The Best Films of 2025

If nothing else, 2025 was the year of VistaVision. I’m still plagued by the question of “why?” What’s the deal with this film stock? Why is this decades-old format suddenly making a high-profile comeback? First developed in the 50s by Paramount, it’s a higher-fidelity, wider version of the standard 35mm film frame. It peaked in popularity in the late 50s with John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock shooting some of their films on it, before suddenly vanishing by the 60s. It’s kicked around in the corner of the film world through its use in special effects, with special effects sequences in everything from Star Wars and Jurassic Park to Interstellar and White Noise. Then, this year, it’s back. Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, and Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia all used the format. And it’s not going away either, with Greta Gerwig’s The Magician’s Nephew and Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights both shot on VistaVision and due out next year.

What does the resurgence of this old film stock mean for the future of the film industry? Who’s to say! Is it a metaphor for . . . something? Perhaps! Who’s to say?

Other than reviving VistaVision, what else did the year 2025 accomplish for the great arf form of cinema? Quite a lot, actually! The year opened with the wide release of a few stragglers from last year’s awards cycle, including the aforementioned The Brutalist, RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys, and Matthew Rankin’s Winnipeg-meets-Tehran comedy Universal Language (one of my favourites from last year). In the spring, Bong Joon-ho made his return with the sci-fi action comedy Mickey 17 and Ryan Coogler wowed the world with Sinners. In the summer, James Gunn’s Superman was easily my favourite blockbuster of the season, while Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme was a comedic midsummer delight.

Towards the end of the year, the world of the arthouse was exploding with high-profile releases. Following up on their collaboratively directed smash Uncut Gems (2019), both Safdie brothers made their solo directorial debuts this year, with Benny directing The Smashing Machine and Josh directing Marty Supreme (one of those will be on my full list). Richard Linklater delivered not one, but two biopics about mid-century artists with Blue Moon and Nouvelle Vague. Yorgos Lanthimos delivered his third film in twenty-two months with the Jesse Plemons/Emma Stone two-hander Bugonia. Then, Paul Thomas Anderson made one of the best films of his storied career with One Battle After Another. Finishing off the year, the Holiday season was dominated by a messy return to Pandora with James Cameron’s Avatar: Fire and Ash.

All in all, it was a pretty stellar year at the movies. Notwithstanding a certain line delivery by the Tenacious D frontman regarding a sedimentary rock striking an iron-carbon alloy.

Insert usual disclaimer here: I can’t see every feature film released in a given year, either due to time constraints, lack of knowledge about the film, or the fact that it hasn’t been released in my area yet. Some films absent from consideration for this list include Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, Óliver Laxe’s Sirāt, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent, Ira Sachs’ Peter Hujar’s Day, Bi Gan’s Resurrection, Lynne Ramsey’s Die My Love, and Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee.

Enough stalling! Let’s get into the list . . . 

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11. Superman

“Hey, buddy. Eyes up here.”

I left my screening of Superman lighter than air. A out-of-the-park summertime blockbuster smash, James Gunn’s adaptation of the Man of Steel is a colourful, boisterous, and kindhearted approach. The film embraces the cheesy, cartoonish sincerity of its title character to great effect, creating not only a fabulous superhero adventure but also making the Last Son of Krypton feel more human than ever before. An earnest and vulnerable David Corenswet dons the cape and trunks, playing a version of the hero who is indistinguishable from his human alter ego. He’s a Superman who is, in many ways, a very flawed character, but a character who is also deeply good. Rachel Brosnehan plays a stern and self-guided Lois Lane, who is refreshingly active in the film’s narrative. Nicholas Hoult embraces pure malice in his interpretation of arch nemesis Lex Luthor. The film runs through a number of exhilarating set pieces, with Superman and his cadre of fellow superheroes running through a slew of enemies, from the evil masterminds and genocidal dictators to monsters and meta-human brawlers. Writer/director Gunn excels at his careful tone policing, with the film managing to find some incredible comedic highs, while managing to (most of the time) sink the dramatic weight. It has only grown on me in subsequent viewings.

Superman is tailor-made to the times we live in. Itself set on an Earth that sits on the brink of war, where the severity of international atrocities is played down for the sake of America’s allies, the internet spews constant hatred, and culture and society are dominated by the rich and powerful, the film is ripe for analogies to our present reality. But when the world feels more dangerous than ever, and the human race seems less inclined to kindness, Superman is a taste of something better. Led by a hero whose entire mission is to do good things for his fellow citizens of Earth, Superman offers a moral clarity that’s all too rare in both blockbuster filmmaking and the world at large. As Lois says, Superman is the sort of guy who finds beauty in everyone and everything, even in his most dastardly foes. The film is unashamed of being corny and, at times, downright cheesy. But by embracing the camp inherent to the character, and contrasting his charm with the self-indulgence and selfishness of some of the other main players, the film shows that hope might be our best chance at survival. It’s a film that embraces optimism and a love of the human spirit. Now that’s pretty punk rock.

Superman is now available to rent from digital platforms. You can read my full review here.

Directed by James Gunn.

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10. Eddington

“We need to free each other’s hearts.”

In the summer of 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 lockdowns, the Black Lives Matter protests, and a vicious presidential election, a liberal mayor, Ted Garcia (a flighty and driven Pedro Pascal), and his conservative sheriff, Joe Cross (a rather gentle Joaquin Phoenix), clash in a very public disagreement over the mayor’s recently introduced mask mandates. In a year where my year-end “best of” list is dominated by very obviously political movies, Eddington might be the most aggressive of them all. Director Ari Aster carefully mixes in the right levels of ragebait and COVID-era political screaming (which hasn’t gone away) with an ensemble of deeply flawed and deeply human characters, making this the 2020 film that I thought was next to impossible. What begins as a Robert Altman-esque portrait of a small New Mexico town caught in the divide between Cross and Garcia shifts from social satire to neo-Western crime drama to action thriller without a second thought. There are some brilliant character beats throughout, the film is aggressive in the best way possible, and Phoenix kills in the leading role. 

Yet, despite all of its political aggression, this is easily Aster’s chillest movie. Breaking from the folk horror terrifiers of Hereditary and Midsommar and the abdurdist epic Beau is Afraid, Eddington feels like a much more relaxed mode for the filmmaker. Still, despite the movie not making me want to claw the skin off my face in quite the same way as his previous work, is no less cynical and devastating. The themes of American tribalism, reactionary politics, AI data centres, online conspiracy theories, and the faceless corporate shareholders who profit from rampant division make the film feel like a devastating look back on a time that still feels too close to comfort. The tagline “Hindsight is 2020” might feel like a bid for a misplaced sense of historical recollection, but the film is more an unsettling reflection of a time I think most of us wish never happened. While one could call Aster spineless for making a film that ends in such a surprising and unsatisfying way, he does fundamentally acknowledge the continual sense of unease in the world. The world is going mad!

Eddginton is now available to rent from digital platforms.

Directed by Ari Aster.

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9. The Brutalist

“No matter what the others try to sell you, it is the destination, not the journey.”

Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is one of the stragglers from last year’s awards cycle that didn’t make it to a wide release until January 2025, making it a part of the 2025 list. I saw The Brutalist on a cold Sunday afternoon in January, a screening where the projectionist messed up the intermission (which is fully scripted in the film), giving a full 15 minutes of a black screen followed by the timed 15 minutes projected. Regardless of this strange glitch in the projection, I was floored. To call the film anything less than monumental would be a disservice. An American epic in the true sense of the word, the film is a sprawling achievement. Beginning in the late 1940s, László Tóth, a Hungarian Jew and an accomplished architect, arrived in New York City to make a new life for himself and his family. For the next three-and-a-half hours, some thirteen years of László’s new life play out in vivid detail, from his humble beginnings struggling to make a living as an assistant in a distant cousin’s furniture store, to his eventual trepidatious success under the employ of a Pennsylvania millionaire.

Like Tóth’s architectural feats, which are so central to the drama, the film itself is formally and structurally flawless, a carefully measured, intricately designed work. Its grand scale and hefty runtime are staggering, like the pieces of modernist and brutalist architecture featured throughout, with its sense of scale revealing something quiet and contemplative at the core. The painted landscapes of Lol Crawley’s camera and the roaring horns of Daniel Blumberg’s score make the film feel larger than life and hypnotic, lulling the viewer into something much larger than themselves or any of the human characters in its drama. The film is as ambitious as Tóth himself is, making a direct connection between the film’s formal conventions and the art we witness being brought to life in the narrative. Full of images of steel and concrete, the themes of beauty and purpose are stripped of any sense of comfort, as the film tries to find some sense of joy in a world occupied with so much suffering.

The Brutalist is available to rent on digital platforms. You can read my full review here.

Directed by Brady Corbet.

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8. Wake Up Dead Man

“I take it you’re not a Catholic.”

A small congregation of embittered, faithful followers. A church haunted by a decades-old family tragedy. A greedy and ego-driven elder priest screams from the pulpit. And an elusive 80-million-dollar fortune waiting for someone to find it. Sporting a longer haircut and a messy beard, Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc makes his welcome return to the screen with Wake Up Dead Man, the third film in Rian Johnson’s trilogy of whodunits, following Knives Out (2019) and Glass Onion (2022). Like its predecessors, Wake Up Dead Man is unafraid to be ferociously contemporary and outwardly, and unsubtly, political. Where the previous films have found the themes of the nuclear family, wealth, immigration, and pandemic responses to be ample supplies of on-the-nose commentary and satire, this film takes a stab at religion as both a corruptive and restorative force. This time, however, Craig’s charming southern investigator is upstaged by Josh O’Connor’s Father Jud, a new priest at a small parish in Chimney Rock, New York, who finds himself as the primary suspect in an ongoing murder investigation. Full of evocative cinematography, snappy editing, and gorgeously rendered characters, the film is a fabulous high-stakes mystery.

Not only does the mystery itself make for some compelling and highly entertaining filmmaking, but Johnson also substantiates the film with a surprisingly deep meditation on faith, grace, and forgiveness. The script is full of references to scripture and twisted quotes from the Bible’s most famous characters. There is one particularly beautiful moment in which Jud breaks from the urgency of the case to spend hours on the phone with a woman he has never met before to pray with her for her fractured family. While the eternal skeptic Blanc and the devout Father Jud never see eye-to-eye on God, nor does Blanc have a “road to Damascus” conversion, the film allows for a softer, grace-filled perspective on what it means to live a faithful life. Wake Up Dead Man hits all of the right notes: it’s well-paced, incredibly tense, always surprising, and often profound. The film is unflinching and scathing in its critiques of American culture and phony religiosity, while never disparaging the power of the divine in the lives of its characters. Where sin abounds — and there is plenty of sin in this twisted comic thriller — grace abounds all the more.

Wake Up Dead Man is now streaming on Netflix. You can read my full review here.

Directed by Rian Johnson.

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7. It Was Just an Accident

“The further you go, the more you sink.”

The career of Jafar Panahi as a voice for creative freedom is the stuff of modern legend. Coming of age as a filmmaker during the Iranian New Wave, including a stint as an assistant director to Abbas Kiarostami, Panahi has long been involved in political activism against the ruling regime of Iran. In 2010, after an arrest and imprisonment, Panahi was given a six-year house arrest sentence and a twenty-year ban on making films due to track record of propaganda against the Islamic Republic. Despite his acclaim as an artist in international markets and frequent calls for his release from fellow filmmakers, activists, and government bodies, Panahi hasn’t left his home country in fifteen years. It Was Just an Accident, this year’s Palme d’Or winner at the Cannes Film Festival and France’s submission for the 2026 Academy Awards, is his sixth feature since he was handed the ban.

In this film, another truly incendiary piece by Panahi, Vahid, a former political activist and current car mechanic, has a chance encounter with the man he believes tortured him in prison – Eghbal the Peg Leg — who he recognizes by the sound of his prosthetic limb. After trying in vain to bury the man alive in the desert outside of Tehran, Vahid visits some of his former political conspirators to confirm whether or not his prison truly is their torturer. The problem: none of them ever saw him in prison. Playing like an update to Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden, Vahid and the band of activists debate the merits of vengeance and mercy, eventually getting intertwined in Eghbal’s personal life and digging up demons from their most painful memories. The film is tightly wound, always on edge, and deeply thoughtful. It Was Just an Accident captures Panahi’s distinctly neorealist sensibilities with wide-angle lenses and long takes, letting the action exist in the masterful and bitter performances from his cast. While I won’t give it away, this film has my favourite final shot of the year.

It Was Just an Accident is available to rent from digital platforms.

Directed by Jafar Panahi.

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6. No Other Choice

“Repeat after me: I am a good person.”

No one does it quite like Park Chan-wook. An adaptation of American author Donald E. Westlake’s The Ax, Park’s No Other Choice is a delightfully and darkly concocted crime thriller about desperation in the modern economy. Starring Lee Byung-hun as disgruntled paper industry middle manager Yoo Man-su, the film follows Man-su’s desperate attempt to win back a role in the industry through a murderous scheme involving a North Korean pistol, a fake paper company, and gardening. The Korean master’s tenth feature and South Korea’s submission for the 2026 Academy Awards, the film proudly plays to his many strengths as a craftsman. The film remains visually inventive and dynamic, with Kim Woo-hyung’s camera dancing through the film’s tense and dense plotting. The script, written by Park and a trio of other collaborators, is coloured pitch black while always managing to find humour in the rather pitiful states Man-su and his victims find themselves in. The cast runs the gamut of desperate, crafty, pathetic, and uncertain, especially as rather ordinary people are pushed towards their breaking points. Electric doesn’t even begin to describe how dynamically structured No Other Choice is.

The film’s title phrase, “no other choice,” is repeated throughout the film under a variety of contexts. When we first hear it, it’s uttered by the new American owner of a Korean-based paper manufacturer to justify mass layoffs at the plant, of which our protagonist is a victim. Man-su utters it repeatedly as a mantra or manifestation to justify the extreme actions he takes to “level out” the competition in the job market. Choi Seon-chul, a line manager and the object of Yoo’s desperate jealousy, says it in the film’s final act when describing his own less-than-ethical decisions to climb the corporate ladder. The characters, a group primarily made of men with an inflated sense of self-importance in an industry that was already dying in the late 90s when Westlake wrote the original text, see themselves primarily as pawns of fate. There is a fascinating tension between these characters as victims of a horribly oppressive and desperate work culture in South Korea, while also using violence as their primary language to get ahead. It’s fascinating — and wildly entertaining — stuff.

No Other Choice is now playing in select theatres, with a wide release coming in the new year.

Directed by Park Chan-wook.

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5. Hamnet

“Look at me.”

In his Poetics, a philosophical treatise on drama and literary theory, Aristotle describes the function of stage tragedy as arousing feelings of “fear” and “pity” in the mind of the viewer, before purging those feelings through the story. The concept is translated as “catharsis” most often in English. In the canon of English literature, the most famous tragedy is Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a play caught between the living and the dead. Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet is a similarly haunted work, telling the story of Agnes Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife, and the death of her son, Hamnet. And through these complementary tales of familial loss and the pain of memory, there is catharsis for not only the film’s central characters, but for the audience itself. Director/co-writer/co-editor Chloé Zhao builds a beautiful combination of weepy period piece and complex character study, with a film that is bound to leave the viewer emotionally eviscerated and raw. Jesse Buckley, playing Ages Hathaway, tears her heart out here in an empowered, pained performance. 

The film’s climax has Agnes watch the debut performance of Hamlet, in which her husband (who the film is not particularly interested in) plays the ghost of Hamlet’s father. In this intimate, front-row experience of her husband’s play, she gains some semblance of peace to her traumatic, turbulent arc. The cheap reading of Hamnet’s finale is that Agnes, who has a gift of limited foresight, sees how powerful Shakespeare’s work will be to the masses. But the more personal, intentional reading, in my mind, is that, in that moment in the Globe as she sees the devastating death of Hamlet on stage, Agnes has her own catharsis. She is no longer alone with her son’s memory. Zhao’s deftly crafted period weeper blends terrific performances (again, Buckley will leave you breathless) and a beautiful visual language. She dwells on beautiful metaphorical images, creating surprising and thoughtful parallels between the film’s themes of motherhood and death. The great gaping doors still call to Agnes, but they no longer have to be as frightening.

Hament is playing in theatres. You can read my full review here.

Directed by Chloé Zhao.

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4. Marty Supreme

“It’s an original ball for an original guy. It’s the Marty Supreme Ball, not the Marty Normal Ball.”

To describe Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme as a sports movie would be a fairly reductive way of characterizing the film. While sure, protagonist Marty Mauser (played by electrified Timothée Chalamet) plays a lot of table tennis — a character pretty directly inspired by real-life table tennis hustler and international champion Marty Reisman — including competing at the international stage, but the film spends little of its runtime on the sport. It’s not even a “sports drama about the characters, not the sport” type film (a la Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine, which also came out this year). If you saw the heart attack-inducing Uncut Gems and thought that Marty Supreme might be a chiller, more biographical time at the movies, you’d be mistaken. The problem is that international ping pong is only one part of his life. Mauser is also trying to take care of his pregnant best friend, scam teenagers at bowling alleys, romance an aging 30s movie star, escape the clutches of his uncle, find a lost dog, and make it to the airport for 8 a.m. the next morning. After the first forty-five minutes, when Marty returns home from a stint in London, trying to win it big at the British Open, the film descends into the same frenetic, conclusive pace that leaves the protagonist and his stash of orange coloured ping pong balls running from one scheme to the next as Marty desperately tries to keep himself from buckling under the weight of his hustler lifestyle.

Chalamet brings a bragadocious swagger and sense of desperation to a character who is pretty despicable to everyone he meets. It’s a risky play on Safdie’s part, but when Chalamet plays the part with such vulnerability, it’s hard not to feel for the poor guy at least some of the time. Other cast highlights include Gwyneth Paltrow’s artistically burnt-out millionaire, Odessa A’zion’s scarred Rachel, legendary crime film director Abel Ferrara’s embittered dog owner, Tyler, The Creator’s wingman to Mauser, and Kevin O’Leary’s (yeah, the guy from Dragons’ Den) scummy pen executive. From the vibrant cinematography and period production design to the absurd visual choices and anachronistic needle drops, the film begins at a million miles an hour and never wants to stop. Any film to own the word “Supreme” firmly in its title better have the strength of character to earn that label. Thankfully, Safdie has the confidence to pull that trick off with flying colours. It’s a classic story of mid-century American success, spearheaded by a battering ram of a performance from Chalamet about a kid who’s willing to burn his whole life for the fleeting and distant hope of greatness.

Marty Supreme is now playing in theatres everywhere.

Directed by Josh Safdie.

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3. Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie

“This is going to be a copyright nightmare. If you’re watching this in a theatre right now, thank your lucky stars because it’s going to be the only showing ever.”

Director Matt Johnson used the goodwill he garnered from the success of BlackBerry to finance a feature-length, time-travelling sequel to his short-lived Viceland comedy series, itself a sequel to his late 2000s web series, and, boy, does he ever hit a home run straight out of the Skydome. The premise of Nirvanna the Band has never changed: two friends, Matt and Jay (played by Johnson and his long-time collaborator Jay McCarrol as fictionalized versions of themselves), are attempting to book a show at the Rivoli for their band, Nirvanna, using increasingly desperate publicity tactics. This time, however, they’re just about at their wits’ end. Opening with a Mission: Impossible-esque parachute stunt based around the CN Tower that is maybe as thrilling as anything Ethan Hunt has done on camera, Nirvana the Band the Show the Movie kicks off its breezy runtime with the audience in stitches. And the train of jokes never lets up. After an accident involving an RV and a bottle of Orbitz (there’s a deep cut piece of Canadiana for you), we are quickly swept away into a time-travelling journey where Matt and Jay find themselves trapped in 2008, in the earliest days of their band.

Shot in a guerrilla, borderline prank show style with various real-life passerbys being thrown into the film, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is a riotous, anarchic love letter to this strange piece of internet Canadiana, the city of Toronto, the Back to the Future movies, and the year 2008. I stepped into my screening at a local festival with a cursory background on Carrol and Johnson’s cult series, and I adored what I saw. It’s outrageously funny and totally madcap, while also hitting some really strong emotional beats about aging and friendship. The two, both in their early 40s, have been playing these characters in arrested development for nearly two decades, and they aren’t afraid to embrace their age. Scrappy, lovingly handmade, and always surprising, I’ve been recycling bits from Nirvanna to myself and anyone who’s crossed my path since October. This is a fabulous piece of Canadian cinema and comedy.

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is headed for a theatrical release in February 2026. Don’t miss it! Check out the trailer here.

Directed by Matt Johnson.

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2. Sinners

“You keep dancing with the devil and one day he’s going to follow you home.”

The Mississippi sun might just melt the skin off your bones if you’re not careful, something that Sinners’ vampiric antagonists have to take quite literally. Drawing on the history of the early 20th-century American South and African-American culture, Ryan Coogler’s electrifying Film is not only a carefully constructed historical epic, but also unabashedly and refreshingly a genre film. Sinners came in hot in the early part of the year and has been sizzling in my mind over the last eight months. Directed by Ryan Coogler, shot in glorious 65mm film by Autumn Durald Arkapaw, and soundtracked with Ludwig Göransson’s haunting guitars, the film roars with energy and is marinated in a rich, Southern gothic sense of mood and atmosphere. Michael B. Jordan stuns as twins “Smoke” and “Stack,” with each performance distinctive and full of depth and interiority. Newcomer Miles Caton plays Sammie, a preternaturally talented musician, whose bass-y voice grounds the film’s explorations of the nature of sin in its complicated view of spirituality. As the sun sets over the American South, after spending half of its runtime carefully setting up a brand-new juke joint run by the twins and their complex interpersonal relationships, Sinners descends into action-horror vampire madness.

Coogler’s real magic trick is how he so masterfully meshes the genre trappings with the real history and culture of the early 20th-century American South. It never goes out of its way to explain the historical context to the viewer, letting the realities of Jim Crow laws, the Great Depression, and the First World War inform the characters and their motivations without ever domineering over the film. Sinners never falls into the pitfalls of lesser genre films that want to be smarter than their inspirations. This is a vampire movie through and through, with allergies to garlic and silver and the need to be invited into buildings included. The film also includes some truly revelatory uses of music, both in its score and as a mechanism for exploring themes of artistry, culture, and the ties that bind generations of people together. And the rest of the film is exemplary, too. Brilliant production, costume, and monster design choices abound. Always one-upping itself with its incredible action set pieces, musical moments, and frights, Sinners is the sort of film that reaffirms why the movies endure as an art form.

Sinners also has my favourite movie scene of the year. Sammie’s performance of “I Lied to You” is otherworldly. I’d link the scene on YouTube, but it’s so much better in the context of the full film, so go watch it!

Sinners is now available to rent on digital platforms. You can read my full review here.

Directed by Ryan Coogler.

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1. One Battle After Another

“Viva la revolution!”

Marijuana, left-wing radicalism, U.S. immigration policies, ethno-fascism, class divisions, and lifelong familial regret are just some of the volatile ingredients mixed into this Molotov cocktail of a film. I feel like every description of One Battle After Another slightly undersells just how insane and utterly propulsive this movie is. Running at top speed from the very first frame until the very last, Paul Thomas Anderson’s 130-million-dollar rollicking action epic mixes “anxiety comedy” and brutally dark tragedy into a pulse-pounding extravaganza. It’s a razor-sharp commentary on contemporary American politics that never tries to hide its relevancy, while also stepping into the murky, ever-present question of how to resist totalitarian regimes. Some of the most interesting and stunning choices from PTA’s storied career as a defining voice of American cinema are featured here, from the evocative and often grimy cinematography to the disconcerting piano melodies crafted by composer Johnny Greenwood. The action sequences are incredible, from the extensive foot chases to the dramatic finale in the California desert. It’s so stunning and captivating, I am honestly at a loss as to how to organize my thoughts.

Leading the ensemble cast is a desperate, haggard, and in-over-his-head Leonardo DiCaprio as Bob Ferguson, a washed-up member of the “French 75,” who brings a weed-induced absent-mindedness to a brilliantly funny leading role. He’s surrounded by a fabulous ensemble, including an incredibly tortured Teyana Taylor, a raw and vulnerable Chase Infiniti, and the comedically excellent Benecio del Toro. But the real MVP is Sean Penn, whose frankly terrifying performance as Colonel Lockjaw might just be my favourite of the year (heck, his walk alone puts him in the running for my favourite). One Battle After Another is certainly not the year’s only story of contemporary American politics, but it is the most effective. Not only because its themes are both specific and eternal, backed by truly classic-worthy filmmaking, but because it dares to offer a little bit of hope to this horrible climate. In a world where division seems to be the name of the game, the film dares to suggest that our shared humanity might just pull us through. It’s a slam dunk for PTA and easily the best film of the year — and one of the best of the century thus far.

One Battle After Another is now available to rent on digital platforms.

Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.

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Honourable Mentions

2025 saw the release of many a film, including some really strong films that I, in the interest of brevity and my own sanity, was not able to include fully in this list. Below is my list of honourable mentions, films that are well worth your while, but didn’t quite make the top ten.

• Black Bag (directed by Steven Soderbergh) — A slick, stylish, and tightly-plotted political thriller. Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender play a pair of married intelligence operatives who are as obsessed with each other as they are suspicious. It’s delicious (and not just for its great cooking scenes).

• Bugonia (directed by Yorgos Lanthimos) — Lanthimos remade the Korean black comedy Save the Green Planet! as a deeply funny and profoundly dark film with Jesse Plemons as a paranoid, terminally online domestic terrorist and Emma Stone as the corporate suit who ruined his life. Incredible final montage.

• Frankenstein (directed by Guillermo del Toro) — Del Toro finally broaches the ultimate monster story with his adaptation of Frankenstein. Jacon Elordi steals the show as the Creature, while Oscar Isaac hams it up as a cartoonishly evil Victor Frankenstein. Full review here.

• Nickel Boys (directed by RaMell Ross) — Shot from a first-person POV (how many of those do you see in cinema?), the film tells the crushing story of a reform school in the southern USA and the abuse sustained by its students. It’s a heavy watch about the profound racism of the American justice system.

• Train Dreams (directed by Clint Bentley) — I felt very at home in the trees of the Pacific Northwest in this film, before Bentley promptly crushed my heart with this lush and poignant period piece weeper.