With stormy seas ahead in the world of cinema, we celebrate the good and the great from another spectacular year for the medium.
We’re bracing ourselves for some weird machinations in the world of film in the coming years, particularly as some of the key studio filmmakers sacrifice art and premium exhibition at the altar of making sure the CEO can add an extra 0 to the latest stock dividend payout. Yet we believe the good will out in some shape or form, and we hope that the filmmakers whose work features on this list do not find themselves hitting a wall when it comes to funding their next films, and the films after that. We hope that people will glance through this list and nod along at our sage wisdom, but more than that, we also hope that this will be an entry point for discovery for some of the year’s finest works of cinema. A small note: this run-down is based on film releases from 1 Feb 2025 to 31 Jan 2026, so there may be a few titles that have yet to hit cinemas yet.
30. Eddington
In 2025 Ari Aster made the film that everyone loved to hate… again! We weren’t so sold on his naval-gazing doodle from 2023, Beau is Afraid, but with Eddington, he’s joined again by an all-in Joaquin Phoenix who plays an impulsive New Mexican sheriff whose rebellion against a mask mandate in his sleepy little burg swiftly escalates into all-out war. Sacred cows are ritually slaughtered in every scene, and despite its self-consciously alienating approach, it’s perhaps the film that best encapsulates the crazy moment of societal discordance that Americans are experiencing right now.
Read our review.
29. Pavements
If there’s one thing that’s as bad as a biopic, it’s a documentary puff-piece that trundles through an artist’s career like a Wikipedia page come to life. Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements is not that movie, as the director decides to pick apart the mythos of the beloved indie rock band by shooting the making of his own fake prestige biopic and an accompanying off-broadway musical review. It’s an absolute hoot.
Read our review.
28. Zodiac Killer Project
What Pavements is to the music bio doc, Zodiac Killer Project is to the true crime saga, a caustic critique of self-serious tabloid cliché about a filmmaker (Charlie Shackleton) presenting sketches for an abortive prestige project about – you guessed it! – the Zodiac killer. It’s a step-up for this exciting British filmmaker whose passions extend as much to the medium as they do the message.
Read our review.
27. I Only Rest in the Storm
One of the highlights of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, Pedro Pinho’s expansive exploration into Europe’s colonial legacy in Africa avoids hand-wringing platitudes in favour of something more authentic and exciting. It sees a civil engineer from Portugal heading to Guinea Bissau to gauge the possibility of a new road project, and his research extends to a deep dive of the country’s various cultural enclaves. Three-and-a-half hours fly by!
26. Cloud
Where Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 2001 film Pulse explored digital isolation with ghosts breaking into reality through the internet, his latest techno-thriller is less supernatural but equally unsettling, instead bringing the online world of marketplaces and forums into the real world. Kurosawa gives us so much to chew on with layers upon layers of commodity fetishism, digital age paranoia and the modern day economy of online interaction within our grotesque late capitalist hellscape, doing so with humour, dread and tension, sharp as ever. Features one of the best shoot-outs of the year.
Read our review.
24. The Smashing Machine
The first Safdie brother to make our 2025 list, as Benny enters the ring with this passionate solo project about one of the founding fathers of MMA, Mark Kerr. In the lead role is Dwayne Johnson, shedding his star-spangled image to play a man whose fragility and confusion shine through the tough-guy façade. This is more of a melancholy film than Uncut Gems or Good Time, less interested in the mechanics of catastrophe and more focused on getting under the very thick skin of its lug-of-a-subject.
Read our review.
24. The Naked Gun
When it comes to laughs-to-the-pound, no-one is beating Akiva Schaffer’s miraculous and hilarious refit of the Zucker brothers classic TV and film serial, The Naked Gun. Liam Neeson is perfectly cast as hard-boiled Police Squad detective, Frank Drebin Jr, while an on-message Pamela Anderson turns up as his femme fatale lover. The problem with this film is deciding which gag or scene is the funniest – maybe the moment where Drebin first encounters Danny Huston’s moustache-twirling bad guy, and they discover their mutual love of the Black Eyed Peas.
Read our review.
23. Cover-Up
Legends don’t usually come as charismatic and principled as Seymour “Sy” Hersh, a legendary American investigative journalist who decides – under some duress – to become the subject of the new film by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus. This urgent doc meticulously chronicles Hersh’s major scoops, including the uncovering of the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam war and becoming a major headache for Richard Nixon and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger. It is about the need for journalists like Hersh to make sure the truth about atrocities around the globe are not buried by the powerbrokers.
Read our review.
22. The Phoenician Scheme
Benicio del Toro takes centre stage in this latest fantasy outing from Wes Anderson about a mid-century rotter named Zsa Zsa Korda who, following an attempt on his life, decides to wrap up his nefarious affairs by taking his estranged daughter (Mia Threapleton) under his wing and head up on a legacy-securing adventure. This is pure, unfiltered 100 per cent proof Wes Anderson – accept no substitutes.
Read our review.
21. Predators
To Catch A Predator only aired on American television for three years as part of NBC's Dateline, but the show – in which Chris Hansen and his team lured would-be online sex offenders into the open using real children and teens as bait – has left an indelible mark on popular culture. Filmmaker David Osit interrogates the show's legacy in this sobering documentary, featuring interviews with former decoys, vigilantes inspired by To Catch The Predator, families of the falsely accused and Hansen himself. Osit's understated and self-reflective approach turn potentially salacious subject matter into a damning exploration of mob justice and crime as entertainment, and his investment in the material becomes clear as the story unfolds. Predators is the antithesis of the true crime industrial complex generating millions for the likes of Netflix and HBO – thoughtful, precise, and revealing about why a show like To Catch A Predator not only existed in the first place but still has a hold on audiences.
Read our review.
20. Sentimental Value
Norway’s favourite son, Joachim Trier, returns following his worldbeating comedy-drama, The Worst Person in the World, with another film about a young woman (played again by Renate Reinsve) trying to overcome confusion and understand her place in the world. She is a lauded theatre actor with some major emotional hang-ups, which aren’t helped when her estranged film director father (played by the great Stellan Skarsgard) asked her to star in his biographical new film.
Read our review.
19. Alpha
We rep for Julia Durcournau’s sci-fi-tinged Aids allegory about a young girl who has potentially been infected by a strange new disease as the result of a drunken tattoo. Though tonally very different from the filmmaker’s previous films, Raw and Titane, Alpha continues Durcournau’s interest in the fragility and malleability of the human body, as the heroine’s uncle (brilliantly played by Tahar Rahim) passes through a melancholy transformation.
Read our review.
18. Mickey 17
Bong Joon Ho’s belated follow-up to his Oscar-sweeping Parasite captures the filmmaker at his goofy, idiosyncratic best. Robert Pattinson, doing the year’s wildest accent, plays a reprobate named Mickey who signs up to become a manual labourer whose body is cloned every time he dies. It’s a cautionary tale about the misuse of technology, but also a story of the people who insist on violent colonial escapades as a way to advance humanity.
Read our review.
17. Flow
Winner of the Oscar for Best Animated Film in 2025, Flow is the dialogue-free tale of a cat’s adventure in a post-apocalyptic world beset by extremely erratic shifts in the climate. The little scamp befriends a Labrador and a capybara and sets sail on a voyage of discovery and survival. It’s an expressive and emotional film, made with a unique digital technique by the Latvian filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis who, next time we see him, will probably have a $100 million+ animated feature under his arm.
Read our review.
16. Happyend
A sonically electrifying opening scene within an underground rave establishes the greatness of Neo Sora's fiction debut from the jump. It sets up a the beautiful friendship between a diverse, wholesome group of teens at the core of a story about coming of age against a fascist panopticon of invasive surveillance. Not only is it a stunning technical achievement, powered by one of the year's most striking scores from Lia Ouyang Rusli, it's an incredibly sweet film, nostalgic in a way that feels like a much-needed hug, all while speaking to and reflecting so much of what’s relevant in our uniquely complicated present.
Read our review.
15. Bugonia
The word “remake” comes with all manner of red flags when it comes to films that are supposed to generate a sense of excitement. Yet with Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia, which is a remake of the 2003 Korean film Save the Green Planet!, that’s not really the case, as you can instantly see how the lovable, chaotic original could perhaps be forged into something more incisive and expansive. Emma Stone stars as an awful corporate CEO who is kidnapped by a conspiracy theorist played by Jesse Plemmons who, along with his cousin (Aidan Delbis), try to extract a confession from their captive about her connection to a race of alien invaders. Best final scene of 2025?
Read our review.
14. Marty Supreme
Timothée “Big Balls” Chalamet proves that when it comes to the technical and physical side of performing for the big screen, he’s all in and then some. This solo feature from Josh Safdie is an anti-sports biopic of 1950s table tennis prodigy Marty Mauser, an overconfident braggart whose indomitable self-belief leads him into some very sticky situations, especially when it comes to funding a trip to Japan to participate in a tournament. It’s propulsive, hectic and stressful in that unique Safdie way.
Read our review.
13. Sorry, Baby
If there’s any justice in the world, Eva Victor will be festooned with cash and creative freedom to make whatever they want following the success of their feature debut, Sorry, Baby. They star as an English major at an east coast University who is dealing with the fall-out of unwanted sexual advances by their tutor. It’s a film which avoids the hysterical clichés of these stories to take a more perceptive and difficult look at the ways a woman can deal with the fact that her life has been upended by a pitiful and weaselly man.
Read our review.
12. Peter Hujar’s Day
What a delight this miniature two-hander is from Ira Sachs, a visualisation of New York journalist Linda Rosenkrantz’s effort to speak to interesting cultural figures and just find out what they do over a single day. Rebecca Hall is perfect as the louche, chain-smoking Rosenkrantz, while Ben Whishaw lights up the screen as self-effacing photographer and Warhol associate, Peter Hujar.
11. Sinners
Ryan Coogler made a serious play to save cinema in 2025, and his bold and brassy Sinners proved that creativity and originality of vision still have a place in modern Hollywood. This story of twin hucksters, both played by Michael B Jordan, is set in the Mississippi delta during the 1930s, and uses the framework of a vampire movie to make a trenchant statement on Black cultural identity in the modern age and the appropriation and manipulation of art.
Read our review.
10. The Shrouds
At the age of 80, Canadian maestro David Cronenberg made arguably one of his greatest, most moving, reflective and not to mention nakedly personal films in The Shrouds. A restrained Vincent Cassel dons a silver swoop of hair as a grieving tech bro who has invented a new gizmo – a new type of grave that allows you to remain in video contact with the desiccating corpse of your dearly departed. It’s a film about the limits of the human body, but also about conspiracy, manipulation and how difficult it is to let go and move on.
Read our review.
9. It Was Just An Accident
The news of Jafar Panahi’s release from house arrest was great for the filmmaking community at large. His return to filmmaking proper yielded one of his finest films, a cerebral thriller of sorts which directly addressed his own arrest and questioning by violent state enforcers. The film was also the recipient of the 2025 Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, making Panahi one of a handful of filmmakers to have one the top prize at the big three: Cannes, Venice and Berlin.
Read our review.
8. Afternoons of Solitude
From the outset this seemed like a small side project from the Spanish maverick Albert Serra, an intimate documentary portrait of the bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey. Yet this is clearly a major work, one which asks the viewer to look through the moral void at the absurd macho spectacle of bullfighting, but then also goes on to become a study of bodies in motion, of a thrilling dance between man and beast.
Read our review.
7. Hamnet
Tears were shed and then some when we caught the new film by Chloé Zhao, her return to Earth following a flying visit to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Another ace literary adaptation, this time of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel about how William and Agnes Shakespeare processed the premature death of their young son. It’s a sad and joyful film, one which casts fresh eyes on one of the most analysed artworks in history, and one which boats a pair of formidable central performances from Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal.
6. Die My Love
Lynne Ramsay continues adding to the case that she never misses with her new provocation, an adaptation of Ariana Harwicz’s 2017 novel about a loved up young couple (Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson) moving to a lovely little house in the country, having a kid and then completely falling apart. Gifted by a pair of huge, exciting performances from its two leads, the film explores the mental and emotional turmoil of postpartum depression as well as the general existential confusion of trying to life in a world that is – for the most part – fairly fucked up.
Read our review.
5. No Other Choice
The South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook is on a major roll at the moment following 2022’s Decision to Leave, and he returns this year with a pitch-black adaptation of Donald Westlake’s 1997 horror-thrilled novel, The Ax. The story sees a family man (Lee Byung-hun) losing his middle-manager job due to cuts, and so he decides to make some cuts (and more) of his own as he enters the job market with the type of bloodlust and hunger that HR managers apparently love. A dark, delicious treat.
Read our review.
4. Caught By the Tides
Never one to rest on his creative laurels, the Chinese auteur’s Jia Zhangke’s stunning new film saw him look back at the footage captured for many of his previous works to fashion something completely new – a romantic musical about a woman (played by Jia’s wife and muse, Zhao Tao) travelling across country to reconnect with her departed lover. It’s a treatise on technology, creativity and the economic tiers of Chinese society, but one that’s also supremely moving and cinematically innovative.
Read our review.
3. Frankenstein
When you’ve climbed Everest, what is there left in the world to conquer? It’s a question that writer/director Guillermo del Toro is likely pondering now, as 2025 was the year that he got to make his long-cherished opus, an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’. His fluid, pictorial image making is, as ever, best-in-class, and this time around he was also gifted with a pair of stunning performances in his two leads, Oscar Issac and Jacob Elordi.
Read our review.
2. The Mastermind
Josh O’Connor had a fairly spectacular 2025, to the level that we didn’t even begin to resent the fact that he seemed to star in a film every single week of the year. The stand-out for us was Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, a perceptive character study, a riff on the time-honoured heist movie, and an essay on a very American version of personal self-destruction. O’Connor is perfectly cast in the title role, while Reichardt proves once more that she’s perhaps the most consistently great filmmaker working in the world right now.
Read our review.
1. One Battle After Another
We’ll be honest: in the run-up to the release of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, we had no real idea of what to expect. We kinda knew that it had been inspired by a Thomas Pynchon novel; it had Leonardo DiCaprio wearing granny shades and doing a lot of shouting; and that it was his first contemporary-set film since Punch-Drunk Love. When we finally got to see it, we all agreed that this was 2025’s pure kino moment, our jaws constantly on the floor upon witnessing the work of a filmmaker with almost Jedi-like mastery of the medium. Dazzling, pleasurable, memorable – and not just the fact it produced by-far the year’s greatest meme, but the fact it is the film we’ll be watching, in 20, 30, 50 years time.
Read our review.
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