2025 Best Films - Top 10

As expected, 2025 has not been kind for the silver screen. The recent news of Netflix buying out Warner Bros felt like the final nail in a year defined by mediocrity, corporate overreach, and cinematic disappointments.

And yet.

Among the rubble, a handful of films sparked genuine life back into the projector, at least for me. Against all odds, they reminded me why we still sit in the dark. Curiously, this year’s standouts came from a surprisingly balanced spread of festivals: four from Cannes, three from Venice, two from Berlin, and one from Fantastic Fest. Some have already reached audiences; others are still teasing from afar, hopefully reaching a screen near you very soon. Either way, consider this your cinematic rewind of the last twelve months.

So pop your kernels, dim the lights, and in the spirit of this annual tradition, let’s be kind & rewind 2025.

***Disclaimer***

First, a necessary act of self-defence: Marty Supreme is absent simply because I haven’t seen it yet. Releasing a film on Christmas Day is a bold move, sometimes it lands you in awards season glory, sometimes it lands you in January purgatory. Ask me again in a week.

With that out of the way… here we go.

An honourable mention must also go to Holofiction, by  Michal Kosakowski. Being an experimental montage film entirely composed of hundreds of existing movies, I found it genius, hypnotic, and conceptually thrilling, but it's less of a cinematic effort than a film with an actual production. Hence, perhaps it's not Top 10 material.

10) Left-Handed Girl - Shih-Ching Tsou

Shih-Ching Tsou’s solo directorial debut is a quiet marvel. Co-written, co-produced, and edited by Sean Baker, it blends Taiwanese social realism with contemporary American indie aesthetics, mostly shot on an iPhone amid the neon lights of Taipei’s night markets. The story follows a single mother who moves to the city to open a tiny noodle kiosk, navigating economic precarity while her five-year-old daughter, I-Jing, treats the market as her personal playground. Meanwhile, the older teenage sister is forced into a version of motherhood she never asked for. The child's curiosity is at the soul of the film, cutting through adult anxiety with razor-sharp innocence. It’s relentless, tender, and very funny, filled with lived-in details and deep compassion for overlooked characters cinema usually walks past without noticing.

9) Blue Moon - Richard Linklater

A very original breakup movie: the artistic divorce of lyricist Lorenz Hart from composer Richard Rodgers after writing a number of all-time classics in the 1920s and 1930s, including the titular song. Set almost entirely in real time, Blue Moon unfolds in a Broadway bar on the night of Oklahoma!’s premiere, Rodgers’ first smash hit without Hart. What follows is a chamber dramedy soaked in regret, jealousy, nostalgia, and martinis. Linklater dissects Hart’s sorrow and unparalleled wit with surgical precision, never flinching, never indulging. Ethan Hawke gives the performance of his career: camp, cynical, self-aware, tragic. The combover helps, sure, but it’s his fearless commitment to playing a loser that makes it magnificent.

8) The Voice of Hind Rajab - Kaouther Ben Hania

Cinema at its most urgent.

This devastating fusion of documentary and fiction refuses the comfort of distance. Actors don’t “perform” so much as re-enact what truly happened, and at its centre is Hind Rajab herself, her real calls to the rescue centre woven directly into the film. Her small voice trembles as she admits she fears the darkness more than the tanks outside. On the other end, rescuers plead, strategise, and hope, trying to clear a path for an ambulance that never arrives. Unfolding almost in real time, the film tightens suspense not through plot twists, but through an unbearable sense of impotence and sheer helplessness. The hardest film of the year. And the most necessary.

7) Kontinental ‘25 - Radu Jude

Radu Jude continues his gleeful provocation and introspection of Romanian identity with a comedy as absurd as real life can be. Orsolya, a well-meaning bailiff, spirals into guilt after a homeless man hangs himself during an eviction she enforced. Despite her kindness, she cannot shake responsibility, and seeks redemption by recounting the incident to anyone who will listen, trapped in a compulsive loop of confession and self-flagellation. Jude tones down his usual experimental fireworks in favour of something more contained and intimate. The result is no less cynical, no less hilarious, and arguably more poignant because of it.

6) Sentimental Value - Joachim Trier

Joachim Trier once again deals with the difficulties of love in full Scandinavian fashion, turning from romantic collapse to familial wreckage and delivering a tender autopsy of inherited wounds, fractured communication, and the ghosts that linger in the wallpaper of childhood homes. Renate Reinsve is extraordinary as Nora, a successful actress forced to confront her estranged father after her mother’s death. Stellan Skarsgård, in a career-best performance, plays Gustav, a once-great director attempting a late-life comeback with a script written specifically for his daughter. If cinema is indeed a form of communication, it can become an artist’s best reconciliation language, or at lest their attempt at it, and perhaps even a vehicle for healing. Underneath it all is Trier’s signature preoccupation:  he knows exactly where the emotional core lies and how to drill straight into it, with honesty and humour.

5) No Other Choice - Park Chan Wook

Laid off, humiliated, and discarded by the ruthless job market, Yoo Man-soo devises an outrageous plan to eliminate the competition- literally. Everything is meticulously executed in this dark comedy, and the Korean master raises the stakes scene after scene, in full control of the frame. Park Chan-wook turns capitalist despair into a pitch-black farce, escalating tension scene by scene with absolute formal control. It’s never realistic, never apologetic, and perversely hilarious even at its most grotesque. A macabre parable of late-stage capitalism- as well as a resourceful guide if you get laid off.

4) Father Mother Sister Brother - Jim Jarmush

A masterclass in restraint, this is a film that whispers, confident you’ll lean in. At a brisk, confident pace, it unfolds with an elegance rarely seen, with no clunky exposition, no hand-holding, just sailing across the self-enforced rituals of politeness, awkward silences, and conversations that feel like icebergs: most of the meaning is hidden beneath the surface. Across three unrelated stories, siblings reunite facing unresolved tensions with distant parents. Jim Jarmusch knows how to make this hollowness palpable. Played by a dream cast including Tom Waits, Charlotte Rampling, Adam Driver, and Cate Blanchett, each character is rendered with such delicacy that the tiniest glance carries the weight of an accusation, or a confession. Their intrinsic incommunicability feels simultaneously drenched in irony, and yet utterly true to life. It’s a film that understands that what isn’t said is often louder than dialogue, and sometimes silence is the sharpest line of all.

3) Die My Love - Lynne Ramsay

Lynne Ramsay doesn’t just depict madness, she makes you inhabit it.

A ferocious and intoxicating portrait of postpartum despair and the quiet, daily violence of domestic life that grabs you by the throat and refuses to let go. Jennifer Lawrence gives her finest performance to date as Grace, a young mother isolated in rural Montana with her partner Jackson, played by Robert Pattinson. Bold and uncompromising, every frame feels dangerous, and Die My Love feels like a slow-burning panic attack. Every choice, from the oppressive sound design to the jagged, staccato editing, works to keep you trapped inside the labyrinth of Grace’s disintegrating psyche. It's hyperrealistic like an intimate documentary, like a mirror to our own demons, yet dripping with cinematic flair. A primal scream on celluloid.

2) Sirat - Oliver Laxe

The most exciting film of the year. Possibly of the last few.

You really can't tell what's going to happen, every turn brings a genuine shock, and nobody is safe in the Moroccan desert where Luis, accompanied by his little son Esteban, is searching for his missing daughter. They plunge headfirst into rave culture, drug-fuelled anarchy, and military hostility, two fish out of water as they rub shoulders with the reckless, mutilated and non-stop party people. Mystical, brutal, funny, terrifying, Sirat reaches peaks of tension I haven’t felt since William Friedkin's Sorcerer. Not for the faint-hearted.

1) One Battle After Another - Paul Thomas Anderson

The hype was gargantuan.

The risk, enormous- dangerous, even.

Sure, PTA has never missed, but this time the stakes were different. Working with the largest studio budget of his career, the threat was real: that Hollywood’s controlling grip might blunt his indie flare and meticulous craft. Instead, Anderson doesn’t merely retain his voice: he weaponises it. One Battle After Another emerges as the definitive epic of our time: exhilarating and compassionate, sharp without ever tipping into moralism. Anderson finds a way to navigate contemporary contradictions amidst woke revolutionaries, alt-right cultists, ideological whiplash, and transmute today’s chaos into pure cinema. Once the film clicks into gear, it never lets up, seamlessly alternating between incendiary spectacle and moments of dazzling comedy. What begins as a frenetic political action film pivots, brilliantly, into a devastatingly tender father-daughter drama. Leonardo DiCaprio’s disillusioned Lebowskian protagonist embarks on a frantic quest to rescue his daughter from Colonel Lockjaw, collapsing the distance between ideology and intimacy.

Sean Penn’s Colonel Lockjaw stands among the great characters of cinema history: a white supremacist villain played with such tragic vulnerability he becomes both terrifying and clownish, monstrous and pitiful.

Add the grandeur of VistaVision glory, Jonny Greenwood’s score of scratching strings and exploding guitars, and the greatest car chase in 130 years of cinema, and you have something rare: a rigorously formalist auteur film that also functions as a populist blockbuster.

A new classic is born.

Final Reel

If 2025 wasn’t a great year overall, there’s still a flicker in the dark. And while the future remains uncertain, 2026 is already shaping up to be far more interesting. Here’s hoping the lights stay on.