20 CHRISTY Directed by Brendan Canty Christy initially came on like a grittier take on Irish sitcom The Young Offenders, telling the story of a young care leaver (Danny Power) caught between respectability and wildness. But Canty’s debut feature unfurled into a more complex, surprising and moving film through its feel for the everyday textures of estate life and the fierce spark of Cork teenagers.
20 CHRISTY Directed by Brendan Canty Christy initially came on like a grittier take on Irish sitcom The Young Offenders, telling the story of a young care leaver (Danny Power) caught between respectability and wildness. But Canty’s debut feature unfurled into a more complex, surprising and moving film through its feel for the everyday textures of estate life and the fierce spark of Cork teenagers.
19 THE FIRE INSIDE Directed by Rachel Morrison There were more high-profile boxing films in 2025 – Benny Safdie’s Smashing Machine, Sydney Sweeney’s Christy – but none of them packed quite the punch of Ryan Destiny, superb as Claressa “T-Rex” Shields, the scrappy teenage 2012 Olympic champion from Flint, Michigan, in this powerful debut feature from cinematographer turned director Morrison.
18 BLACK BAG Directed by Steven Soderbergh Despite announcing his retirement in 2013, Steven Soderbergh has continued at a brisk clip, and in 2025 delivered not only the first-person ghost curio Presence, but also this irresistible chamber piece starring Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett as a British intelligence power couple, plotting assassinations, intrigue and geopolitical havoc while hosting perfectly poisonous dinner parties.
17 WHEN THE LIGHT BREAKS Directed by Rúnar Rúnarsson Elín Hall delivered one of the year’s most unforgettable performances as Una, a headstrong Icelandic teenager cast into the abyss when her boyfriend suddenly dies in a car accident. For 80 minutes Sophia Olsson’s camera rarely strayed from her haunted, freckled features as they were contorted in a real-time symphony of grief, soundtracked by Jóhann Jóhannsson’s “Odi Et Amo”.
16 LITTLE TROUBLE GIRLS Directed by Urška Djukić First-time director Djukić was the big discovery of 2025, with this hallucinatory film about a Slovenian girls choir on tour, awakening to sex, desire and the uncanny polyphony of Balkan folk song. Though it was set in the familiar teenage world of smartphones and Snapchat, here was a film that felt as timeless as Black Narcissus or Picnic At Hanging Rock.
15 TORNADO Directed by John Maclean Following the cowboy dreams of his 2015 debut Slow West, The Beta Band’s John Maclean returned with more genre splicing: a samurai revenge film set in 18th-century Scotland, populated by gangsters, puppeteers and circus performers. Tim Roth was striking as a brigand seemingly just returned from a Millwall away game, but even his performance paled next to Japanese model Kōki in the title role.
14 SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE Directed by Scott Miller If A Complete Unknown was Dylan goes electric, Deliver Me… was the Boss goes acoustic. Focusing on Springsteen’s troubled year in New Jersey following the enormous success of The River, it was short on dramatic fireworks, but, freaking out to “Frankie Teardrop”, Jeremy Allen White brought the darkness back to heartland rock.
13 STEVE Directed by Tim Mielants Novelist Max Porter adapted his own novella Shy, translating the junglist stream of consciousness into a swirling portrait of a residential school for troubled boys and its embattled headmaster (Cillian Murphy). But the film really came alive in the boldness of its sound and vision – the vertiginous swoop of Robrecht Heyvaert’s camera and the sub-bass soundtrack of Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow.
12 THE MASTERMIND Directed by Kelly Reichardt For the past few years Josh O’Connor has been the hardest working rat boy in Hollywood, playing sultry archaeologists (La Chimera) ethnomusicologists (History Of Sound), tennis underdogs (Challengers) and sexy priests (Wake Up Dead Man). But he’s never been better than as the feckless ringleader in Reichardt’s superb 1970s mood piece about a smalltown heist gone wrong.
11 THE SEED OF THE SACRED FIG Directed by Mohammad Rasoulof Filmed in secret and smuggled out of Iran for editing, even as the director was being detained and sentenced to a decade in prison, The Seed Of The Sacred Fig was arguably 2025’s most urgent film, telling the story of a middle-class Iranian family driven to crisis when Dad is promoted to investigator in the Revolutionary Guard, even while his daughters protest against the ongoing crackdown.
10 A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE Directed by Kathryn Bigelow Bigelow made her name as the hard-boiled aesthete of American action movies, but she returned for her first film in seven years with an unbearably tense tale that took place almost entirely within the airless bunkers of American situation rooms, where the most significant action is a single red triangle slowly advancing across computer monitors towards the nuclear annihilation of Chicago.
9 FLOW Directed by Gints Zilbalodis A single Latvian animator, director and composer, working with open-source software, outshone Pixar and won a richly deserved Oscar for this story of a cat, a labrador, a capybara, a lemur and a secretary bird who band together to pilot an abandoned boat through storms, torrents and cosmic peril. At a time when animation is threatened by a tsunami of AI slop, Zilbalodis brought back some of the pantheistic wonder of prime Miyazaki.
8 I’M STILL HERE Directed by Walter Salles The precarious, imperilled beauty of Rio de Janeiro, 1970, has never been so vividly captured as in Salles’ tender love letter to the city of his youth. His first feature in 12 years followed the fortunes of the Paiva family, whose domestic paradise is lost when radical dad Rubens gets arrested by the military junta, and his wife (a stupendous Fernanda Torres) begins the slow, forlorn process of fighting for his release.
7 THE BRUTALIST Directed by Brady Corbet Corbet’s proudly heroic feature didn’t just swing for the fences but for the very limits of cinema, telling the story of a visionary architect (Adrian Brody) fleeing Budapest for the comfort and wonder of post-war America, and finding the promise of liberty all mixed up in the confounding patronage of bullying industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce). Though it sometimes careered off the rails, this was an impressive statement of intent.
6 THE BALLAD OF WALLIS ISLAND Directed by James Griffiths This unassuming tale of reconciliation on a rainy Welsh island turned out to be a sleeper hit, reviving the spirit of Ealing Studios. Co-writers Tim Key and Tom Basden refined their melancholy comedy of midlife masculinity, but the film was lit up by Carey Mulligan, singing beautifully and reprising something of her role as Jean from Inside Llewyn Davis.
5 28 YEARS LATER Directed by Danny Boyle Boyle’s belated threequel got his zombie franchise back on track, splicing Teletubbies, Rudyard Kipling, Olivier’s Henry V and Young Fathers to create a terrifyingly plausible vision of an isolated community trying to survive off the shore of a feral Britain abandoned to Alpha zombies and strangely familiar Scottish neds.
4 NICKEL BOYS Directed by RaMell Ross Adaptation was too tame a word for this electrifying improvisation on Colson Whitehead’s novel about two boys’ attempts to escape a barbaric 1960s Tallahassee reform school. Though it’s filmed in impressionistic, first-person POV, the direction never feels gimmicky, serving two devastating performances: Ethan Herisse as the idealistic Elwood and Brandon Wilson as the pragmatic Turner.
3 ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson For 30 years, Anderson has been the brightest hope of liberal American filmmaking, the one Gen X director who could hold a candle to the raging bulls of Nixonian cinema. With One Battle After Another he fulfilled his destiny with an $150 million, state-of-the-nation blockbuster, very loosely adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, about the shambolic but hopeful fight against homeland fascism.
2 SINNERS Directed by Ryan Coogler Once upon a time, artists moseyed down to the crossroads to sell their soul for unfettered power. The modern filmmaker’s Faustian bargain is directing a superhero movie in the hope it funds your own dream project. Coogler exceeded all expectations with two superlative Black Panther movies, and with Sinners made good on the deal with 2025’s most sensational film: a timely and bloody vampire allegory of black music, magic and ambition.
1 A COMPLETE UNKNOWN Directed by James Mangold Five years in the making, and apparently signed off by the man himself, Mangold’s film proved to be a rich and handsome retelling of Bob Dylan: The Early Years. Was it a faithful account? Though based on Elijah Wald’s rigorously footnoted book Dylan Goes Electric!, in familiar biopic fashion it played creatively with the historical record (much as Dylan himself had done), conflating people, places and events – notably “Sylvie Russo” (Elle Fanning), a version of Dylan’s Greenwich Village muse, Suze Rotolo. But it undeniably captured the spirit of the times, conjuring the buzz, hum, slush and drone of a Village full of cranks, seers and, yes, tambourine men.
Mangold assembled a sterling supporting cast, including Scoot McNairy as the ailing Woody, hospitalised with Huntington’s, but still raging against the dying of the light, Ed Norton giving a career-peak performance as the idealistic, conflicted Pete Seeger, and Dan Fogler threatening to steal yet another show with his Albert Grossman (possibly the most rock’n’roll performance in the film).
At the heart of it all, Timothée Chalamet was the quizzical eye of the gathering storm. Having prepared over the past decade by playing a series of messianic freaks, from Paul Atreides in Dune to the young Willie Wonka, he seemed abundantly prepared for the role, nailing the hobo stroll, mercurial moods and the inscrutable cool. Above all he was a revelation as a singer, performing over 40 songs, from the early, flinty “Song To Woody” right up to the ferocious “Like A Rolling Stone” amidst the havoc of Newport. It was hard to resist joining in with the applause of those early, confounded, enchanted audiences.
