SASKIA BARON
1 One Battle After Another
2. Sinners
3 It was Just an Accident
4 Palestine 36
5 Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight
6 April
7 Motherboard
8 Holy Cow
9 The Brutalist
10 Pillion
It was hard work finding ten films I wholly loved this year, and even then, these have flaws (particularly the last third of The Brutalist). But I’m pleased to find that five of my favourite films were directed by women, each exploring very different genres, and that Sinners and One Battle After Another were such densely visual treats they required repeated viewings.
JUSTINE ELIAS
Bring Her Back
Hedda
Highest 2 Lowest
The Ice Tower
It Was Just an Accident
Nickel Boys
One Battle After Another
Sinners
Sorry, Baby
Weapons
Though some of the world's finest filmmakers (Spike Lee, Kathryn Bigelow, Rian Johnson) saw their work go straight to streaming, a few directors – Zac Cregger (Weapons), Ryan Coogler (Sinners), and Danny Boyle (28 Years Later) – managed to rejuvenate the cinema experience. Two of year's most technically daring movies, James Cameron's Avatar: Fire and Ash and Paul W.S. Anderson's In the Lost Lands, might have met opposite fates at the box office, but both pushed the boundaries of auteurism. The most memorable movies, though, beguiled with a comparative whisper. The wintry emotional landscapes of the twisted fairy tale The Ice Tower (Lucile Hadžihalilović) and the melancholy Sorry, Baby (Eva Victor) will linger in the mind long into 2026.
GRAHAM FULLER
April
The Ice Tower
I’m Still Here
It Was Just an Accident
Misericordia
One Battle After Another
On Falling
A Real Pain
Sentimental Value
Train Dreams
April would’ve topped this list even if it wasn’t alphabetical. Dea Kulumbegashvili’s harrowing drama about a night-lurking female obstetrician who performs illegal abortions for village women hoiks a furious J’accuse at Georgia’s misogynistic patriarchy. Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here and Jafar Pahani’s It Was Just an Accident hauntingly parse the traumatised survivors of torture and bereavement by murderous regimes in Brazil and Iran. Cliff Bentley’s Train Dreams salutes the stoical unknown loggers who hewed America’s railroads from the wilderness. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another hews the Christian nationalists seeking a white American reich; Leonardo DiCaprio’s flapping bathrobe resists them.
NICK HASTED
1 Ellis Park
2 One Battle After Another
3 The Brutalist
4 Oslo Stories Trilogy: Sex
5 Sinners
6 Kontinental ‘25
7 The Seed of the Sacred Fig
8 Weapons
9 Islands
10 The Mastermind
Justin Kurzel’s documentary on Nick Cave’s right-hand man Warren Ellis and the Ellis Park wildlife sanctuary he helps fund is ecstatic and hugely moving cinema, as a director known for hardcore examinations of violence turned toward the light. From Kontinental ’25’s microbudget absurdist Romanian yarn about late capitalist moral choice to One Battle After Another’s blockbuster winking revolutionary zeal, a spirit of resistance imbues much of this list, fighting for loving virtue and the emotional worth of cinemagoing itself, as hostile shadows fall on both.
HELEN HAWKINS
1 The Mastermind
2 It Was Just an Accident
3 One Battle After Another
4 Seed of the Sacred Fig
5 Santosh
6 Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight
7 Train Dreams
8 Little Trouble Girls
9 Holy Cow
10 A Real Pain
This year’s list was a struggle: not to find 10 releases to include but to choose ones to exclude. I have reluctantly left out some remarkable films with five-star performances in them – Blue Moon, in which Ethan Hawke takes his talents to a new level; A Complete Unknown, with spellbinding Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan and Ed Norton as Pete Seeger; and Sentimental Value, elevated by the pain-wracked father-daughter relationship of Stellan Skarsgård and Renata Reinsve. My top choice The Mastermind shows that director Kelly Reichardt continues to fly the flag for adventurous indie auteurs.
DEMETRIOS MATHEOU
1 One Battle After Another
2 Marty Supreme
3 Sentimental Value
4 Train Dreams
5 Sinners
6 Sorry, Baby
7 Urchin
8 September 5
9 Hedda
10 Bugonia
2025 has been a superb year, in which we've seen a full range of what film can achieve: from the big, bold, viscerally cinematic (Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another, Josh Safdie's Marty Supreme) to the intimate and poetic (Clint Bentley's Train Dreams), to the vibrant socio-political makeovers of genre (Ryan Coogler's Sinners) and adaptation (Nia DaCosta's Hedda). All the films on my list suggest this is one of those periods when the independent sensibility is thriving; it's been a while since I've been so deeply moved, and so consistently thrilled.
MARKIE ROBSON-SCOTT
1 Sinners
2. One Battle After Another
3 Late Shift
4 Young Mothers
5 Blue Road
6 A Real Pain
7 Bugonia
8 The Courageous
9 The Brutalist
10 Twiggy
2025 was a good year for indie films and documentaries, such as Blue Road, which shone light on the fascinating Edna O’Brien, and Twiggy, Sadie Frost’s portrait of the ground-breaking Sixties icon. Late Shift, The Courageous, and Young Mothers are compelling social realist films with political messages, while Ryan Coogler’s box-office hit Sinners uses supernatural horror to explore American racism with extraordinary originality. Yorgos Lanthimos’s unhinged Bugonia is another dystopian genre-bender. (Vampires and aliens are perhaps suitable expressions of the zeitgeist.) And Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another provides political commentary in the form of a wildly entertaining action thriller.
JAMES SAYNOR
2000 Meters to Andriivka
The Brutalist
It Was Just an Accident
Marty Supreme
Nickel Boys
One Battle After Another
Red Path
The Seed of the Sacred Fig
Sinners
Steve
Iranian cinema has always played a good game, and two remarkable undercover efforts from either end of 2025 kept the ball in play – It Was Just an Accident and, perhaps the year’s standout, The Seed of the Sacred Fig. America went down a route of wacky grandiosity with movies like One Battle After Another and Sinners, rounding off the year with the three-parts-brilliant, one-part-chaotic Marty Supreme. And on the home front there was Steve, an unsparing and inspiring day in the life of a school for troubled kids.
ADAM SWEETING
The war between cinemas and streamer-land rages on, but 2025 had its vintage moments. Rather under-appreciated, I felt, was Steven Soderbergh’s forensically cunning spy drama Black Bag, while Rian Johnson’s latest Knives Out caper was a riot and Jennifer Lawrence was stunningly good as the psychologically damaged young mother in Die My Love. For sheer slapstick silliness, The Naked Gun took some beating. Brad Pitt’s F1 successfully put its huge piles of money where its mouth was, while Mel Gibson delivered a mini-masterclass in shoestring thriller-making with Flight Risk.
1 Black Bag
2 Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
3 Die My Love
4 Ballad of a Small Player
5 Frankenstein
6 F1
7 The Accountant 2
8 Flight Risk
9 The Naked Gun
10 Jurassic Park Rebirth
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