The 50 best films of 2025
Our annual international critics’ poll shows cinema thriving, meeting a year of global troubles with thrills, intelligence, humour and feeling.
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 in the list below, could have been plucked out of the news cycle. Somehow, even though these films went into production long before, many caught a reflection of the year’s horrors.
Rebellion pulsed through many of them: behold the fugitives on the run in One Battle After Another, The Secret Agent, The Mastermind and even the rave-searchers of Ólivier Laxe’s Sirāt. Yet despite the general dystopian vibe, cinema this year was eager to make us laugh in the dark. From Sorry, Baby to Eddington and Weapons, humour and horror jostled together. Most remarkable of all was Jafar Panahi, drawing on his own experience in prison and making space for farcical comedy in his Palme d’Or-winning revenge thriller It Was Just an Accident.
Originality marked not just the narratives of many of the best films but their cinematic styles, full of bold artistic flourishes. There were also some memorable sonic shocks to the senses: the unexpected cross-century musical chorus in Sinners; the pounding, visceral experience of the desert raves in Sirāt.
And while films about fathers (not just One Battle, The Secret Agent, Sirāt and The Mastermind but No Other Choice, Sentimental Value, The Phoenician Scheme) were remarkably numerous, Pillion’s BDSM romance and Eva Victor’s introspective reckoning with sexual assault Sorry, Baby were among the outliers. That those two were both debut films is no surprise; and there were enough other arresting features by emerging directors – including Sound of Falling, Blue Heron, Left-Handed Girl and On Falling – to suggest that the future of cinema is bright.
— Isabel Stevens
Find all our 2025 round-ups in Sight and Sound: the Winter 2025-26 issue.
The best films of 2025
50. With Hasan in Gaza
Kamal Aljafari, Palestine, Qatar, Germany, France
Kamal Aljafari’s video recordings of a journey through Gaza in 2001 underpin this vibrant documentary of Palestinian life in defiance of occupation.
Read the review: With Hasan in Gaza: Rediscovered footage creates a powerful portrait of Palestinian life under occupation
Where to see it: Awaiting UK distribution
49. What Does That Nature Say to You
Hong Sang-soo, South Korea
Hong Sangsoo’s latest sees him again embracing lo-fi stylistic experiment, shooting on a seemingly ancient and scrappy digital camera a typically minimalist scenario about a young poet’s humiliations over dinner with his girlfriend’s parents.
Where to see it: Awaiting home release
48. The Phoenician Scheme
Wes Anderson, USA
Wes Anderson delivers his most elaborate creation yet with this high-wire story of Anatole ‘Zsa-zsa’ Korda, an eccentric, death-defying post-war tycoon trying to conjure infrastructural wonders in the deserts of the Near East.
Read the review: The Phoenician Scheme: Benicio del Toro steals the show as a death-defying tycoon in Wes Anderson’s latest caper
Where to see it: On major streaming services
47. Oslo Stories Trilogy: Dreams
Dag Johan Haugerud, Norway
Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud’s Oslo Stories Trilogy, a rich set of films exploring modern relationships, concludes beautifully with the story of Johanne, a 17-year-old who grapples with her unrequited love for her French teacher by writing an autofictional novel.
Read the review: Dreams (Sex Love) review: vividly captures the dizzying highs and lows of first love
Where to see it: Awaiting home release
46. Nickel Boys
RaMell Ross, US
RaMell Ross’s lyrical adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel adopts the point of view of two teens in a brutal 1960s reform school, asking the audience not simply to observe their reality, but to feel it.
Read the review: Nickel Boys: RaMell Ross’ radically inventive second feature
Where to see it: On Amazon Prime
45. Miroirs No. 3
Christian Petzold, Germany
The German director’s gorgeous, drifting study of a woman taken in by a stranger after a car crash has faint echos of Vertigo (1958), but is more concerned with unnerving family dynamics than romance.
Read the review: Mirrors No. 3: Suspense melts away into golden summer days in Christian Petzold’s low-key psychodrama
Where to see it: In UK cinemas spring 2026
44. Landmarks
Lucrecia Martel, Argentina, USA, Mexico, France, Netherlands
Lucrecia Martel’s first documentary magnifies the 2018 trial of the killers of a tribal elder in northern Argentina into a richly cinematic testimony to Indigenous culture and its colonialist erasure.
Where to see it: Awaiting UK distribution
43. Highest 2 Lowest
Spike Lee, USA, Japan
Denzel Washington’s timeless charisma propels Spike Lee’s corporate drama-cum-kidnap thriller, an exuberant reimagining of Kurosawa Akira’s High and Low (1963) set in the world of modern Black capitalism and the music biz.
Read the review: Highest 2 Lowest: It’s solidarity versus capitalism in Spike Lee’s erratic kidnapping thriller
Where to see it: On Apple TV
42. Hard Truths
Mike Leigh, UK, Spain
Marianne Jean-Baptiste gives a fearless performance in Mike Leigh’s empathetic portrait of the outrageously hostile Pansy, whose hardened façade masks a real fragility.
Read the review: Hard Truths: Mike Leigh’s graceful tragicomedy shows how irreplaceable he is in British cinema
Where to see it: On major streaming services
41. Hamnet
Chloe Zhao, UK
Chloé Zhao’s immersive adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s bestseller about William Shakespeare’s sublimation of his feelings at the loss of his son into writing Hamlet is a remarkable, disarming portrait of love, grief, anger – and the power of art.
Where to see it: In UK cinemas from 9 January 2026
40. Die My Love
Lynne Ramsay, USA, UK
After the birth of her baby, Jennifer Lawrence’s Grace experiences a psychological rupture that devours her life, her relationship with her husband (Robert Pattinson) and her own identity in Lynne Ramsay’s ferociously maximalist psychodrama.
Where to see it: In UK cinemas now and coming to Mubi
39. Cover-up
Laura Poitras, Mark Obenhaus, USA
Poitras and Obenhaus profile the American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, drawing clear parallels between the subject of his first exposé – the 1968 massacre by US troops at My Lai in Vietnam – and Israel’s present-day crimes in Gaza.
Where to see it: In UK cinemas now and on Netflix from 26 December
38. 28 Years Later
Danny Boyle, USA, UK
Danny Boyle and scriptwriter Alex Garland’s horror saga takes an inspired mythical turn, following a young boy’s quest to secure his ailing mother’s safety in what remains of a country ravaged by a virus.
Read the review: 28 Years Later: Danny Boyle imagines a dark British future in a thrilling expansion of his zombie classic
Where to see it: On major streaming services
37. Souleymane’s Story
Boris Lojkine, France
This Paris-set drama is a propulsive addition to the canon of migration cinema, slowly deepening its portrait of Abou Sangaré’s Guinean bicycle courier as he works hand to mouth and hatches a story to claim asylum.
Read the review: Souleymane’s Story: a Guinean in Paris seeks the perfect tale to secure asylum in Boris Lojkine’s affecting migration drama
Where to see it: On Apple TV and Amazon from 12 January
36. Silent Friend
Ildikó Enyedi, Germany, Hungary, France
Ildikó Enyedi’s entrancing, time-hopping follow-up to On Body and Soul (2017), tracing three lives from different eras connected by the same Ginkgo biloba tree, is another distinctive rumination on loneliness, shared consciousness and the natural world.
Where to see it: Awaiting UK distribution
35. The Shrouds
David Cronenberg, Canada, France
David Cronenberg’s macabre modern love story stars Vincent Cassel as a widowed businessman who invents grave cams for the grieving as a way to make sense of his loss.
Read the review: The Shrouds: Cronenberg captures the obsessional force of grief in a dystopian widower drama
Where to see it: On major streaming services
34. Remake
Ross McElwee, UK
An unlikely proposal to turn his autobiographical documentary hit Sherman’s March (1986) into fiction and a short lifetime’s footage of his late son Adrian spur Ross McElwee’s rich, aching meditation on the interplay of memory, filmmaking, living and legacy.
Where to see it: Awaiting UK distribution
33. On Falling
Laura Carriera, UK
Joana Santos’s young Portuguese woman working as a warehouse ‘picker’ in Scotland experiences the degradation and isolation of the modern workplace in Laura Carreira’s quietly devastating exploration of the human cost of the gig economy.
Read the review: On Falling: Laura Carreira’s chilling debut explores the human cost of the gig economy
Where to see it: On BFI Player
32. My Father’s Shadow
Akinola Davies Jr., UK, Nigeria
The hustle and hubbub of Lagos are experienced as novelty by two young brothers from the countryside, and as nostalgia by their elusive accompanying father, on a single historic day in 1993, in Akinola Davies Jr’s charged, tender act of communion with the past and its lost possibilities.
Where to see it: In UK cinemas from 6 February 2026
31. Father Mother Sister Brother
Jim Jarmusch, USA, Ireland, France
Jim Jarmusch’s low-key family anthology, with a cast including Cate Blanchett, Adam Driver and Tom Waits, looks at adult sibling relationships in the US, Dublin and Paris, and lets in a touch of vulnerability alongside its arch humour and awkwardness.
Read the review: Father Mother Sister Brother: Jim Jarmusch’s low-key family anthology speaks from the heart
Where to see it: UK release date yet to be announced
30. Cloud
Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan
Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s captivating genre experiment finds action in the world of e-commerce with the story of a greedy online reseller who gets in over his head.
We said: “For all the genre flourishes, Kurosawa is illustrating how the internet can facilitate the radicalisation of the worst of human behaviour and help people connect and manifest it in the world at large. But something’s also rotten here in the unsavoury aspects of buying and selling that we take for granted… When it comes to malaise in internet-turbocharged liberal economies, Cloud suggests the call is coming from within the house.” (Nicolas Rapold, S&S May 2025)
Read the full review: Cloud: an online hustle turns deadly in Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s violent, freewheeling thriller
Where to see it: On major streaming services
29. Black Bag
Steven Soderberg, USA
Love and espionage go hand in hand for married agents Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender in a sophisticated spy thriller packed with secrets, paranoia and romance.
We said: “In Black Bag, as in Hitchcock’s masterpiece Notorious (1946), espionage and romance are metaphors for each other, and they have similar geometries of duplicity and loyalty, secrecy and trust. The film’s title references a term of art for top-secret information, such as a spouse’s whereabouts on a suspicious business trip – love is the ultimate macguffin, and clandestine activity is a bit of role play to keep things interesting.” (Mark Asch, S&S May 2025)
Read the full review: Black Bag: Steven Soderbergh’s scenes from a spy marriage
Where to see it: On major streaming services
28. Nouvelle Vague
Richard Linklater, France
Richard Linklater goes behind the scenes of À bout de souffle’s historic production for a film that embraces Jean-Luc Godard’s cinephile passion and formal imagination.
We said: “In the best way, it’s like watching À bout de souffle with Linklater’s live commentary. The general mood is that of being in on something with Godard and company, making Nouvelle Vague a bit of a caper film. Coming just a couple of years after Godard’s death, the movie is partly a memorial of a very specific moment of possibility, but its verve is an invitation to do it yourself, too.” (Nicolas Rapold, S&S online)
Read the full review: Nouvelle Vague: Richard Linklater’s joyful tribute to the free spirits of French filmmaking
Where to see it: In UK cinemas from 30 January 2026
27. The Love That Remains
Hlynur Pálmason, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, France
An artist and mother of three is readier than her seafaring husband to go their separate ways in Hlynur Pálmason’s increasingly off-kilter study of marital and mental sundering.
We said: “Pálmason’s year-in-a-life drama about the messiness of marital separation is funny, lyrical and tender. It’s also a quiet curveball after the Icelandic director’s thriller breakout A White, White Day (2019) and his historical epic Godland (2022). Emotions stay suppressed as a father of three becomes unmoored by divorce while his wife adapts. Unexpected fantasy sequences are a highlight, along with the family’s charismatic sheepdog and Pálmason’s attentiveness to rural Iceland throughout the seasons.” (Isabel Stevens, S&S Summer 2025)
Where to see it: In UK cinemas from 13 March 2026
26. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
Mary Bronstein, USA
Seventeen years on from her mumblecore debut Yeast (2008), Mary Bronstein returns with an anxiety-inducing exploration of motherhood, starring Rose Byrne as an overwhelmed therapist with a suspicious hole in her ceiling.
We said: “Piercingly funny and far from ingratiating, If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You… radiates a certain sadness, powering along from Linda’s point of view as she tries (and mostly fails) to drift past the world’s daily irritations. Introducing the film at Sundance, Bronstein described it as a successful transfer ‘from my head to the screen’, which feels true to how the film straps the viewer right in with Linda.” (Nicolas Rapold, S&S online)
Read the full review: If I Had Legs I’d Kick You: Mary Bronstein pushes life’s daily irritations to the limit in this dark maternal drama
Where to see it: In UK cinemas from 20 February 2026
25. Eddington
Ari Aster, USA, UK, Finland
Ari Aster’s black comedy of Covid-era terrors in a western town tugs at America’s hot-button social strife through a mayoral contest between rivals Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal.
We say: Among the year’s most polarising films, Ari Aster’s sprawling, antically hilarious Covid-era neo-western drew accusations of political bothsidesism from many critics for its shots fired at Maga gun nuts and hypocritical white liberals, among other targets. But laser-pointed satire isn’t the MO of a film that claustrophobically and rather brilliantly captures the relentless social warfare, spiralling online dependency and chaotic rhetorical noise of America under Trump, then and now. (Guy Lodge)
Read the full review: Eddington: Ari Aster’s Covid movie punches in all directions and misses
Where to see it: On major streaming services
24. April
Dea Kulumbegashvili, Georgia, Italy, France
Dea Kulumbegashvili follows her masterpiece Beginning (2020) with an unflinching story about a Georgian obstetrician whose career is threatened by her reputation as an abortionist.
We said: “It comes in with the breath and never comes out, the dread that lives in your chest from the first, uncanny scene of Dea Kulumbegashvili’s severe and brilliant April. The dread is like a toxin polluting the damp fields and changeable skies of the Georgian countryside in spring – not that summer will bring relief. April might be the cruellest month, but in Kulumbegashvili’s Georgia, for Kulumbegashvili’s women, all the months are cruel.” (Jessica Kiang, S&S May 2025)
Read the full review: April: dread inhabits every frame of Déa Kulumbegashvili’s brilliant abortion drama
Where to see it: On BFI Player, Amazon Prime and Apple TV
23. Afternoons of Solitude
Albert Serra, Spain, France, Portugal
Winner of the Golden Shell at the San Sebastián Film Festival, the Spanish auteur’s mesmerising bullfighting documentary shows the beauty and the barbarism of the tradition.
We said: “Serra made a considerable leap forward in every regard with Pacifiction (2022), which attracted attention and acclaim from far beyond his previous coterie of admirers. This latest enterprise sees him confidently refining his own personal style, embellishing the familiar fly-on-the-wall format with an array of visual and aural flourishes that combine to produce perhaps the most immersive encapsulation of tauromachy yet achieved in cinema.” (Neil Young, S&S October 2025)
Read the full review: Afternoons of Solitude: Albert Serra’s immersive encapsulation of matador life
Where to see it: Awaiting home release
22. Rose of Nevada
Mark Jenkin, UK
Vividly shot on 16mm, Mark Jenkin’s film about two Cornish fishermen who return from sea to find they have slipped 30 years in the past is a tale of the fantastic, but it’s rooted in the bleak political realities of 2020s Britain.
We said: “Rose of Nevada is a mystery narrative that expects us to do a great deal of interpretative work, but in which individual elements might be read either as metaphor, or more straightforwardly as navigational clues to guide us through the narrative’s troubled waters… As you’d expect from Jenkin, shooting once again on 16mm – with occasional visible sprocket holes and searing blasts of overexposure – the film is at once visually harsh and remarkably beautiful in its attention to detail and texture. Rust, mould, crumbling plaster all evoke a world defined by decay, running out of energy and of luck. The water imagery, from rain on slate to the ferocious storm braved by the Rose’s crew, evokes a world in which porousness is the law. All things leak into all others, meanings and time zones included.” (Jonathan Romney, S&S online)
Read the full review: Rose of Nevada: a remarkably beautiful Cornish time-loop drama
Where to see it: In UK cinemas from 24 April 2026
21. A House of Dynamite
Kathryn Bigelow, USA
Bigelow’s story of US government officials facing an escalating nuclear threat is a masterclass in tension-building, with top- notch performances from an ensemble cast that includes Idris Elba and Rebecca Ferguson.
We said: “Bigelow and her screenwriter Noah Oppenheim understand that there is tension to spare in the first half hour of an alert, and they keep personal dramas to a minimum. Structurally, the film resembles those 1970s disaster movies that sublimated nuclear anxieties into other catastrophes (earthquakes, capsized cruise liners). Here the main character is the missile, and the rest of the ensemble come and go as the looming disaster plays out from different angles. The performances are excellent, with little emoting beyond an occasional glassy stare, so that watching Rebecca Ferguson refuse to cry, or a character apologise for getting angry about potato chips at a workstation, becomes oddly moving… This might be Bigelow’s crowning achievement, a film which should restart discussion of the continued proliferation of nuclear weapons.” (John Bleasdale, S&S November 2025)
Read the full review: A House of Dynamite: Kathryn Bigelow’s terrifying nuclear threat thriller might be her best work yet
Where to see it: Streaming on Netflix
20. Blue Moon
Richard Linklater, USA, Ireland
Richard Linklater’s sensitive portrayal of American lyricist Lorenz Hart, played with a witty, frenetic energy by Ethan Hawke, brings us deep into the gossipy theatre-crowd milieu of old New York.
We said: “Blue Moon portrays the long goodbye of a great American lyricist, Lorenz Hart, through Richard Linklater’s mastery of creative time frames and poignant reflection. As witty and alert as its fading subject, it takes place within a Manhattan bar on the opening night of Oklahoma!, the inescapable 1943 classic by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II and notably not Hart, Rodgers’ former partner. Filming a sparkling script by Robert Kaplow, Linklater works his wizardry with another single night’s articulate drama as he and Hawke did in Before Sunrise (1995)… Hawke told one interviewer that Linklater’s direction was partly modelled on Rodgers and Hart songs: ‘heartbreaking then funny and silly then smart and then strange.’ That’s a faithful description of the well-staged cinematic nuance of Blue Moon.” (Nicolas Rapold, S&S December 2025)
Read the full review: Blue Moon: Ethan Hawke feels unstoppable in Richard Linklater’s loving Broadway biopic
Where to see it: In UK cinemas
19. The Voice of Hind Rajab
Kaouther Ben Hania, Tunisia, France
The director of Four Daughters (2023) constructs a ticking-clock docufiction of frustrated rescue workers in Gaza responding to real recordings of calls for help from a young survivor of an air strike, trapped in her family’s bombed-out car.
We say: If not the best film of 2025, The Voice of Hind Rajab is the most powerful, timely and necessary. It dramatises the events of 29 January 2024, when five-year-old Hind Rajab found herself amid dead family members in a car bombed by the Israel Defense Forces. Recordings of her phone calls put through to the Red Crescent emergency room in Ramallah are the spine of this docufiction thriller, presenting us with a real voice of terror and suffering. Some have questioned the morality of using these recordings, but the objection seems a quibble set against the horror the film portrays. Massacres and genocides are often period pieces, made when the dust has settled. But here the murder persists, and Ben Hania’s film is appropriately raw, urgent and furious. (John Bleasdale)
Where to see it: In UK cinemas from 16 January 2026
18. The Ice Tower
Lucile Hadzihalilovic, France, Germany
Lucile Hadžihalilović’s frosty Berlinale Silver Bear-winner tracks a teenage girl’s looking-glass journey into the production of a film of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, and her fractured relationship with its star, played by Marion Cotillard.
We said: “Hadžihalilović tends to prioritise tone and texture over narrative and dialogue, and this glacially paced, coolly calibrated new work is no exception. Much hangs on what her two lead actresses can convey with a studied look or deliberate gesture. Cotillard skilfully captures an entitled artiste’s vampiric poise and the more brittle, jaded woman behind the dazzling façade. Newcomer Clara Pacini’s wonderfully transparent expressions, mixing fragility and inner strength, match her: she’s a genuine find. Where Andersen’s original tale ended as a triumph of teamwork and summertime thawing, Hadžihalilović refuses to succumb to such communal, cosy comforts. Jeanne’s liberation, if it even comes, will be a hard-fought, frostbitten solo effort.” (Leigh Singer, S&S December 2025)
Read the full review: The Ice Tower: another cryptically macabre and magical fable from Lucile Hadžihalilović
Where to see it: In UK cinemas
17. Blue Heron
Sophy Romvari, Canada, Hungary
Sophy Romvari distils a young girl’s experiences of family relocation, and her elder brother’s growing instability, through her later reflections as a grown filmmaker.
We say: In this striking, semi-autobiographical debut feature, filmmaking is archaeology and restoration – a way to excavate the past and sharpen indistinct, likely unreliable memories. It begins in deceptively straightforward fashion, charting in warm-hued vignettes the strained dynamic within a Hungarian- Canadian family after they relocate to Vancouver Island in the 1990s. This section is angled from the perspective of eight- year-old Sasha, whose quizzical gaze tracks the increasingly self-destructive behaviour of her troubled older brother. An uncanny temporal rupture shows us the adult Sasha – now a filmmaker herself – as she labours to find closure through the prism of her own lens. As with her shorts, Romvari makes bracing use of hybrid and metafictional layers to cumulatively heartbreaking effect. Time frames collapse and bleed into each other, impossible conversations are played out, yet the truth remains agonisingly out of focus. (Matthew Taylor)
Where to see it: Awaiting UK distribution
16. Pillion
Harry Lighton, UK
Alexander Skarsgård’s Adonis biker Ray guides Harry Melling’s submissive traffic warden Colin through a journey of sexual discovery in Harry Lighton’s cleverly written feature debut.
We said: “Lighton’s film – adapted from Adam-Mars Jones’s 2020 novel Box Hill – exists within the recognisable tradition of the feel-good English comedy: think Richard Curtis but with butt-plugs. There’s no coming-out scene; no episode of homophobia. And the film takes a genuinely non-judgemental attitude towards a type of sexual relationship that might appear strange to audiences unfamiliar with sub/dom dynamics. It neither neuters it to win acceptance, nor serves up a trajectory that ultimately bends towards ‘normality’, whatever that is. Skarsgård, who plays the role with his Swedish- American accent intact, looks more like something plucked from the imagination of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. He’s also a little like Julia Robert’s movie star in Notting Hill (1999), swooping into a dull British life and transforming it with transatlantic glamour.” (John Bleasdale, S&S December 2025)
Read the full review: Pillion: a feel-good British BDSM drama
Where to see it: In UK cinemas
15. No Other Choice
Park Chan-wook, South Korea
The Korean director’s follow-up to the carefully plotted Decision to Leave (2022) takes a more chaotic path with the story of an unemployed family man who tries to game the ailing job market by killing his competitors.
We said: “Park Chan-wook’s latest obsessional thriller takes its title from the line given to workers by the new owners of a paper factory for their mass lay-offs: there was, you see, no alternative. Soon enough, freshly fired Man-su (Lee Byung- hun) lurches into stalking and offing his competitors for the next available job opening. Park’s comic yet grisly version of the perennially familiar unemployment spiral adapts the 1997 novel The Ax by the American crime writer Donald Westlake for another generation’s rounds of merciless downsizing… The story hinges on Man-su’s cocktail of deranging distress and pathological problem-solving. All his deadly planning constantly teeters on the edge of disaster. What makes the outwardly normal Man-su a lost human being is that he dreads exposure and failure more than all the actual, you know, murdering.” (Nicolas Rapold, S&S online)
Read the full review: No Other Choice: Park Chan-wook’s murderous thriller is goofy, grisly and perverse
Where to see it: In UK cinemas from 23 January 2026
14. Misericordia
Alain Guiraudie, France, Spain, Portugal
Guiraudie takes Hitchcock’s deadpan sensibility to another level with a genre-fluid crime story about murder, desire and suspicious mushrooms, set in a small village in the Massif Central.
We said: “The film’s plot works itself out through a range of loops, repetitions and escalations. Characters find themselves in the same rooms, the same patches of forest, having not quite the same encounters. Guiraudie keeps characters’ motivations and desires ambiguous to us as well as each other, leaving it unclear whether the joke is on us, them or everyone. It’s an ethically skew-whiff world, certainly by cinematic standards. What, we wonder, will result in a punch, a shrug or a clinch? A queerly polymorphous sexuality is at work, making it tricky to track who’s into whom and who has a problem with it. What lies beneath all this fluid skulduggery is a sense of roiling repressed urges, Eros and Thanatos, taboo and transgression, the draw of the dirt. But it’s also a story about those basic, normal needs, bread and love.” (Ben Walters, S&S April 2025)
Read the full review: Misericordia: mercy is a messy business in Alain Guiraudie’s teasing rural melodrama
Where to see it: On BFI Player, Amazon Prime and Apple TV
13. Kontinental ’25
Radu Jude, Romania, Brazil, Switzerland, UK, Luxembourg
Romanian director Radu Jude’s spiky social satire about a bailiff who faces a crisis of conscience when one of her evictees dies by suicide may be his most radical and despairing film yet.
We said: “The mix of sincerity and cynicism, played out across what is essentially a series of dialogues, gradually takes on the moral force of a parable, albeit an ambiguous one. Jude remains committed to responding to the world as it stands (though he’s also recently completed a variation on Dracula), and his antennae are still up for Romania’s wealth inequities, real estate land-grabs, and the general neoliberal creep that has results at once banal, cruel and weird. But as always he renders his characters as actual, flawed people rather than diagrams… Jude and his regular director of photography, Marius Panduru, film [the bailiff protagonist] Orsolya’s exchanges with plain two-shots, tending to tableaux and shooting with an iPhone, which lends a certain present- tense translucence. But Jude continues a project of including what might be referred to as the trash of life – not actual bin garbage, but the absurd indignities and intrusions of the modern condition.” (Nicolas Rapold, S&S November 2025)
Read the full review: Kontinental ’25: Radu Jude continues to find gold as he rummages through the trash of the modern condition
Where to see it: Awaiting home cinema release
12. Sound of Falling
Mascha Schilinski, Germany
Mascha Schilinski won the Cannes Jury Prize for this multi-generational saga which follows the lives of women on a farm in eastern Germany throughout the 20th century, tracing the grand sweep of history through small, beautifully observed tableaux.
We said: “An epic shot in home-movie style, with a cast of characters spanning nearly a century, Sound of Falling embraces its farm in rural Germany, where casts of characters populate the farmhouse and barn, establishing a dreamy sense of place with a blinking concentration. It is a film with characters, especially its four women, and a flimsy bit of plot, but those aren’t its only treasures: above all, it is a film about mood, aura, memory. And trauma, soaking into the floorboards, crouching in the corner. It is about history writ small: the closely observed preoccupations and actions of this micro-universe invented by Schilinski, co-scenarist Louise Peter and their gifted cinematographer Fabian Gamper, who creates a world reminiscent of Super 8 movies as much as faded daguerreotypes, memories of a mythical history that ring truer than newsreels. More than an unearthed record of a scorched earth arena, this is an emotional epic, tracing hope and harm across generations.” (B Ruby Rich, S&S Summer 2025)
Where to see it: In UK cinemas from 6 March 2026
11. Sentimental Value
Joachim Trier, Norway, France, Germany, Denmark
Stellan Skarsgård delivers a career best performance as Gustav Borg, a self-involved director and absent dad who tries to convince his anxious actress daughter (played by a fantastic Renate Reinsve) to star in his autobiographical film.
We said: “We come to realise that Nora bears the weight of an impenetrable melancholy in a family in which suicidal despair lurks just below the surface. The sadness, however, is by no means a black hole, but a thing of many colours and registers. Foremost is Reinsve’s incandescence, even at her lowest. The deft script, which Trier cowrote with Eskil Vogt, features tonal shifts, between melancholy and playful, sometimes both at once. Most magical are the elisions between the ‘real’ world and the artful one of stage and cinema. Orchestral moods alternate with American pop songs. And a rich palette (Kasper Tuxen is the cinematographer) subtly shifts from silvery darkness of night, host to meditation or loneliness, to vibrant colours of filmmaking or acting.” (Molly Haskell, S&S Winter 2025-26)
Read the full review: Sentimental Value: an egotistical director tries to reconnect with his family through cinema in Joachim Trier’s gorgeous drama
Where to see it: In UK cinemas from 26 December 2025
10. Resurrection
Bi Gan, China, France
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.
We said: “Bi’s work before now has often looked backward and forward simultaneously. Its spectral textures, reworking of vintage noir motifs and quotations from influences Tarkovsky, Hou Hsaio-hsien, Hitchcock – commingle with an exploratory interest in new forms and technology, epitomised by the 59-minute unbroken take in 3D in Long Day’s Journey into Night (2018). In the seven years since that film, Bi’s sole output has been the exquisitely rendered miniature A Short Story (2022), a commission for a feline products company. But any notions that he may have scaled back his vision are resoundingly quashed by the kaleidoscopic, reflexive sprawl of Resurrection. It’s the sort of wildly ambitious project that might easily teeter into grand folly, but the results are consistently spellbinding.” (Matthew Taylor, S&S Winter 2025-26)
Where to see it: In UK cinemas from 13 March
9. Dry Leaf
Alexandre Koberidze, Germany, Georgia
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.
We said: “There’s a man looking for his grown-up daughter, who has vanished while travelling around rural Georgia photographing football fields. Accompanying him on his quest is a man who – a narrator matter-of-factly explains – is invisible, and as Koberidze’s slow, shaggy intrigue proceeds you begin to wonder whether the missing Lisa has simply disappeared into the pixellated ether too. Which is to say that this magic-realist road movie follows in the tradition of Antonioni’s metaphysical mysteries, though what it most closely resembles is the sprawling lo-fi picaresque of Mariano Llinás’s Historias extraordinarias (2008). Koberidze’s insistence on the beauty in degraded visuals might also suggest a kinship with such retro-format fetishists as Mark Jenkin or Guy Maddin – but the vital difference is that he isn’t trying to summon up the cinematic past. Movies have never looked like this, and only a special kind of dreamer would want to make them.” (Sam Wigley, S&S Winter 2025-26)
Where to see it: Awaiting UK distribution
8. Weapons
Zach Cregger, USA
With its labyrinthine plot, revolving around the overnight disappearance of an entire class of schoolchildren, Zach Cregger’s creepy, complex horror had a critical and popular impact nobody was quite ready for.
We said: “A cinematic spectacle hung on the theme of parents’ biggest fear/guiltiest fantasy – that the children would just Go Away – Weapons is both acutely grief-stricken and punctuated by black humour. A sitcom actor before he moved into writing and directing, Cregger provides disconcerting laughs amid the horror, whether a scrap in the supermarket, the unconventional use of a potato peeler, or the headmaster (Benedict Wong) and his husband relaxing in matching vintage Minnie and Mickey Mouse sweatshirts. The film’s trump card is the breathtaking relentlessness of its bewitched characters, and its finale escalates wildly as, in one continuous take, the missing children pursue their prey through or Magnolia, a suburban estate – a feral pack that sparks the film tells memories of the fate of Sebastian in Suddenly, Last Summer (1959).” (Jane Giles, S&S Winter 2025-26)
Read the full review: Weapons: a gruesome puzzle box horror of jolts and jump scares
Where to see it: On major streaming services
7. Sorry, Baby
Eva Victor, USA, Spain, France
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.
We said: “Director Eva Victor got their start in a world of intensely online comedy, sharing viral skits on TikTok and writing headlines for the American feminist satire website Reductress. In many ways, this languid, lived-in debut about a young academic in stasis feels like a revolt against this digital immediacy – a film of confident, Reichardtian slowness that keeps its ‘inciting incident’ behind closed doors, and takes its sweet time figuring out how it wants to feel about it. Using the recognisable beats of a deadpan American indie comedy about mid-twenties malaise, Victor takes an expansive view of sexual assault and its life-stalling aftermath. They wrote the film during lockdown with encouragement from Barry Jenkins (who became Sorry, Baby’s co-producer), sequestered with only their cat for company in a friend’s home in snowy Maine, and the private melancholy of that time seems to inhabit the entire film.” (Katie McCabe, S&S September 2025)
Read the full review: Sorry, Baby: Eva Victor’s tender debut wears its jokes like armour
Where to see it: On BFI Player and major streaming services
6. It Was Just an Accident
Jafar Panahi, Iran, France, Luxembourg
The Iranian director’s politically-charged revenge thriller asks nuanced questions about the nature of trauma and oppression with a blackly comic story informed by his own experiences with imprisonment.
We said: “Shot with Panahi’s usual handheld camera, and wonderfully compact and self-assured in spite of having been made in secret, the film melds the personal and political in the most subtle and searing ways. An enquiry into whether political violence on this scale can ever justify extralegal killing, or whether an eye for an eye is indeed precisely the approach that’s needed, It Was Just an Accident is a dark film. It does, however, find a lighter touch in Vahid’s ad hoc, deeply amateur crew, who at one point run out of petrol and are forced to push their kidnapping van to its destination. It also sees sparkles of humanity and warmth in people who are capable of towering monstrosity. Without tipping his hand at key moments, Panahi asks us what we are willing to tolerate in the name of maintaining a civilised world particularly when the powers-that-be are anything but civilised.” (Christina Newland, S&S December 2025)
Read the full review: It Was Just an Accident: Jafar Panahi explores the morality of violent revenge in his deserving Palme d’Or winner
Where to see it: In UK cinemas
5. The Secret Agent
Kleber Mendonça Filho, Brazil, France, Germany, Netherlands
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.
We said: “”Imagined from a combination of recorded history and personal recollection, The Secret Agent may be a fiction, but as the grown Fernando tells Flavia, who is herself attempting to make sense of Armando’s story from fragmentary evidence, ‘you remember my father better than I do.’ A consummate cinephile, Mendonça Filho is the rare director who conceives of cinema politically and as entertainment. The Secret Agent is a committed effort at salvaging historical memory as well as an intoxicating feat of filmmaking. Without missing a beat, it can depart from painstaking period piece into B-movie territory, satirising media-fabricated panic in a vignette about a sentient severed leg that goes on a killing rampage in a gay cruising area. Such confident skill, combined with the richness of the narrative and the impressively fluid storytelling, renders the film riveting for all 158 minutes of its running time. One is tempted to call it a masterpiece.” (Giovanni Marchini Camia, S&S online)
Read the full review: The Secret Agent: a masterful genre-inflected epic from Kleber Mendonça Filho
Where to see it: In UK cinemas from 20 February 2026
4. Sirât
Oliver Laxe, Spain, France
A father in search of his lost daughter enters a world of illegal Moroccan desert raves in the Spanish director’s vivid spectacle of a world on the edge of an apocalypse.
We said: “Laxe staged another spiritual quest through the Moroccan desert in his 2016 ‘Muslim western’ Mimosas, and here likewise he has executed a high-degree-of-difficulty shoot in which the cast and crew traverse rocky and windblown vistas past the edge of human civilisation, reaping gorgeous visual rewards. The word ‘sirât’, an opening title card informs us, is an Islamic term referring to the bridge, narrow and treacherous, across which we might pass between heaven and hell. In Laxe’s ravishingly distilled film, this concept is brought to life with a shot of trucks teetering on the brink of oblivion, and random moments of violence. It’s also dramatised by a hypnotic scene, late in the film, where characters explore a perilous landscape on blind faith, like a cartoon character suspended in midair after running off a cliff, seemingly kept alive only through their surrender to the rhythm of the universe, which in Sirât embodies in every shake of a subwoofer, stirring body and soul on a preverbal level.” (Mark Asch, S&S online)
Read the full review: Sirât: Oliver Laxe’s thrilling desert parable lets the music take control
Where to see it: In UK cinemas from 27 February 2026
3. The Mastermind
Kelly Reichardt, USA, UK
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.
We said: “Not that Reichardt’s tone ever gets close to moralising or judgemental (even as the film’s title sounds increasingly ironic). She retains her genius for slowly but surely shifting a film’s course until it’s become something else again, subtly leaving us space to re-evaluate J.B. and his maverick path. In this movement, it’s not unlike her eco-terrorism drama Night Moves (2013), but more successful. At one point she crystallises the limits of J.B.’s world and world view with a 360-degree pan of his hotel room as he forges a passport: it begins and ends with him alone. Reichardt has said she was inspired by a 1972 heist of the Worcester Art Museum (in another town in Massachusetts), and at the start of the film my impulse was, perhaps glibly, to see a parallel between art-heisting and filmmaking: get in, get your pictures, get out. But the concerns of The Mastermind run to other depths, very much conditioned by our current era, when moral dilemmas and the imperative to do anything more than stand by have reached an unignorable pitch. J.B.’s character comes out with a sinking clarity when push comes to shove, and like a heist in reverse, before you know it Reichardt has come and gone, leaving you with something invaluable to gaze upon and ponder.” (Christina Newland, S&S December 2025)
Read the full review: The Mastermind: Kelly Reichardt pulls off a perfect slow heist movie
Where to see it: On Mubi from 12 December 2026
2. Sinners
Ryan Coogler, USA
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.
We said: “Sinners was spring 2025’s great cinematic surprise: a period horror musical shot through with historical awareness, soul-stirring songs, horny wit and sincere emotion that became a hit with critics and at the box office. In their fifth collaboration, Ryan Coogler cast Michael B. Jordan in dual roles as the Smokestack Twins, World War I veterans who we meet on their return to Mississippi in 1932 after a seven-year stint in the employ of Chicago gangsters. Their idea is to open a juke joint back in their hometown: “We might as well deal with the devil we know.” What the brothers don’t know, yet, is that the devils dwelling down South include a coven of vampires, led by Jack O’Connell’s Remmick. With a keen line in folk song, Remmick and his fellow bloodsuckers are drawn by the blues music of the twins’ cousin Sammie: a sound so transcendent it can, as the film’s voiceover tells us, “pierce the veil between life and death, conjuring spirits from the past and the future”. The startling set piece that dramatises Sammie’s unearthly skill was instantly recognised as visionary. Cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s camera sweeps through the club as musicians of varied traditions and time periods appear among our protagonists. The sequence splits open the structure of Sinners, transforming the film from John Sayles-styled social panorama to visceral horror.” (Alex Ramon, S&S Winter 2025-26 2025)
Where to see it: On major streaming services
1. One Battle After Another
Paul Thomas Anderson, USA
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 – Paul Thomas Anderson’s incendiary portrait of modern America is the worthy winner of this year’s poll.
We said: “Paul Thomas Anderson’s not-really-Pynchon, not-quite-action-movie, which stormed the hearts and minds of 21st-century movie diehards who are sick and tired of the cinema of failure but cannot let go of the American 70s, a time of auteurist mythology defined by both the artistry of Altman and sell-out spectacle of Star Wars (1977). The admiring critical response has been justified but also conspicuous: here, finally, is something that dares to be satisfying while refusing to paint a rosy picture of where we’re at. Anderson’s film is as beaten to a pulp and scarified as Sean Penn’s Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw at the denouement and, like other recent Trump-era tales, it moves with a propulsive lurch, speeding and digressing, rising and falling. Yet One Battle is, somehow, not a movie of defeat, using the rough textures and no-fools mentality of that earlier, storied period of cinematic disillusionment as a surface-level primer to locate entirely new energies.” (Michael Koresky, S&S Winter 2025-26)
Read the review: One Battle After Another: There’s so much to relish in Paul Thomas Anderson’s political cat-and-mice caper
Where to see it: On major streaming services