Sight and Sound: the Winter 2025-26 issue

In 2025, cinema was no bystander. Immigrant detention centres. Protests, with protesters getting arrested. Authoritarian governments rooting out rebellious figures. Culture wars and conspiracy theories. The backdrops to many of the best films, as chosen by our critics over the following pages, could have been plucked out of the news cycle. From the Trump administration’s deportation of immigrants and deployment of the National Guard to various US cities, to the growing influence of nationalist, populist agendas in the UK and across Europe, it has been a scary year. Somehow, even though these films went into production long before, many caught a reflection of these horrors.

— Isabel Stevens, introducing our films of the year cover feature.

At the end of every year, we ask our team of critics to name the best new films they’ve seen in the last 12 months. Reflecting the challenges of a difficult 2025, the list they ’ve come up with bristles with thrills, intelligence, humour and feeling – from Korea to Gaza to California, and from Tudor England to 60s Paris to a burningly topical present. Isabel Stevens begins the countdown. 

The winner of the poll is SPOILED BELOW.

Artificial intelligence continues to encroach on the film business, in big and small ways, enraging artists but also, it seems, luring audiences. Perhaps, though, there are ways for artists to fight back. By Dominic Lees.

A host of music documentaries, offering enjoyable portraits of stars from John Lennon and Yoko Ono to Sly Stone and Led Zeppelin, offered a brighter note in a year dominated by harrowing investigations into life, and death, in Gaza and Ukraine. By Nick Bradshaw.

Cosiness is out, sweariness is in. Veteran directors have shown that they still know how to draw astonishing performances from actors, while novices have provided fresh, wildly divergent angles on the state of the nation: 2025 may not have been the greatest year ever, but it gave us plenty to enjoy and cause for optimism. By Philip Concannon. 

All the old monsters were reawakened this year – though some of them turned out less terrifying than you might have hoped – and a lot of old franchises were rebooted or sequelled or requelled. But fear also had a contemporary, misleadingly ordinary face. By Kim Newman. 

From urgent, news-making drama to a breathtaking portrait of one of the great living filmmakers, 2025 was a strong year for both the streamers and the traditional broadcasters. Here, a selection of critics and BFI television curators choose their hits of the year. 

As our round-up of the best releases of 2025 shows, there’s never been a better time to collect restorations and rarities from boutique labels

Tell-all memoirs by actors and directors may have dominated the shelves, but 2025 has been a rich and varied year for books on cinema, writes John Bleasdale.

In what is, startlingly, only his third feature, the Chinese auteur reworks a century in the history of cinema, and of China, as a vast, virtuosic fantasy situated somewhere between Frankenstein and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. By Matthew Taylor. 

A 186-minute film shot on an old phone in blocky, bitmapped images might sound like a forbidding proposal, but the latest film by the brilliant Georgian director of What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? is a mesmerising wonder, writes Sam Wigley. 

With its labyrinthine plot, revolving around the overnight disappearance of an entire class of schoolchildren, nobody was quite ready for the critical and popular impact of Zach Cregger’s creepy, complex horror, writes Jane Giles. 

Eva Victor emerged from the world of online comedy to write, direct and star in this languid, dark comedy about a professor who finds herself unable to move on after a sexual assault. She explains how she found the right balance between light and dark in the film.

In 2025, having long been barred from leaving the country, the great Iranian director made a triumphant return to Cannes, winning the Palme d’Or with this bitterly comic drama. He discusses the film and explains why he doesn’t think of himself as a political filmmaker. 

Set in the 1970s, when Brazil was under military dictatorship, and following an academic on the run after an act of resistance, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s endlessly surprising thriller offers suspense, humour and an important history lesson. By Tom Charity.

An elliptical, enigmatic tale of a father searching for his lost daughter at a rave in the Moroccan desert, this richly atmospheric film presents a vivid spectacle of a world on the edge of an apocalypse. By Erika Balsom. 

Kelly Reichardt’s film concerns a failed architect turned art thief – but with its Vietnam War-era setting and Josh O’Connor delivering another study in arrested development to match La chimera and Challengers, it is rather more than a caper movie. Cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt tells Thomas Flew how they made it happen. 

Apparently the result of an explosion in the genre factory, Ryan Coogler’s 1930s-set vampire-gangster-blues drama was one of 2025’s most unexpectedly thrilling experiences at the cinema. By Alex Ramon. 

Zipping frenetically from one set piece to the next and incorporating a dizzying array of film types – from heist gone wrong to romantic melodrama to satirical comedy to chase thriller – the director’s incendiary portrait of modern America is the worthy winner of this year’s poll, writes Michael Koresky. 

Compiled by Bob Mastrangelo. Including obituaries for Terence Stamp, Lalo Schifrin, Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina, Michael Roemer, Peter Watkins and Phyllis Dalton. 

The director of Flux Gourmet and Berberian Sound Studio, Peter Strickland, has long admired the haunting, dreamlike films of Lucile Hadžihalilović. As her dark fairytale The Ice Tower arrives in UK cinemas, the pair sat down to discuss dreams, artifice and meaning and why there is a kinship in their cinematic sensibilities. 

Park Chan-wook’s satire of modern capitalism No Other Choice, a pitch-black comedy adapted from a novel by Donald Westlake, sees its bumbling everyman driven to murder to secure employment after losing his job. Here Park discusses masculinity, identity and the beguiling screen presence of the film’s star Lee Byung-hun. By Arjun Sajip. 

Having made her name tackling the expansive canvases of the contemporary American West and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with Hamnet the director Chloé Zhao has produced a domestic period drama – but in this wrenching film, the stakes don’t feel any smaller. By Sophia Satchell-Baeza.

Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, an affectionate retelling of the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle, lovingly recreates the world of Paris in 1959. Here Linklater explains why making the film felt like a séance and offers a cinephile’s guide to the key figures of the New Wave, and the assorted hangers-on, who populate his big-screen celebration of an extraordinary era. By Jonathan Romney. 

It’s been a bumper year for Stephen King adaptations. Edgar Wright, director of a new version of King’s dystopian thriller The Running Man, talks to the author about media manipulation, the attractions of genre and how far reality has come to reflect fiction in the half-century since he wrote the novella that inspired the film. By James Mottram. 

In what’s set to be a great year for fans of the classics – with new versions of The Odyssey, Wuthering Heights, Sense and Sensibility and Bride of Frankenstein – and an even better one for fans of Charli xcx, two questions loom large: will Terrence Malick ever finish editing his latest? And will we find out what Tom Cruise and Alejandro G. Iñárritu are up to? By Thomas Flew. 

Gift recommendations from the Sight and Sound team. 

Director Kaouther Ben Hania on her acclaimed, emotionally devastating account of the killing of a little girl in Gaza, in hybrid docufiction film The Voice of Hind Rajab. By Leigh Singer. 

Bristol-based punk band Idles are known for their frenetic, aggressive sound, so they were a perfect fit to co-write and perform the soundtrack to Darren Aronofsky’s stressful crime thriller Caught Stealing. By Sam Davies. 

Radu Jude’s Kontinental ’25 poster is a painterly homage to Rossellini, replacing Rome with Romania. By Hope Rangaswami. 

Watching Hamlet or All About Eve, the emotions we share with our fellow groundlings have immense power. By Pamela Hutchinson. 

You can write about LA as a lurker, like Joan Didion, or you can grab it with both hands, like Eve Babitz. By Nicole Flattery. 

2025: the year the lines between real and synthetic dissolved. By Mike Williams. 

At the heart of this series of encounters between the filmmaker Aleksandr Sokurov and the Nobel Prizewinning author, returned to Russia after a 20-year exile in the West, is a profoundly moving moral enquiry. By Travis Jeppsen. 

The attitudes and behaviour on display in films of the silent era can seem utterly alien, but a great actress’s gaze can connect with us across a century. By Pamela Hutchinson. 

In ‘Black Atlas’, Edward George uses images of Blackness to map out centuries of racial discourse, and suggest how we got to where we are. By Abiba Coulibaly. 

Sixty years ago, Raoul Coutard, the celebrated cinematographer of nouvelle vague classics such as À bout de souffle, Lola, Jules et Jim and Pierrot le Fou, wrote a fascinating piece exploring the art of the film cameraman and what it was like to work under the mercurial command of an exacting genius like Jean-Luc Godard. By Raoul Coutard. 

Our critics review: Nouvelle Vague, Hamnet, Saipan, The History of Sound, A Bear Remembers, Sentimental Value, No Other Choice, Peter Hujar’s Day, Game, Lurker, Eleanor the Great, My Fathers Shadow, Cover up, Is This Thing On?, H is for Hawk, Still Pushing Pineapples, Animalia, Twinless, Rental Family, The Running Man, The Voice of Hind Rajab

Our critics review: The Agatha Christie Collection, The Ambulance, Rio Lobo, István Szabó: Hungary, 1981-1988, Priest, Night of the Juggler, Él, The Men of Sherwood Forest, City on Fire, Wicked Games: Three Films by Robert Hossein. 

Our critics review: Scene: a memoir, Two of me: Notes of Living and Leaving.