Sinners to One Battle After Another: The 25 best films of 2025
The cinema highlights of the year – from a “whip-fast” action thriller to a moving family drama and warm-hearted comedy.
1. Hamnet
Chloé Zhao’s deeply moving film about the death of Shakespeare’s son translates Maggie O’Farrell’s novel to the screen with all its eloquence and emotional power intact. It would have been easy to tip into sentimentality or melodrama in the story of how 11-year-old Hamnet’s death affected his grieving parents. But the film is, instead, profoundly moving, largely thanks to the depth and honesty of its performances. Jessie Buckley is by turns fierce and poignant as the strong-willed, intuitive Agnes, Shakespeare’s wife and the film’s true heroine. And Paul Mescal brings a rich, down-to-earth humanity to the character of Shakespeare himself. Immersing us in the textured world of the 16th Century, the film encapsulates their lives from their courtship through a heart-rending performance of Hamlet that, in this fiction, brings Hamnet back to life in the form of one of literature’s most enduring heroes. Stunningly beautiful in its visual imagery and its themes of love, art, death and mourning, Hamnet is the most affecting and loveliest film of the year. (CJ)
2. Sorry, Baby
This irresistible indie comedy drama was written and directed by Eva Victor, who also plays the lead role of Agnes. We see Agnes in the present day, when her best friend Lydia (Naomi Ackie) visits her at the New England college where she teaches, but the film also flashes back to the period, just a few years earlier, when she and Lydia were undergraduates, and Agnes was sexually assaulted by one of her professors. Victor chronicles the days before and after the assault with matter-of-fact frankness and deadpan sardonic wit, so that a potentially grim drama becomes a quirky, bittersweet ode to resilience and female friendship. The most remarkable part is that Sorry, Baby is Victor’s debut film as writer-director, and yet they have already established an unmistakable style and tone of their own.
Searchlight Pictures3. Is This Thing On?
Bradley Cooper has now directed three films concerning the performing arts: A Star is Born took on rock music, Maestro moved onto classical music, and Is This Thing On? dives into the world of small time stand-up comedy. It’s probably appropriate, then, that it’s the most casual, intimate and downright fun of the three. The film’s co-writer, Will Arnett, stars as a jaded finance executive who has drifted apart from his wife (Laura Dern). One night he reluctantly gets on stage in a New York comedy club, just to avoid paying the cover charge. But, to his surprise, he finds that stand-up allows him to open up about his problems, as well as reminding him that there can be more to middle age than parenting and a nine-to-five job. Based on the experiences of John Bishop, a British comedian from Liverpool (hence Arnett sometimes wears a Liverpool football top), this warm-hearted comedy drama shows how difficult marriage can be while suggesting that it might be worth the trouble. (NB)
4. One Battle After Another
Paul Thomas Anderson’s audacious original has the pace and humour of an antic comedy, while also featuring a touching family drama and a deadly serious plot about authoritarian governments and racist conspiracies. Miraculously, he makes it all feel effortless, without a single lagging moment. The film is buoyed by its starry cast. Leonardo DiCaprio is at his comic best as the shambolic former radical Bob Ferguson, with Benicio del Toro, Sean Penn and Teyana Taylor in vivid supporting roles. With intellectual heft, Anderson channels the social and political themes of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, which inspired the film. And DiCaprio and Chase Infiniti, as his daughter, add an emotional warmth that is not always associated with Anderson. Oh, and there are also whip-fast, enthralling action scenes, with car chases and shootouts. Oscar predictors have latched onto the idea that this is Anderson’s year because he’s overdue, but One Battle After Another is simply one of the year’s best, apart from any of that. With stunning ambition, this dazzling mix of art and entertainment does it all. (CJ)
Venice International Film Festival5. No Other Choice
Park Chan-wook’s satirical farce, based on a novel by Donald Westlake, is another gory triumph from the Korean director of Oldboy and The Handmaiden. Lee Byung-hun stars as a long-serving paper-factory manager who is perfectly content with his career, his wife and his children, and life in general. But pride comes before several falls. He can hardly believe it when he is suddenly made redundant. And he is even more shocked when no other company will hire him. With his family home at risk, and his children’s futures on the line, he decides to become a not-so-talented Mr Ripley, and starts murdering the rival candidates for a job he wants. No Other Choice is an outrageous black comedy which bursts with imaginative twists, oddball characters and wacky ideas. But Park cares deeply about his hapless anti-hero, and he asks all-too-relevant questions about the effects of sweeping job cuts and artificial intelligence. (NB)
6. The Secret Agent
This exhilarating drama makes every trope of the political thriller seem fresh, as the director and screenwriter Kleber Mendonça Filho deftly illustrates the insidious way corrupt government power at the top trickles down to blight the lives of ordinary people. The film’s unique tone is set at the start when text on screen situates us in Brazil in 1977, described as “a time of great mischief” – a decidedly low key way of describing the country under a dictatorship. Wagner Moura is dynamic and brings all his charisma to the role of Marcelo, an apolitical professor who crosses a government-connected oligarch and finds himself targeted for murder. The film mixes genres and influences with ease, giving us a carnival celebration, an underground resistance network, a touching relationship between Marcelo and his young son and assassins engaged in a bloody shootout. There is even a meta theme about films, including a mini horror spoof about a hairy severed leg that can hop and kill. Combining these unlikely elements into one intense, suspenseful, enthralling film, Mendonça Filho solidifies his reputation as one of the best directors working today. (CJ)
7. The Voice of Hind Rajab
In terms of pure, gut-punching impact, nothing else in cinemas this year can compare to The Voice of Hind Rajab. Written and directed by Tunisia’s Kaouther Ben Hania, the film recreates a heart-rending incident from January 2024: a five-year-old Palestinian girl was trapped in the wreckage of a car in Gaza, she was terrified that an Israeli tank would open fire, and, in her last hours before she was killed, she spoke on the phone to some volunteers in a Palestine Red Crescent Society office. In the film, actors play the volunteers, who desperately try to arrange for an ambulance to rescue her, but the voice on the other end of the line is a recording of Hind Rajab herself. The effect of this devastating blend of documentary and drama is that a tense ticking-clock thriller becomes a stark, almost unbearable picture of war’s brutality. Ben Hania’s last two films, Four Daughters and The Man Who Sold His Skin, were Oscar-nominated. The Voice of Hind Rajab should make it three in a row. (NB)
8. Sentimental Value
Despite its title, the great strength of this eloquent family drama is its heartfelt but unsentimental tone as it explores the complex dynamics between a father who is a brilliant film director and the two grown daughters he tries, quite belatedly, to form an emotional bond with. Stellan Skarsgård gives what may be the best performance of his long and varied career as the father, Gustav Borg, depicting him as an unapologetically self-absorbed artist who nonetheless has genuine love and concern for his daughters. The writer and director Joachim Trier elicits equally realistic, nuanced performances from Renate Reinsve as his anxious, distrustful daughter, an actress, and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas as the younger daughter who is protective of her small son and sister. Elle Fanning, as an actress Borg casts in his film, smoothly helps carry the theme of how art intersects and complicates life. Sentimental Value begins with a look at the Borg family house in Oslo, a perfect emblem of the way this enticing film makes viewers feel they have entered a home and witnessed these father-daughter and sibling relationships in all their wariness and longing for love. (CJ)
9. It Was Just an Accident
Jafar Panahi is now forced to make his films in secret, as he has been prohibited from directing by the Iranian authorities – having served two previous prison terms, he has just received another one-year sentence and a travel ban. It’s hardly surprising, in the circumstances, that his latest work, It Was Just an Accident, is so fiercely critical of the regime. What is surprising is that it has so much humanity, optimism and knockabout humour. Vahid Mobasseri stars as Vahid, a mechanic who overhears a conversation, and recognises the voice of the guard who tortured him when he was a political prisoner. He decides to kidnap his tormentor, but there’s one small snag: Vahid was blindfolded in prison, so he can’t be completely sure that he has the right man. The only solution he can think of is to drive around Tehran, asking his fellow ex-prisoners for their advice. Panahi’s ingenious comedy of errors was a worthy winner of the Palme d’Or, the top prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. (NB)
10. Marty Supreme
Timothée Chalamet takes the unlikeliest hero – a selfish young man who cons his way through life and dreams of becoming, of all things, a ping-pong champion – and makes him endlessly fascinating in Josh Safdie’s textured period piece set in New York’s Lower East Side in the 1950s. Chalamet sharply defines the high-spirited, wiry, fast-talking Marty Mauser as a guy so determined to get ahead he doesn’t even recognise how ruthless he is. The performance smartly resists the tendency to ask us to love the character; understanding him is enough. Throughout Marty’s globe-trotting comic adventures, as he crosses paths with a former film star (Gwyneth Paltrow, impeccable in the role), a criminal and his girlfriend’s husband among others, Chalamet’s portrayal is a perfect match for the film’s dry, sometimes absurdist humour and kinetic energy. A rollicking character study in the guise of a sports film, Marty Supreme is so lively and fun to watch that it’s irresistible even when its flawed hero isn’t. (CJ)
11. Wake Up Dead Man
The third of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out mysteries is at least as enjoyable as the other two. As usual, we get to see Daniel Craig’s smartly suited Benoit Blanc solving mind-bending puzzles and outwitting nefarious villains. And, underpinning all the hijinks, we get to watch over-privileged sections of American society being forensically satirised. In Knives Out, it was the entitled children of the wealthy who were placed under Johnson’s magnifying glass; in Glass Onion, it was hipster tech bros and vacuous influencers; and in Wake Up Dead Man, it’s apocalyptic religious leaders and the politicians who exploit them. In a nice contrast with the flamboyant and rationalist Blanc, Josh O’Connor plays an earnest young priest who clashes with Josh Brolin’s fire-and-brimstone preacher. (NB)
12. Father Mother Sister Brother
Jim Jarmusch’s career is full of thoughtful, beautifully crafted films that are sometimes undervalued because they seem so easy-going, so it was a long-overdue recognition when his latest won the Golden Lion, the top prize, at this year’s Venice Film Festival. This trio of separate stories, each set in a different city, each with a different knock-out cast, is again more layered, ambitious and deeper than it might seem. Each segment has its own tone, but they share the theme of grown children and parents misunderstanding or not knowing each other, when they even try to understand. The segments build in seriousness. There is mordant comedy when Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik, as distant siblings, visit their father (Tom Waits) in New Jersey. Cate Blanchett and Vicky Krieps are sisters having tea with their mother (Charlotte Rampling) in Dublin, in a realistic drama of icy missed connections. And there is an elegiac feel and a sense of history in the Paris segment, with Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat as the children of American expatriates. With his typically fluid style and more poignancy than ever, Jarmusch says more about family in each relatively brief section than most film-makers can in hours. (CJ)
13. Weapons
Weapons begins at 02:17, one night in an unnamed suburb, when 17 young children from the same elementary school class get out of their beds, leave their houses, and run off into the darkness. From then on, the anguished locals have to grapple with the question of what happened and why. The solution to the supernatural mystery turns out to be a straightforward one, but Zach Cregger, the writer-director of Barbarian (2022), takes an unusually roundabout route to his jaw-dropping finale, showing events as they’re experienced by several characters in succession: the children’s bitter teacher (Julia Garner), their harried headteacher (Benedict Wong), an angry parent (Josh Brolin), a troubled policeman (Alden Ehrenreich), and more. Along the way, Cregger demonstrates his masterly control of countless horror elements, from nerve-frazzling silences to gasp-out-loud gore, from creepy surrealism to surprising humour. But it’s the bright mosaic of ordinary American life that makes Weapons unique. Influenced by Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia and Robert Altman’s Raymond Carver adaptation, Short Cuts, it feels like a whole new kind of horror film. (NB)
14. Highest 2 Lowest
This exhilarating, thoughtful thriller was inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 High and Low, but it is pure Spike Lee, which is high praise. Denzel Washington plays a music-industry mogul, David King, whose teenage son is held for ransom, although it turns out the kidnapper has mistakenly taken the son of King’s assistant (Jeffrey Wright). Will the cash-strapped King pay for someone else’s child? That moral dilemma is given shape by Lee’s usual tropes, blended into one smooth film. There is his deeply rooted awareness of race and class as pervasive social issues. There are glowing visuals, including King’s luxurious Brooklyn penthouse, filled with work by black artists. There is vibrant music ranging from rap to salsa to a full orchestral soundtrack. And as King engages with the kidnapper, there is an electrifying chase though the New York subways during the crowded Puerto Rican Day celebration. Washington is at his best (no scenery chomping here) and A$AP Rocky gives a chiselled performance in a supporting role. There are a few didactic lines of dialogue, but that goes with the territory in a Spike Lee film. Gripping and virtuosic, Highest 2 Lowest could have come from no one else. (CJ)
15. Bring Her Back
Danny and Michael Philippou made a stunning switch from YouTubers to feature-film directors with their ghostly chiller Talk to Me in 2022 – and the Australian twin brothers’ follow-up is even better. Bring Her Back is the meticulously constructed, stickily atmospheric tale of an orphaned brother and sister, played by Billy Barratt and Sora Wong, who are sent to live with a welcoming – perhaps too welcoming – foster mother, played by Sally Hawkins. The key is that the Philippous take the film’s horror and drama equally seriously. Rather than resorting to cheap jump scares or contrived twists, they tell a powerful emotional story about three-dimensional people in a believably lived-in setting; it just so happens that this particular story involves demonic possession and flesh-eating zombies. It’s gripping, viscerally intense and distinctive enough to establish the brothers as two of today’s finest horror film-makers. And if Oscar voters paid more attention to the genre, then Hawkins would be a contender for the best actress prize. (NB)
16. Materialists
Jane Austen knew that money and marriage are forever entwined, and Celine Song has smartly taken that idea, along with a great deal of wryness, into the 21st Century in this delightful almost-romcom. Materialists may look like a traditional romantic comedy, but it breaks with any stock notion of the genre and offers a clear-eyed view of relationships in our material world. Song has a way of evoking light-handed performances from her glittering cast, with Dakota Johnson as Lucy, a professional matchmaker choosing between two men in her own life. Let’s face it, there is no bad choice here. Chris Evans is the ex who still loves her, but can only offer the life of a struggling actor – and Lucy doesn’t want to be poor. Pedro Pascal is the billionaire who actually listens to her. Pascal is, as usual, a perfect blend of charm and sincerity. Yet for all Song’s practical, non-judgemental view of how money factors into relationships, she is never cynical about love itself. Following Song’s first film, Past Lives, it is another gem from one of today’s most original and nuanced film-makers. (CJ)
17. The Ballad of Wallis Island
This delightful British comedy stars its two writers, Tom Basden and Tim Key, alongside a luminous Carey Mulligan. Key plays Charles, a cheerfully eccentric lottery winner who pays his favourite folk duo, Herb McGwyer (Basden) and (Mulligan), to put on a live show on the small island where he lives. The trouble is that the duo broke up years ago, both professionally and personally, and Charles hasn’t told either of them that the other one will be on the island, too. Sensitively directed by James Griffiths, The Ballad of Wallis Island is a triumph. It’s big-hearted, sincere and picturesque, and filled with characters you care about, but it’s also consistently funny from start to finish. Charles’s dialogue, in particular, is so tightly packed with deliberately bad puns and groanworthy catchphrases that you may want to rewatch the film as soon as it’s finished to catch any punchlines you missed the first time round. (NB)
18. Lurker
Of the many films that have dealt with fame in the age of social media, with its seemingly close but illusory bond between fan and celebrity, few have been as accomplished or up-to-the-minute as this piercing psychological thriller. In his first film, writer and director Alex Russell (a writer and producer on The Bear and Beef) expertly controls the story’s trajectory as its central character crosses the line from superfandom to a toxic parasocial relationship. Matthew (Théodore Pellerin) is working as a shop assistant when pop music star Oliver (a charismatic Archie Madekwe) walks in. The enthusiastic Matthew is taken into Oliver’s entourage, but although the film gives us his point of view, that doesn’t make him a hero. As an audience we squirm at the way he lets himself be ridiculed and treated as a mascot. And when Oliver freezes him out, Matthew goes over the edge. Where most films about fandom head straight into horror, this savvy, chilling portrait is more effective because it only eventually arrives at stalkery suspense. Along the way it exposes the all-too-common roots of delusions about fame. (CJ)
19. Companion
The sharpest American indie film of the year so far, Companion stars Jack Quaid and Sophie Thatcher as a devoted young couple who go to stay with some friends in a Russian tycoon’s remote forest getaway. (Rupert Friend has a hilarious cameo as the mulleted oligarch.) As a drunken evening of confessions, suspicions and disagreements unfolds, it seems at first if the film might be a romantic comedy, or maybe a noirish thriller about a robbery gone wrong. In fact, Companion is a science-fiction comedy thriller – but beyond that, the less you know about the film in advance, the more enjoyable its many ingenious twists and turns will be. Suffice it to say that the big-screen debut of writer-director Drew Hancock is a sparklingly entertaining satire on modern technology and the never-more-relevant topic of how entitled and misogynistic certain insecure young men can be. And it packs all of its ideas into 97 minutes. (NB)
20. Sinners
As stunning as Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther was, he has outdone himself with Sinners. Michael B Jordan is slyly convincing as twins named Smoke and Stack, who return from Chicago to their home town in Mississippi, in the Jim Crow South in 1932, to open a juke joint. With huge ambition and imagination, Coogler swirls familiar genres and tropes into a wholly original film that blurs the real and the supernatural. Sinners is a period piece as well as a vampire film. It is a drama about racism, family, superstition and spirituality, and it comes with passionate sex and exhilarating blues music. Coogler directs with brio, at times creating a phantasmagoria in which robed African musicians appear next to rappers. The first hour is so full of texture it could stand alone as a period film, but the supernatural eventually intrudes, leading to a finale of action, blood and vengeance. Jordan is surrounded by a superb supporting cast, including Delroy Lindo, Wunmi Musaku and Hailee Steinfeld. Sex, blues and vampires at the door? What more can anyone want from a film? (CJ)
21. Art for Everybody
Miranda Yousef’s riveting documentary tells the stranger-than-fiction story of Thomas Kinkade, one of the biggest-selling artists in history. Critics dismissed his work as nauseatingly sickly, but in the 1990s and 2000s, there were shops all around the US devoted to Kinkade’s sentimental pictures of cosy country cottages. Art for Everybody asks fascinating questions about who gets to decide what counts as legitimate art, and whether some paintings can be more moral than others – questions that resonate today, in light of the continuing culture wars in the US . But Yousef’s delicately balanced and sensitive film is just as fascinating on personal issues as it is on sociopolitical ones. A key part of Kinkade’s marketing was his carefully constructed public image as a devoutly Christian, all-American family man, and yet the so-called “Painter of Light” had a dark side, too. Did the pressures of being a squeaky-clean Dr Jekyll push him into becoming a self-destructive Mr Hyde? (NB)
22. Warfare
Alex Garland, the writer and director of Civil War, and Ray Mendoza, a veteran who was that film’s military advisor, have created a harrowing, visceral, real-time drama that recreates an actual battle between Navy Seals and al-Qaeda jihadists. Garland’s virtuoso technique and Mendoza’s first-hand experience of war blend in a film of uncompromising focus, which plunges us into the intensity of combat without explanation or backstory. Yet the faces of Joseph Quinn, Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis and D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai are enough to capture the fear and determination of being under siege. Creating characters far from the bravado of typical Hollywood war films, the actors depict courage in battle as a terror-filled endurance test. The film immerses us in that feeling. It is loud and intense, relentless in its barrage of grenades and gunfire, and when the cries of pain from the injured men start, they never stop. Warfare is a dazzling technical achievement but much more. Focusing on the personal cost of combat and violence itself rather than the politics of the Iraq conflict, it reinvents the war film with bracing freshness and immediacy. (CJ)
23. Holy Cow
Deep in the leafy French countryside, a scruffy teenage layabout Totone (Clément Faveau) has to look after his younger sister Claire (Luna Garret) after the sudden death of their father. His answer to their dire financial problems? Making award-winning luxury cheese. Louise Courvoisier’s debut film is a heart-tugging coming-of-age drama, rooted in the soil of the Jura region where she grew up. She offers an earthy insider’s view of how strenuous life can be for agricultural workers, and how wrenching it is when carefree youth turns to relentless, responsible adulthood. But she also fashions a warm, romantic, gorgeously scenic and ultimately hopeful tale of underdogs working together in the sunshine to improve their lives. Blessed are the cheesemakers, as Monty Python once put it. (NB)
24. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
Aardman’s two greatest heroes are back – and so is their sneakiest ever adversary, a diabolical penguin named Feathers McGraw. Directed by Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham, the Oscar-nominated Vengeance Most Fowl is chock-full of the qualities that make Wallace & Gromit’s farcical adventures so cherished: the painstaking stop-motion claymation, the Heath Robinson-style gadgetry, the winking homages to classic cinema, the gleefully silly British humour, and the deep affection for the characters and their world. Above all, it a treat to see Feathers McGraw, more than 30 years after he was introduced in The Wrong Trousers. But there is more to the Bristol-based studio’s new film than the nostalgic whimsy you would expect. When Wallace invents a robotic garden gnome that does all of Gromit’s favourite gardening jobs (and that’s even before it turns evil), the story takes a canalboat trip into Mission: Impossible territory by addressing fears about artificial intelligence. (NB)
25. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
The immensely talented director Rungano Nyoni, whose I Am Not a Witch (2017) won a Bafta for outstanding British debut, makes artful, accessible films of great visual panache. Her latest is a clear-eyed drama about cultural and generational conflict. The heroine, Shula, is a cosmopolitan woman recently returned from the city to her village in Zambia. Nyoni conveys this dissonance at once, as Shula drives home from a costume party dressed in a glittery silver helmet and dark glasses (an homage to a Missy Elliott video) and finds her Uncle Fred dead on a dirt road. As the story takes us into the family’s traditional funeral rituals, it slowly reveals that Shula and two cousins had been abused by Fred as children, a reality their mothers put aside as they mourn their brother. Nyoni’s style is realistic even as she drops in surreal images. The narrative about secrecy and the trauma of sexual assault builds in power right to the end, when Shula recalls a children’s television programme and the title of this stunning film finally makes sense. (CJ)
