Top Ten of 2025
SOUND OF FALLING (Mascha Schilinski, Germany, 2025) – Formally dazzling, heterogenous, polyphonic multi-generational drama set in a house near the future / current / former internal German border. We experience life through the eyes (sometimes literally) and voices of various women as they enact and reenact themes of abuse and struggle. Several time periods are juggled, and various storylines are only filled out piece by piece, through stolen glimpses and snatches of narration, over the two and a half hours of the film. The film goes to some very dark places (we see characters’ fantasies of suicide played out, for instance, and there are plenty of deaths and mutilations), but the cinematic creativity on display is so impressive that the overall impression is one of elation rather than depression. I’m sure this film will attract more than a few comparisons with
Mirror, but to me it was more like
Heimat by way of
Inland Empire. It’s one of many films this year that make spectacular use of Academy Ratio (three more are in my top ten, and three more are in the ten after that) which seems to be coming back as a “cinematic” (anti-television) visual format.
RESURRECTION (Cannes Version) (Bi Gan, China, 2025) – Creatively dazzling as
Sound of Falling was, it – and just about every other movie ever made – is overshadowed in that respect by Bi Gan’s latest opus. It’s five films crammed into a vague science-fiction framework in which one of the rare people who can still dream (and they dream Cinema) is pursued through time by Shu Qi (finding a safe arthouse haven after the retirement of Hou Hsiao-hsien). His lucid moments manifest as films within the film embodying various styles and genres and each evoking one of the five senses. These episodes double (triple? quadruple?) as evocations of the history of the twentieth century, the history of China in the twentieth century, and the history of cinema. L’arroseur gets arroséed a couple of times; a mirror store gets (Lady of) Shanghaied; trains get metaphored. The episodes have their ups and downs (which is surely deliberate: why attempt this kind of a compendium if it’s not going to have a radical internal variety?) but it’s all a glorious cinephilic hot tub. There’s even a Bi Gan movie in there at the end, a one-take wonder that’s a horror / gangster hybrid running from the middle of the night to dawn.
I know that timeline doesn’t add up, but one of the elements of the plan sequence is a section where the live action is accelerated while films play on an improvised street cinema at regular speed. It’s a reinvention of one of Wong Kar-Wai’s signature shots.
The film is an entire universe unto itself. There are things in here that you’ve never seen before. For instance, the film ends with:
an audience made of light in a melting wax cinema.
It’s apparently being recut even as we speak, so I’m trepidatious about what form it might be in when it gets a commercial release. They should at least proofread the English intertitles of the opening ‘silent’ (‘hand-coloured’, partly animated, thoroughly expressionistic) episode.
SIRAT (Oliver Laxe, Spain, 2025) – Laxe sure knows how to open a movie. Here he sets up the location and the premise, and introduces all the main characters in a visually and sonically astounding sequence (a rave in the Moroccan desert), then swiftly moves on to the next – and only – thing, an escape into the unknown. What better place to spend the end of the world than a place that isn’t even a place (Western Sahara)? The journey becomes more fraught and more hallucinatory as it goes on. McGuffins are jettisoned. Stark, beautiful and tense as a motherfucker.
Kinda non-specific spoiler
The film delivers what feels like the most shocking moment I’ve seen in a film. And the second-most shocking.
(Sergei Loznitsa, France, 2025) – France is the only country that figures twice in my top ten, but it’s only on a funding technicality, as one of the directors is American and the other Ukrainian.
Two Prosecutors is as post-Soviet as cinema gets, whatever its provenance, and it’s of a piece with Loznitsa’s earlier features in mood (grim) and quality (extraordinary). An adaptation from Georgy Demidov, who knew whereof he spoke, this film lacks the phantasmagoria of
A Gentle Creature, but inhabits a similar Kafkaesque world with its own implacable authoritarian gravity. The Academy (it’s that ratio again!) compositions have an austere foregrounded geometry (boxes within boxes, occasional slashing diagonals), and Loznitsa holds and holds on personal encounters of escalating tension. Loznitsa is, of course, one of the greatest living documentary filmmakers, but his fiction features are very different in form and always something special.
IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT (Jafar Panahi, Iran, 2025) – I don’t know that Panahi has ever made a bad film (and I think I’ve seen them all), but this one is so
complete that it might just rise to the top. It’s a story of revenge deferred and frustrated (often in incongruously comic terms) that balances humour and horror and tension (it occurs to me that my top five are all oddball thrillers of some kind), shot through with a casual formal mastery. The ending is sheer perfection. Life goes back to normal.
DREAMS (Dag Johan Haugerud, Norway, 2024) – The second part of Haugerud’s Oslo Trilogy might be the best, but it’s a close-run race between three brilliant films. The premise is a great one – a teenager writes a secret memoir about her relationship with her new teacher, but when she shares it with her grandmother, its sheer literary quality distorts everybody’s response to the actual situation. Haugerud’s script is flawless, and is funny and moving even as it gets deep into the weeds of the moral and personal dilemmas of the characters. The actors are effortlessly up to the task of embodying their slippery characters, and, like all the films in the trilogy, it makes superb use of the Oslo locations. These films are much harder to pull off than they might appear.
THE BLUE TRAIL (Gabriel Mascaro, Brazil, 2025) – A soft science fiction satire of society’s attitudes to the elderly (in short: patronize, marginalize; eliminate) that takes the unexpected form of a magic realist, tropicalismo picaresque. Another gorgeous Academy film. Widescreen is for squares.
THE NEW YEAR THAT NEVER CAME (Bogdan Muresanu, Romania, 2024) – Brilliant debut that demonstrates that the Romanian New Wave is still going strong after a quarter of a century (or six decades, if you adopt Cristi Puiu’s suggested dating method!) A bunch of vivid characters (whose interconnections only slowly become apparent) all reach the end of the line in lockstep with the Ceausescu regime, and the film’s multiple synchronized climaxes are orchestrated sublimely in the final twenty minutes.
A POET (Simon Mesa Soto, Colombia, 2025) – Rough at the edges (quite literally: the film has the hairy frame edge of old 16mm, though I doubt that it was actually shot on film) but hilarious, perceptive and uncomfortable. Former poet, now general all-around loser Oscar is one of the least prepossessing protagonists in memory, and his hunched gait, whiny entitlement and general haplessness at first make you wonder if you’ll be able to last out the film. But the ridiculous situation he finds him in – ‘discovering’ a natural poet with a fresh voice among his students – offers him the possibility of reinvention, if only he can manage to not screw it up. The script unfurls magnificently, as various characters reveal their insecurities and opportunism, and various fates unravel. Ubeimar Rios’ lead performance is detailed and complex, and our sympathy kind of grudgingly seeps into him rather than being narratively demanded or specially pleaded by the actor. Rebecca Andrade as his charge, Yurlady, is also excellent, and is required to play unconscious slapstick, sly manipulation and artistic ambition all from an attitude of passive innocence.
EUREKA (Lisandro Alonso, Argentina etc., 2023) - Heartbreaking multi-layered, time-travelling, shape-shifting epic held together by the disappearances of indigenous people. The closer you look, the less you see. A very sad film, but my god it's beautiful.
Now Number 11 because of bumping:
NOUVELLE VAGUE (Richard Linklater, France, 2025) – This could so easily have ended up as an ironic pastiche, one of those films where simply making a reference to something else is supposed to amount to a joke, but Linklater’s affection and deep understanding of his subject fashion a gem that flourishes on its own merits. It looks and feels exactly like a New Wave film, but it’s not a slavish imitation of any particular model (and certainly not Godard). There are reenactments of well-known incidents, and references to various films, but they’re there for a reason and contribute to an organic whole (Belmondo and Seberg dancing the Hully Gully, for example, both evokes the Madison scene in
Bande à part and illustrates how Belmondo is acting as a partner-in-crime with Seberg and thus bringing her into the fold with his other partner-in-crime, Godard.) I think the secret sauce in this film is that connective tissue of plausible relationships: Belmondo bridging the gulf between Godard and Seberg; the goading tension between Godard and Georges de Beauregard; the mutual challenge and play of Godard and Coutard; Godard taking or leaving advice he receives from Melville and Rossellini; the competitive friendship with Truffaut and others of the Cahiers crew, with Suzanne Schiffman as the (non-competitive) cement holding them together; Pierre Rissient as the amiable lubricant allowing the production to move forward. These relationships are what give the film is verisimilitude and breath. Everybody is introduced with a filmed portrait and their name, and many of the likenesses are uncanny. None of the actors miss the mark, either, which makes this some kind of casting miracle. Academy, naturellement.
Top Ten (Eleven) in Spirit of 2025
INSIDE THE YELLOW COCOON SHELL (Pham Thien An, Vietnam, 2023) – The opening sequence shot establishes Thien as a character with a spiritual itch he’s dying to scratch, but it concludes with a bike crash that sets him on another path. His sister-in-law dies from her injuries, leaving his nephew, Dao, miraculously unharmed. Thien’s brother has disappeared, so he’s the one who has to: 1) look after the orphan boy; 2) take the body back to her home village and help organize the funeral; 3) find his missing brother. This is slow, contemplative cinema, and the reference points are Tsai, Weerasethakul and early Jia, but it’s an impressive first feature that – like the quest it depicts - gets more spiritual and dreamlike as it progresses.
ONE OF THOSE DAYS WHEN HEMME DIES (Murat Firatoglu, Turkey, 2025) – This film also wears its influences on its sleeve, and its specifically early Kiarostami, particularly the linear, ‘one damn thing after another’ real-time films he scripted for others (e.g. The Key, The White Balloon, Men at Work). You know those dreams where you have something really important to do, like kill a guy, but you keep getting distracted by side-tasks that end up taking much more time than you expect? This is the film for you. It’s very well-done, if rather familiar, but the way the opening and closing scenes work with each other and the film as a whole is really clever, and pushed the film up into the top rank for me. Pairs up cosily with
It Was Just an Accident.
BRAND NEW LANDSCAPE (Yuiga Danzuka, Japan, 2025) – And this pairs up cosily with
Sentimental Value (both films about the abrupt, unwelcome return of an absent father), but Yuiga Danzuka’s assured debut was a lot sharper and more surprising, both in the character dynamics and narrative turns (the big one being
so very Japanese). The urban landscape of Tokyo serves as a supplementary character, maybe even a rival of sorts.
MAGELLAN (Lav Diaz, Phillipines, 2025) – Wow! A sweeping historical epic, in vivid colour, with a commanding central performance from a major international star! (You haven’t seen any Lav Diaz films, have you?) Actually, the grand subject is crammed into Academy ratio (I love you Academy! Don’t ever change!); the colour is murky and misty – it’s raining and windy most of the time; and Gael Garcia Bernal is a distant, unlikeable presence, usually seen in long shot (i.e. perfect for the film.) The plight of the indigenous peoples getting duped and massacred is given equal weight as the colonial ‘adventure’, and everything – even Magellan’s ‘brilliant career’ – ends up sordid and compromised. This is pretty much exactly the film I would have expected from Diaz, but I can’t get enough of his thoughtful anti-spectacle and impeccably classical compositions in the tradition of Murnau and Ford.
FIUME O MORTE! (Igor Bezinovic, Croatia, 2025) – Superbly creative documentary about Gabriele d’Annunzio’s bizarre interlude as the dictator of a proto-fascist independent state on the border of Italy and Croatia for a couple of years after World War One. The story itself is fascinating, but Bezinovic’s approach to it is whimsical and rewarding. Timelines are provided by the tiled opening dates in the foyers of various old buildings; hand-held picture postcards are roughly juxtaposed with modern views; paintings of key events appear as tableaux vivants; vox pops reveal how little or how much the locals know about their town’s weird history. Best of all, Bezinovic casts local citizens to re-enact scenes from history. He basically asks every bald man he meets to play d’Annunzio, and then they all do. There's also a self-reflexive round-robin narratorial conceit that adds to the fun.
THE LOVE THAT REMAINS (Hlynur Palmason, Iceland, 2025) – After the brilliant
Godland, I feel like I’m more attuned to what Palmason is doing in his less conceptually unusual films like this one and
A White, White Day. This is a story about a fragmented family (she’s an artist, he’s a herring fisherman, away most of the time; the kids are often left to their own devices). It’s well-observed and handsomely shot (Academy, yet again), and so gently involving that a late feint at tragedy seems guaranteed to resolve itself harmlessly, which leaves one quite exposed for the weird ending that follows.
THE SECRET AGENT (Kleber Mendonca Filho, Brazil, 2025) – A tense, engaging 70s thriller (in both setting and style). Wagner Moura gives a charistmatic star performance, but this film reminds me just how good Mendonca is at presenting fully rounded secondary and tertiary characters in practically no time at all. After a while of working its genre magic, the film seems to make a stumble into predictability when we flash forward to the researchers researching the story – something that’s almost never a good idea – before it rallies with an excellent action / suspense sequence. Then we get not just another stumble, but the same one, on a much bigger scale.
Not only do we go back to the low-stakes world of the modern day researchers, but they give away the ending of the main story.
And then Mendonca does something pretty audacious, delivering a completely different kind of ending to the one we expected. Very deft filmmaking.
After this flash forward, we never return to the period narrative, and the throwaway ‘spoiler’ is all the conclusion we are offered for the central narrative of the film. Then Mendonca sets up the alternative conventional ending of this sort of film: the Confrontation with the Survivor, who will offer enigmatic words of wisdom and tie a bow on the whole enterprise. And this too is ripped away from us when we find that Fernando isn’t really interested and barely remembers his father at all.
(Alain Guiraudie, France, 2024) – What if
Midsomer Murders were French and queer as fuck? There’s a lot of Chabrol in its DNA, but this is indelibly a Guiraudie film: stylish, perverse and black as pitch. It’s a slow-burn comedy driven by the logic of lust that accumulates its laughs slowly but surely. Many of them take the form of running gags (the way the villagers instantly disseminate every secret to everybody else; the police’s unflappable surface acceptance of every unlikely scenario presented to them; Jeremie’s inept alibi vamping). Felix Kysyl looks like a prematurely aged teenager, which is the perfect casting for the various ‘couples’ for which he auditions over the course of the film.
LOVE (Dag Johan Haugerud, Norway, 2024) – Final installment of the Oslo Trilogy. Typically excellent, and maybe the most photogenic of the three. Cruising on a ferry never looked so good.
TRAINS (Maciej Drygas, Poland, 2024) – The master documentarist tackles the history of Europe in the twentieth century told through archival footage of trains. Sections flow into one another, arranged thematically (the manufacture of a locomotive; trains in industry; trains as war machines; trains as entertainment; women railroad workers and so on) and set to a mostly musique concrete score. Another Academy ratio film, thanks to its source material.
CLOSE YOUR EYES (Victor Erice, Spain, 2023) - Victor Erice is a modern master whose output has been so sparing it's hard to say exactly what a 'typical' Erice film looks like, but I'm just glad that we got at least one more feature out of him in his eighties. It's not an old man's film, however (whereas
The Quince Tree Sun, which he made when he was 50, is an old man's film
par excellence) and it gracefully slips between sombre and playful modes as it manoeuvres from one 'film within a film' to the next, circling back for a satisfying synthesis in the final stretch.
Ten more worth anybody’s time:
ORWELL: 2 + 2 =5 (Raoul Peck, USA, 2025): Shrewd documentary matching Orwell’s writings to what’s happening right now.
TWINLESS (James Sweeney, USA, 2025): Delightful, twisty comedy with surprising visual flair considering how utterly script- and performance-driven it is.
HAPPYEND (Neo Sora, Japan, 2024): Barely science fiction premise about the surveillance state manifesting in a Japanese high school. Yamashita with a shot of Oshima in its arm.
ROMERIA (Carla Simon, Spain, 2025):
Summer 1993: Ten Years Later, basically. It’s not as strong as that debut, but it’s excellent on its own terms.
THE MASTERMIND (Kelly Reichardt, USA, 2025): Likewise, this is a middling Reichardt film, which makes it better than most other films out there
KONTINENTAL ’25 (Radu Jude, Romania, 2025): I haven’t seen all of Jude’s film, but I haven’t seen one this close to Hong Sang-Soo before. A wry miniature that accumulates humour from repetition (how did he die again?). Apparently made in a few days in the middle of shooting
Dracula. If only all toss-offs were this good.
LITTLE TROUBLE GIRLS (Urska Djukic, Slovenia, 2025): Fine coming-of-age film set among a girls’ choir on a retreat to a photogenic monastery, which manages to side-step a bunch of clichés.
AFTERNOONS OF SOLITUDE (Albert Serra, Spain, 2024): A very tough watch as we follow torero Andres Roca Rey from bloodbath to bloodbath to bloodbath. The film begins with calm, nocturnal shots of the bulls which feel more ‘human’ than Rey’s bizarre displays of ultra-stylized ‘masculinity’ in the ring.
REEDLAND (Sven Bresser, Netherlands, 2025): Cryptic rural murder mystery with a Dumont edge and excellent unnerving use of its flat, threatening setting.
SENTIMENTAL VALUE (Joachim Trier, Norway, 2025): I would probably rate this film higher if I hadn’t seen it alongside Haugerud’s Oslo Trilogy, which does much of the same stuff more deftly and persuasively. For instance, there are three characters in this film, and they’re well written and well played. Unfortunately, there’s also Elle Fanning, who is more of a plot prop, and a bunch of other characters who are barely differentiated. There’s also a comparison to be made with
Nouvelle Vague (American movie star out of her comfort zone on Arty European filmshoot), and it too is unflattering.