25 – Here (Robert Zemeckis).jpg)
Here arrived in UK cinemas on a wave of hostile reviews, most of which struck me as very wide of the mark once I’d seen it. The film presents us with a single perspective, setting up an immobile camera that gazes at a fixed point in space, while in front of it time passes back and forth; we go from the age of the dinosaurs to the age of COVID, spending most of our time in the corner of one house where generations of a single family will grow up. Zemeckis has always tended to invite scorn and scepticism with his sentimentality and his fascination with technology, but I think the tools that he uses in Here serve to create a melancholy portrait of American life in the 20th century; it's a story about lost time, frustrated ambitions and foregone dreams. I found it to be an odd, endearing and sincerely moving film, one that – like his similarly lambasted Welcome to Marwen – deserved better than to be so flippantly dismissed.
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24– Sirāt (Óliver Laxe)
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23 – Twinless (James Sweeney).jpg)
In the first twenty minutes of Twinless, James Sweeney had already done enough to get me interested. I was intrigued by the film’s wry depiction of grief and friendship, by Sweeney’s confident framing and editing, and by his onscreen chemistry with Dylan O’Brien. Then Sweeney played his hand, revealing the true nature of his premise, and I was totally hooked. It’s one of the sharpest acts of rug-pulling that I’ve seen in a while, and Sweeney manages to keep delivering the laughs while developing an unsettling sense of tension. It’s a tight, intelligently directed film and O’Brien is outstanding in a variety of ways. Aisling Franciosi also deserves a mention, as a character who initially appears to be a one-note office bimbo before revealing herself to be the smartest and most perceptive person involved in this situation. Don’t read anything about Twinless, just watch it.
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22 – Direct Action (Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell).jpg)
Direct Action is a film that was long in the making. For much of the past two decades, protestors have resisted attempts to build an airport in the French region of Notre-Dame-des-Landes, an action that was strongly opposed by local residents and farmers. Squatters have occupied the region and refused multiple attempts at eviction, finally triumphing in 2018. Direct Action explores what happens after such a victory has been achieved, following the day-to-day life of the community that has formed on this land. Shot on 16mm, the film immerses us into their activities, from mundane aspects of their work and leisure to ongoing attempts to maintain vigilance against incursions into their territory. Direct Action unfolds across four hours, and it offers an engrossing study of quotidian work that goes into keeping a protest movement alive.
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21 – Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie).jpg)
This was the year of the Safdie separation. Benny made the Mark Kerr biopic The Smashing Machine with Dwayne Johnson, while Josh made Marty Supreme, which feels a lot closer in spirit to the Safdies’ previous works. Like Good Time and Uncut Gems, Marty Supreme is a portrait of a charismatic hustler desperately striving to keep his dreams alive while constantly running on the brink of total collapse. I don’t think it quite manages the sustained level of intensity that those films achieved, there are parts of this two-and-half-hour film that feel baggy and unfocused, but there are long stretches of phenomenal filmmaking. The table tennis scenes are electrifying, and there is no question that Chalamet’s swaggering lead performance is the best work of his career to date. Marty Supreme is definitely my preference from 2025’s two Safdie offerings, even if separately they both seem to lack the special sauce that made their movies tick.
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20 – Henry Johnson (David Mamet).jpg)
The other night I watched Lindsay Anderson’s 1975 film In Celebration, and I wish it was common practice to make a film with the original cast of a play – not a filmed recording of the stage production, but an actual film. That’s what David Mamet did with the cast of his 2023 play Henry Johnson, and the result is one of his best films. Henry Johnson consists of four scenes, each of which is a two-hander, following Henry (Evan Jonigkeit) as he is arrested for fraud and goes to prison, where he falls under the spell of the cunningly manipulative and endlessly philosophising Gene (Shia LaBeouf). As always with Mamet, everything is a con game and a power struggle, and the dialogue here is so classically Mamet, which brings out the best from these actors. All four of the film’s conversations are compelling to watch, but the opening one between Jonigkeit and Chris Bauer is almost a perfect short film in itself, one that builds to a terrific punchline. It’s good to have Mamet back on film.
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19 – Seven Veils (Atom Egoyan).jpg)
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Another project that began life in the theatre, Seven Veils was sparked by Atom Egoyan’s commission to direct a production of Salome for the Canadian Opera Company in 2023; an opera he had first directed in 1996. He created this film while working on the opera, with Amanda Seyfried playing Jeanne, the young director developing a new Salome for the stage, while trying to get out from under the shadow of her mentor’s 1996 production of the same show. This story stands at the crossroads of so many of Egoyan’s familiar obsessions, particularly the themes of family, history, trauma and technology, which are touched upon through the home movie footage of Jeanne’s childhood and her Zoom conversations with her estranged husband. The experience of simultaneously making Salome and Seven Veils seems to have invigorated this director, who makes a number of interesting choices and finds arresting compositions throughout. Egoyan’s recent work has been erratic to say the least, but he’s close to something like his best form here.
18 – Train Dreams (Clint Bentley).jfif)
Train Dreams tells the story of a man who lived from the late 19th century to the mid-20th century, and his life was unremarkable in most respects. Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) is a logger who spends months away from his young family as he clears the great forests and helps to build the railroads that will transform the nation. Edgerton’s finely judged performance beautifully captures the nature of this humble, hardworking man, whose life is blighted by a terrible tragedy but must find the strength to carry on. Grainier is a man of few words, but the silences are filled by Will Patton’s ruminative voiceover, or a marvellous cameo from a gregarious William H. Macy, who talks of the natural splendour of the world and wonders what mankind will do to it. Train Dreams can sometimes evoke better films – The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford comes to mind, as does the work of Terrence Malick – but Adolpho Veloso’s camera finds poetry in the images, and the film has a cumulative effect, with the small and apparently insignificant moments of Grainier’s life building to a powerful climax.
17 – The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho).jpg)
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The Secret Agent plunges us into a vividly realised depiction of 1970s Brazil, where corruption, death and paranoia are everywhere. Fleeing the big city, Marcelo (Wagner Moura, magnificent) finds refuge among other political dissidents hiding out in Recife, but the net – in the shape of hitmen despatched by a powerful enemy – is closing in. What I particularly relish in Filho’s films is the way he sustains a high degree of tension in the central narrative while allowing his film to sprawl casually in multiple directions. We get a surreal interlude involving a zombie leg, we spend a lot of time in and around the local cinema, and he gives ample time to an amazing ensemble of character actors, including the late Udo Kier in his final screen role. Filho has ambition, daring and talent to spare, and his films are exhilarating in their formal brilliance and eccentric touches. I hope the success of The Secret Agent drives people towards discovering his earlier work, especially the documentary Pictures of Ghosts, which feels like a companion piece.
16 – Oslo Stories: Dreams (Dag Johan Haugerud).jpg)
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There were three films in Dag Johan Haugerud’s Oslo Stories series – Dreams, Love and Sex – and I loved them all. These films had no connective tissue aside from their setting and the fact that they each explored different aspects of relationships, but in each film Haugerud showed himself to be skilled and incisive writer, allowing his characters to articulate their insecurities and pain, and work through their problems together. If I had to pick one, then I’d select Dreams as my personal favourite, primarily for the way it captures a palpable sense of what unrequited longing feels like through its sensitively handled story of a schoolgirl falling in love with her teacher. There is real intelligence in the way Haugerud handles each of these films, directing with patience and with an eye for the way the surrounding city adds so much to these stories in terms of life and atmosphere.
15 – If I Had Legs I'd Kick You (Mary Bronstein).jpg)
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If neither of the Safdie brothers’ individual films quite delivered that electric charge of anxiety and dread this year, we had Mary Bronstein (wife of the Safdies’ regular collaborator Ronald Bronstein) to deliver it in spades. Bronstein gets us uncomfortably close to a woman coming apart at the seems; the camera is thrust right into Rose Byrne’s face, and she responds with one of the year’s truly great acting performances. Her character Linda is described as “stretchable” by her daughter, but she is clearly at breaking point, having been left by her husband to cope alone with their daughter’s unspecified illness, and with the pair being forced to live out of a motel when the ceiling caves in and floods their home. The whole film teeters on a funny/nightmarish knife-edge and we are right there with Linda at every strenuous moment, with Byrne earning our empathy despite making no attempt to make to make her more sympathetic or soften her questionable behaviour. I was very disappointed with how little bite Nightbitch had when exploring similar themes last year, but If I Had Legs I'd Kick You doesn’t hold back and it's a bracing experience.
14 – Highest 2 Lowest (Spike Lee).jpg)
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High and Low is probably my favourite Akira Kurosawa film, but the best compliment I can pay to Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest is that I hardly thought about the original film at all as I was engrossed in this one. Lee makes the material typically his own. It takes a while for the film to warm up, but it shifts gears magnificently in the ransom money switcheroo, which Lee stages against the backdrop of the Puerto Rican Day parade and with Yankees fans piling onto the train as another complicating factor. Highest 2 Lowest is reconfigured as a contemplation of what one sacrifices through success, when you're living in an ivory tower and losing touch with real life, and Washington is unsurprisingly tremendous as the mogul brought down to street level. His climactic face-off with A$AP Rocky (so good in both this and If I Had Legs I'd Kick You) is superbly acted and staged. I was fortunate enough to see Highest 2 Lowest on the big screen and it played brilliantly for a sold-out audience. Dumping it onto streaming was a joke.
13 – Roofman (Derek Cianfrance).jpg)
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This is another film that should have been a bigger hit, and a few years ago it would have surely found an appreciative audience. It’s hard to think of many American studio releases this year that were as crowd-pleasing and satisfying as Roofman. Cianfrance directs a lighter touch than we’re used to seeing from him with this material, and he handles it all perfectly, finding plenty of knockabout humour in the absurdity of Channing Tatum hiding out in Toys R Us, but also locating a real emotional core in his growing relationship with Kirsten Dunst. There’s a genuine interest in the texture and nuance of people’s lives here in a way that reminded me of the work of Jonathan Demme, and I found myself completely involved in the final third, which builds to something that feels authentically emotional in a way that Cianfrance’s earlier movies have pushed too hard for. Tatum and Dunst are doing some of the best work of their careers in this film and I wish more people had seen it.
12 – Landmarks (Lucrecia Martel).jpg)
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When I interviewed Lucrecia Martel in 2018, she told me she was finishing a documentary on the murder of Javier Chocobar. That ‘finishing’ apparently took the best part of seven years, but thankfully, a Lucrecia Martel film is always worth waiting for. Chocobar, a leader in Argentina’s indigenous Chuchagasta community, was killed in 2009, with footage of his murder subsequently being uploaded to YouTube. In Landmarks, Martel follows the murder trial and also explores the story of the Chuchagastas, digging deep into Argentina’s colonial history. As you would expect, this is a brilliantly edited film, with Martel skilfully weaving together courtroom footage, interviews with members of Chuchagasta community, archive footage, and photographs into a wholly absorbing and moving portrait of a shameful history. Landmarks is also notable for containing the finest use of drone footage that I’ve seen in a film since Michael Bay’s Ambulance. Martel’s first documentary is a film that deserves to stand alongside her already exceptional body of work.
11 – Silent Friend (Ildikó Enyedi).jpg)
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Three stories taking place across the span of a century. In the first, set in the 1920s, an aspiring female student strives to make progress at the male-dominated University of Hamburg; in the 1970s, a young man with a crush on a fellow student is asked to look after her botanical project while she’s away; and finally, a visiting academic finds himself stuck on campus when COVID strikes, with only a grumpy security guard for company. Each of these tales explores means of communication in some way, not only between people, but between humanity and the natural world. These characters actively seek a way to understand and interact with the trees around this building, and Enyedi’s direction of these scenarios is simultaneously playful and thoughtful. Silent Friend is aesthetically rich (switching between 35mm, 16mm and digital for her three eras) and Enyedi cuts crisply between each narrative in a way that sustains our interest in each while letting them attain a cumulative resonance. An imaginative, consistently surprising and thoroughly engaging film.
10 – Young Mothers (Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne).jpg)
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Do we take the Dardennes for granted these days? Once upon a time, the release of a new film from these Belgian brothers was a major event, but their last few films have had small releases and no fanfare, and Young Mothers is another that seemed to sneak out this year to collective shrugs. This is baffling to me, because I was floored by their latest picture and I remain in awe of what the Dardennes can achieve onscreen, which is the kind of empathetic filmmaking that so few other contemporary filmmakers appear to be capable of. Young Mothers is the brothers’ first true ensemble piece, and through the varying experiences of these teenage mothers and mothers-to-be, they tell stories of children failed by their parents and striving to avoid making the same mistakes. Their filmmaking is deceptively nondescript in its style – and Young Mothers lacks the urgent narrative drive and tension of their prior work – but the unaffected performances they draw from the young cast are so real, and the film had me in tears on multiple occasions.
9 – Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier)
I love the way Joachim Trier so swiftly gives us an understanding of these characters, the house they live in, and their shared history at the start of Sentimental Value. There is little that’s new in the themes that he is exploring here – strained familial relationships, the artist as a bad parent, attempts to find catharsis and healing through art – but it’s the execution of these notions that elevates everything. He and his co-writer Eskil Vogt create characters who feel authentic and nuanced, and each of the interactions between these individuals is superbly written and performed. It would have been easy for Trier to focus attention on the family’s drama and have the supporting role of a American actress act as some kind of comic relief, a cheap spoofing of Hollywood stardom, but Elle Fanning’s performance as Rachel, an earnest actress aware she’s out of her depth, is one that I found extremely touching. Trier draws first-rate performances from every member of his cast, and his style feels so intuitive and effortless at times. This is a wonderfully enjoyable and satisfying film.
8 – Afternoons of Solitude (Albert Serra).jpg)
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After the screening of Afternoons of Solitude that I attended, Albert Serra took part in a Q&A (being a Serra Q&A, it was more of an extended monologue) where he discussed the way they stitched microphones into the matadors’ outfits for this documentary. But where, I wondered? When you see one of these matadors being hoisted and squeezed into his clothes by his team of helpers, there barely appears to be enough room for him. These backstage glimpses into the matadors’ world are fascinating and often comical (they resemble women from period dramas, being forced into corsets ahead of a ball, which rather undermines all the macho posturing) while the footage that Serra captures in the arena is simultaneously engrossing and repulsive. Serra doesn’t consider the ethics of this sport, he simply presents it to us and allows the matadors’ own words to highlight what ridiculous figures they are, with their endless self-aggrandising talk of their “big balls” and how courageous they are for slaying an animal already weakened by multiple blows. Afternoons of Solitude is a tough film to watch, but it's masterfully filmed and edited.
7 – Blue Heron (Sophy Romvari).jpg)
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This is by far the best debut film I saw in 2025. I haven’t seen any of the short films that Sophy Romvari has made prior to this, but I’ll be seeking them out now as she shows incredible filmmaking instincts in this sensitively crafted feature. Blue Heron is clearly a deeply personal work, telling the story of a family dealing with their eldest son’s increasingly dangerous and unpredictable behaviour, and the first half of the film is seen from the perspective of this teenager’s eight-year-old sister. I was so completely drawn into this drama, I was thrown off balance a little by the sudden narrative switch that Romvari makes halfway through the picture, shifting the perspective to the now-adult Sasha, a documentary filmmaker, but this second half of the film finds fresh and equally intriguing ways of exploring these painful memories. Blue Heron is a beautifully directed film, with some astonishingly imaginative and expressive camerawork, and Romvari gradually adds layers of meaning and emotion into its carefully constructed framework, until it culminates in a place that is very moving and cathartic.
6 – It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi)
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5 – The Love That Remains (Hlynur Pálmason).jpg)
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After making the magnificent period piece Godland, my favourite film of 2022, Hlynur Pálmason has returned with something more intimate and contemporary in The Love That Remains. What the two films have in common is a fascination with the capturing the passage of time; The Love That Remains was filmed across the span of a year, allowing us to see the seasons change during the film. A quick summary of this film would describe it as charting a year in the life of a family as the parents go through a separation, but while most filmmakers would make that split the dramatic thrust of the narrative, here it's simply something that is happening, and it's given no more or less importance that the mother’s artworks, the father’s work on a trawler, or the children’s construction of a model for target practice. This is a film assembled from fleeting moments – all caught in vibrant 35mm images – and everything about it feels incredibly lived-in, organic and real, but Pálmason is always ready to surprise us with unexpected comic interludes and surreal touches. It’s another wonderful and entirely fresh film from someone who is fast becoming one of my favourite working directors.
4 – Magellan (Lav Diaz)
Those Lav Diaz fans who feel short-changed by the fact that Magellan is a mere 160 minutes long may be heartened to hear the rumours that the director has an eight-hour version that he is currently tinkering with. In the meantime, this released version will certainly suffice as a masterful and completely involving portrait of the 16th century Portuguese explorer. The film captivates from its opening frame, in which an indigenous woman is suddenly startled and stares directly at the audience, aware of being watched by outsiders. Diaz depicts the invasive force of colonialism through a series of expeditions across two decades; towards the start of the film, we see the aftermath of a conquest, with bloodied bodies strewn across a beach, and the later scene in which Magellan’s men gather and destroy the villagers’ religious icons before making them worship the cross is one of the year’s most indelible sequences. Diaz has a recognisable star for the first time in Gael García Bernal, but there’s not a performance that feels out of place, and there’s no moment when you don’t feel fully transported to this time and place. The compositions created by Diaz and Artur Tort (who also shot Afternoons of Solitude this year) are endlessly striking. It’s a stunning film.
3 – The Testament of Ann Lee (Mona Fastvold).jpg)
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The team behind The Brutalist returns with another film about an immigrant arriving in America and trying to build something that lasts. I found The Testament of Ann Lee to be equally impressive and even more accomplished. The story of Ann Lee, who started the Shaker religious movement in England in the eighteenth century before taking it to the US, is a fascinating one, and Fastvold’s telling of it is bold and imaginative. Amanda Seyfried plays her with a fierce intensity – you completely believe in her religious fervour – but she also shows us how Ann’s development of faith and her renouncing of sex was rooted in the unbearable trauma of birthing and losing four children. Everything about The Testament of Ann Lee feels entirely so vivid and alive. It’s such a stunning recreation of this period, and the musical numbers – developed by Daniel Blumberg from traditional Shaker hymns – that are woven into the fabric of the film are completely rapturous. The Testament of Ann Lee is an astonishing, singular vision, and I felt like my whole body was vibrating when I emerged from the cinema after seeing its projected from 70mm.
2 – Measures for a Funeral (Sofia Bohdanowicz).jpg)
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Sofia Bohdanowicz and actress Deragh Campbell have collaborated on a series of films over the past decade featuring the character Audrey Benac. Measures for a Funeral is the climactic film in that cycle, and it’s their most ambitious and accomplished film to date, shooting in widescreen and telling a story that stretches across Canada and Europe. The film has elements of documentary and essay film as it reflects Bohdanowicz’s own investigation into the early 20th century violinist Kathleen Parlow, and her attempt to stage a production of Opus 28, a work written for her that was never performed, but she turns these real-life elements of research and inquiry into a compelling and inventive drama. Campbell is wonderful as the prickly, troubled protagonist, following the thread of this investigation in part as a means of avoiding dealing with her grief over her dying mother. The piece of music that Measures for a Funeral centres on is frequently described as a ‘minor’ work, but when we see it finally being performed in the film’s final stretch, having seen what went into making this moment a reality, it becomes something spine-tingling and transcendent.
1 - One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson)
How thrilling it is to see Paul Thomas Anderson working on this scale, and working with such an exhilarating sense of freedom. One Battle After Another is unquestionably his most mainstream-friendly and crowd-pleasing film to date, but he hasn’t jettisoned any of his idiosyncrasies in the process. The film has an unusual, undulating rhythm, a willingness to fill out the frame with eccentric supporting characters, and a deep love of goofy humour. This is by some distance the funniest film of the year, but it’s also the most dynamic and exciting, and I’m staggered by Anderson’s control of pacing, which makes this 162-minute movie zip by even as he introduces languid stretches and digressions. One Battle After Another felt like a film alive to the current moment as soon as it was released, but at its core Anderson is moved by the story of a father desperately trying to protect his daughter, and Leonardo DiCaprio’s comical/tender performance is a career high from one of our greatest actors. I loved every twitch and grimace in Sean Pen’s blissfully funny performance; I loved the sense of community embodied by Benicio del Toro’s casually brilliant turn; I loved Teyana Taylor’s incredible screen presence, which reverberates through the movie long after she has left. Above all else, I loved seeing a filmmaker in full command of his material, giving us a feast of a movie that is constantly changing shape and springing surprises in a way that few filmmakers would even dream of. One Battle After Another was also the last film I watched in 2025, as I revisited it on a splendid 70mm print this week, and like most of Anderson’s films, it only improves on multiple viewings; this time, I found it even funnier and more moving than I did the first time. I have a feeling I’ll be re-watching this for many years to come.
