My Favourite Films of 2025

It was a good year for films. Okay, the industry is falling apart thanks to greedy CEOs and a conspiracy to create monopolies so devastating in their power that they threaten to destroy cultural history, but the artists prevailed. It’s a testament to great storytelling and dedicated audiences that cinema’s fight to survive remains so fiery even as cultural vandals like Davids Zaslav and Ellison try to tear it down. I can’t say I have much hope for the business side of it all, but I firmly believe that the medium is too important and too powerful to disappear.

I, of course, didn’t see every film in 2025. A lot of things still haven’t screened in my neck of the woods and I just missed a few major titles (sorry to everyone hoping to see Lilo & Stitch on my list.) My list is sticking to USA release rules because that’s how most sites I write for do it. I’m hoping to see things like Marty Supreme and The Voice of Hind Rajab in the coming weeks. If your favourite film of 2025 didn’t make my list, please don’t leave me weird comments. Let’s enjoy cinema together!

10: HAMNET

(Image via Focus Features.)

There’s been this odd attempt by some awards prognosticators to spin Chloe Zhao’s moving historical drama as a villain of the season, the sentimental and (apparently) too mainstream alternative to critical darlings like Sinners and One Battle After Another. I think that’s weird for a number of reasons, but mostly because Hamnet is a gorgeous meditation on grief and art’s ability to redefine our lives. Based on the novel by Maggie O’Farrell (who has a screenplay credit here), this dramatisation of the Shakespeare family is more than just a tearjerker, although it’s definitely that too. Jessie Buckley tears up the screen as a woman of nature who believes in its harmony but finds herself fighting against it. The final ten minutes are a stunning portrayal of the symbiotic relationship between humanity and creativity. Take that, AI.

9: ON BECOMING A GUINEA FOWL

(Image via A24.)

Speaking of grief… Zambian-Welsh director Rungano Nyoni’s sophomore feature fell through the cracks earlier this year, but it more than deserves your time. A woman stumbles across the body of her uncle late one night, and so begins a family’s mourning process complicated by tradition, duty, and trauma. Self-possessed and deeply furious, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl delves into the intersections of race, gender, and culture that leave this family both at war with their heritage and deeply wedded to it. There’s a rot deep at the centre of this family, revealed through every snide aside or clunky joke. Nyoni’s debut, I Am Not a Witch, showed her ambition, even though it was overladen in the ways that many first movies are. With her follow-up, she’s gotten leaner and sharper. She’s one to watch.

8: THE SHROUDS

We’re a cruel society that takes latter-day David Cronenberg for granted. The Shrouds is thoroughly the work of Canada’s body horror king, but also the effort of an old man in the throes of grief. Made after the passing of his wife, this sci-fi drama delves into the psychosis that accompanies mourning. Vincent Cassel plays a very Cronenbergian man (right down to the hair) who, following the passing of his wife, creates a radical new technology: a shroud-slash-webcam that allows people to watch their late loved ones rot in their graves. Loss makes weirdos of us all in The Shrouds, as a seemingly random crime opens up the rabbit hole of conspiracy. The humour is darker than dark (most awkward first date ever!), but the love is there too. Cronenberg may not be afraid of death, but its annihilating power is a thrall even he can’t escape.

7: WAKE UP DEAD MAN

(Image via Netflix.)

Bless Rian Johnson and Benoit Blanc. The Knives Out series has remained remarkably consistent, and this third instalment comes close to being the best one yet. Josh O’Connor is the true star here – sorry, Daniel Craig, but you still rock as my favourite Southern dandy – as a priest who becomes embroiled in a parish dominated by a fearmongering egoist. The stakes are high before the murder occurs, a locked room mystery inspired by the stories of John Dickson Carr and Edgar Allen Poe. Johnson, as always, has a ball with the intricacies of the case, as well as the characters who inhabit it. But it’s the moral darkness at play here that fascinates me the most. The Knives Out movies have never shied away from politics, and this one is all about a so-called man of God who shames from the pulpit and demands zealous loyalty from his dwindling flock. His opposition is a flawed man who dares to embrace optimism: he goes high when his enemies go low, but we know how that typically plays out. Wake Up Dead Man is a reminder that Johnson is an earnest filmmaker with faith in his audience. Also, there were two Andrew Lloyd Webber references in it, and I cackled at both.

6: EDDINGTON

(Image via A24.)

Critics’ groups have largely swayed towards Bugonia for the “conspiracy culture broke our brains and Emma Stone is here to portray it” movie of 2025, but Ari Aster’s messy portrait of 2020 was the one that most acutely captured the times for me. In Eddington, the COVID lockdown provides the catalyst for decades of tensions to explode in ridiculous and terrifying ways. Conspiracies run rampant, everyone is performing for the camera, and common sense becomes a thing of the past. I don’t blame audiences for being hesitant to check out a movie about the near-past that we all barely survived (and many people didn’t), but Aster really felt like the first storyteller to confront the ways that this period forever changed our future. Laugh while the world burns? Sounds easy compared to what actually happened.

5: TRAIN DREAMS

(Image via Netflix.)

Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar’s quiet and introspective historical drama was one of the surprises of 2025 for me, but it really shouldn’t have been. This pair have revealed themselves to be a consistently strong duo of indie talents thanks to films like Jockey and Sing Sing. In Train Dreams, based on a Denis Johnson book, they focus their (impeccably used) camera on the life of a seemingly simple man with not much to say, and they reveal how even the most humble of existences can and should be elevated to art. Joel Edgerton gives one of the best performances of the year without saying much, playing a logger whose passivity should render him uninteresting or even unlikeable, but you never stray from your loyalty to his journey. Netflix, don’t let this one get away during awards season.

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4: ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER

(Image via Warner Bros.)

Yup, Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest really is as good as everyone says it is. Warner Bros. gave PTA a blank cheque to make a political dramedy about leftist activism that all but endorses violent protests in the face of white supremacy, and it paid off! Three hours long without a minute wasted, One Battle After Another revels in the messiness of sticking it to the man. Leonardo DiCaprio hasn’t been this gripping in years, both warm and ridiculous as the former revolutionary turned pot-addled dad who is forced back into the fight for the sake of his daughter. Teyana Taylor is a star. Have a few small beers in her honour.

3: THE MASTERMIND

(Image via Mubi.)

It’s a heist movie made by the queen of modern minimalist indie cinema. Kelly Reichardt takes on that most stylish of genres and makes it her own. Josh O’Connor’s had a stellar past couple of years, but he’s never been better than he is here, as an entitled semi-employed artist who decides to steal a few paintings from his local museum in an effort to raise some money. It goes wrong, of course. Reichardt is not one for unnecessary aesthetic flair. She keeps her camera work largely still and without cuts as O’Connor deals with the menial labour of crime and its messy aftermath. As the Vietnam War wages in the background, The Mastermind soon reveals itself to be a fiercely political film about sh*tty white dude entitlement.

2: DIE MY LOVE

(Image via Mubi.)

Every new Lynne Ramsay movie is a rare gem to be treasured. Through the lens of the queen of modern cinematic trauma, the agony of postpartum psychosis has never been more feral. Jennifer Lawrence devours the screen as a new mother who is stifled not just by parenthood, but the realisation that the world is utterly uninterested in women like her, even when they make up half the world’s population. Lawrence and Robert Pattinson go wild in the woods, like a Goya painting come to life, scrapping in love as much as hate. Ramsay is a sensory filmmaker, a sensual one, and Die My Love sees her embracing the visual and audio landscape of madness and isolation. Surely when the world is this f*cked up, it shouldn’t be a surprise that we want to see it burn before our eyes?

1: THE SECRET AGENT

(Image via Neon.)

When it came time to pick my favourite film of the year, I expected it to be tougher than it was. Look at my preceding nine choices for proof that it was a banner year. But my heart knew, without any hesitation, that it had to be The Secret Agent. Kleber Mendonça Filho’s latest explores Brazil of the ‘70s, as the military regime disappears dissidents at an alarming rate. Wagner Moura (my choice for Best Actor) has never been better, playing a man returning to his home town in the hopes of finding an escape from the dictatorship for himself and his son. Carefully paced but never dull, a tonal tightrope walk with moments of surrealism and a jolt of the speculative, The Secret Agent is both a startlingly good thriller, infused with B-Movie elements, and a meta examination of how cinema portrays historic tragedies. Nothing is spoon-fed to the audience, and the director knows when to hold back and when to go wild (shark attacks! Capybaras! A subplot involving a dismembered leg!) This is a film about mythmaking, about family (found or otherwise), and about the choices you make in the face of seeming hopelessness. Even the smallest part feels exquisitely fleshed out (RIP Udo Kier.) It should feel like too much, but it’s all brilliantly balanced. I can’t wait to see it again. I can’t wait for you all to see it!