it is overwhelming. It’s a reminder of why we’re here on this Earth, of what truly matters. As Shakespeare himself wrote, “Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, but bears it out even to the edge of doom.” When I got home from the theater, I snuck into my sleeping children’s room so I could kiss their little heads. The morning was too long to wait.

—Anna Moeslein, Deputy Editor