The best films of 2025
In a year of many challenges to the art form, the movies came out stronger; these films are the best of 2025
Photos courtesy of Warner Bros, Neon, A24, 20th Century Studios, and WILLA.
Design by Ryan Quan
Words by Siddhant Adlakha
It’s hard not to worry about the future of cinema when studios are either cannibalizing each other, or monetizing A.I. slop. Then again, it’s just as hard to doomsay when a year like 2025 has provided such a tremendous wealth of great releases—at all budget and production levels, and from every corner of the globe.
From innovative documentaries, to stylishly directed set pieces, to instantly-iconic scenes and great performances that flew under the radar, it always seems like there’s something to celebrate. Optimism is in short supply these days, but when it comes to the movies, it increasingly appears that the artform, when challenged, will adapt and evolve in defiant ways, especially if the year’s exceptional studio and arthouse output is anything to go by.
Without further ado, here are the best 15 films of 2025:
First, some honorable mentions:
The Smashing Machine: Benny Safdie’s emotionally cleansing MMA biopic, featuring a transformative performance by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.
Blue Moon: Richard Linklater’s stage-like document of the glamorous afterparty that sent Broadway scribe Lorenz Hart (a magnificent Ethan Hawke) tumbling down a bottle.
Warfare: A joint effort between Civil War director Alex Garland and former U.S. soldier Ray Mendoza, who turn memories of the Iraq War into an immense sensory experience.
Sex, Love and Dreams: An informal trilogy by Norwegian filmmaker Dag Johan Haugerud, who chronicles physical and emotional intimacy during transformative periods of life, set against the architecture of modern Oslo.
The Chronology of Water: Kristin Stewart’s marvelous feature directorial debut in which she turns a swimmer’s memoir of physical abuse into an impressionistic portrait of emotional tumult.
And now, onto the list.
15. Sabar Bonda (Cactus Pears)
India, Canada, United Kingdom
Grief gives way to intimacy in Rohan Kanawade’s picturesque Marathi-language drama Sabar Bonda (Cactus Pears), his feature debut. As a lonely, closeted Mumbai call center worker returns to his village for his father’s funeral, he’s pulled in one direction by strict traditions, and in the other by memories unlocked by an unlikely companion. With its photographic frame, and a calming soundscape born of natural ambience, the film becomes a gentle embodiment of kindness and wish fulfilment. (Full review)
Now in theaters.
14. My Father’s Shadow
Nigeria, United Kingdom
Set during the 1993 Nigerian election, My Father’s Shadow follows two young brothers who take a trip to Lagos with their distant father (a mysterious Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù) as they observe the world through innocent eyes, and as political violence seeps through the edges of the frame. Directed with naturalistic flair by Akinola Davies Jr. in his feature debut—and written alongside his older brother Wale Davies—the movie’s texture lives and breathes, imbuing its characters and surroundings with a subtle melancholy, as it gradually reveals the deep-seated sorrow at its core. (Full review)
In limited theatrical release; expands Feb. 6, 2026
13. Resurrection
China, France
A mind-bending odyssey told in six vignettes—each mapped onto a different human sense—Bi Gan’s bold third feature traces cinema’s transformation over a 100 years, but uses this metatext to examine China’s social and cultural evolution during the 20th Century. With odes to silent classics and modern movements alike, its story is structured around the phantasmic sci-fi concept of a biomechanical creature who dares to dream, in a world where the secret to long life is letting go of all things illusory. But if the trade-off is between immortality and the wistful magic of cinema (embodied here by, among other things, the most jaw-dropping long take you’ll see this year), then Resurrection is the most rigorous personification of this imagined debate, making the visual and aural case that movies, as a collective experience, are meant to outlive us. (Full review)
Now in theaters
12. The Secret Agent
Brazil, France, Germany, Netherlands
In keeping with its title, information is meted out gradually and carefully in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s lush period drama The Secret Agent, set during Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s. However, the story isn’t one of espionage, despite featuring spy movie hallmarks. Rather, it follows a former teacher and technology expert (Wagner Moura at his most subtly enrapturing) in hiding from totalitarian forces, and carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. The result is one of the year’s most vividly human stories, whose most moving and thrilling moments are forced to slip out from beneath its withholding exterior. Its drama feels like the unfurling of secrets.
Now in theaters
11. Predators
United States
Part retrospective, part media critique, and eventually, a gut-churning self-reflection, David Osit’s archival documentary Predators is an engrossing and involving sociological study on the format, success, and modern legacy of To Catch a Predator, the ultra-popular NBC reality show hosted by Chris Hansen in the mid-2000s. As Osit gradually turns the camera on himself, the series’ dark underbelly comes to light, as do uneasy questions of not only its social and legal utility, but the larger challenge of rehabilitating the perpetrators at its center. However, what it has to say about them is just as discomforting as what it has to say about us.
Streaming on Paramount+
10. Sound of Falling
Germany
In Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling, several generations of women and young girls inhabit a countryside house, harboring secrets about life, death, and sexual impropriety. Its ghostly camerawork and elliptical editing allow it to move between time periods via stream-of-consciousness, but its remarkable ensemble always centers looming anxieties around death and misery, resulting in the year’s most poignant coming-of-age drama—and its most haunting. (Full review)
In limited theatrical release; expands Jan. 16, 2026
9. April
Georgia, Italy, France
A visceral abortion drama banned in its native Georgia, Dea Kulumbegashvili challenges deep-seated social norms through its story of a daring obstetrician, Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), who risks her medical career by helping desperate rural women terminate unwanted pregnancies. Amidst ethereal sound design and twisted, abstract interludes, Kulumbegashvili trains her camera, unflinchingly, on moments of physical pain, capturing the violence wrought upon the female form, while centering its beauty. The director, who was pregnant at the time of production (and gave birth as the film was being made), transforms her own anxieties around childbirth into a discomforting fresco on the lives of Georgian women. (Full review)
Streaming on MUBI internationally. Awaiting U.S. streaming release
8. Sentimental Value
Norway, France, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, United Kingdom
For Sentimental Value, Joachim Trier’s follow-up to Millennial uncertainty drama The Worst Person in the World, he re-teams with actress Renata Reinsve, but casts her in a wildly different role: that of withdrawn stage performer Nora Borg, whose distant, film director father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård) hopes to reconnect by casting her in a movie about his mother. With a tremendous ensemble at his disposal—Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas plays Nora’s understanding sister Agnes; Elle Fanning embodies self-conscious Hollywood starlet Rachel Kemp, who Gustav casts in Nora’s stead—Trier treads a careful line between comedy and wrenching drama, while also blurring the boundary between the character’s memories and Gustav’s old films (both presented with inviting, grainy texture). It’s as much about how thorny, lifelong grudges can turn inward, as it is about the peculiarities of trying to heal the wounds they cause—especially when art becomes a primary outlet. (Full review)
Now in theatres
7. If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You
United States
A nerve-shredding cinematic experience, Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You uses Rose Bryne’s performance as its unrelenting canvas. Shot largely in close ups, it follows therapist Linda (Byrne), an exhausted mother to a 5-year-old daughter with special needs, during the worst week of her life, starting with a domestic mishap that leaves her holed up in a seedy motel—and that’s just the start of it. Her own therapist (Conan O’Brien) dumps her. Her family doctor (Bronstein) accuses her of bad parenting. Her nosy neighbor (A$AP Rocky) invites her to buy drugs off the Internet. And one of her clients (Danielle Macdonald) disappears, leaving her with a newborn baby. And all the while, she barely keeps it together, as Bronstein’s camera captures the stark physical and emotional details of Linda’s harrowing unraveling, as Byrne delivers a career-best performance, practically tearing herself apart at the seams. Few works this year have induced this much anxiety. (Full review)
6. BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions
United States
Detroit techno meets W.E.B. Dubois in BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions, director Kahlil Joseph’s avant-garde feature debut, based on his two-screen art installation. A pulsing video essay that wraps a sci-fi framing device around images of revolution—but seats them alongside viral Internet memes popular on Black Twitter—BLKNWS is as academic as it is accessible, and as ridiculous as it is radical, in its examination of what it means to apply a Black postcolonial lens to a paradoxical world in constant, rhythmic evolution. (Full review)
Now in theaters
5. Avatar: Fire and Ash
United States
Another grand spectacle from James Cameron, Avatar: Fire and Ash overcomes its unwieldiest moments through sincere force of will. The action, pomp and melodrama are all larger than before, imbuing even the series’ repeated beats with a sense of novelty, as Cameron’s deeply human performance-capture characters are thrown headfirst into an operatic family drama steeped in grief, making his ecological pleas feel all the more urgent. No one in Hollywood makes movies this way, combining old-school religious epics with futuristic technology. If this is the final film of its kind, it’s absolutely worth cherishing. (Full review)
Now in theaters
4. The Voice of Hind Rajab
Tunisia, France
Centering its reenactments around real voice recordings of Hind Rajab—the 5-year old Palestinian girl killed by the Israeli army alongside her family in a stranded car—Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab doesn’t just tug at the heart-strings, but rips them right out. Emergency workers from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (roles performed with devastating fury and fatigue) try to keep Hind alive over the phone in real time, in the hopes of having an ambulance reach her before more bullets and tank shells do. However, the characters’ desperation fans outwards, into a dramatic examination of the political deadlocks that not only restrain them, but make them culpable for their own demise. A work that’s as touching as it is enraging. (Full review)
Now in theaters
3. One Battle After Another
United States
Inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, Paul Thomas Anderson’s stoner-action-drama One Battle After Another captures a modern United States in crisis, through its tale of forgotten revolutionaries, and the white supremacist villains who return to haunt them. The specter of institutional racism looms larger over its father-daughter story, as Leonardo DiCaprio’s drug-addled burnout Bob Ferguson pratfalls his way through ICE raids to rescue his self-assured, mixed-race daughter Willa (impressive newcomer Chase Infiniti). The movie’s ensemble is an embarrassment of riches, between Sean Penn’s fidgety narcissist Col. Lockjaw, Teyana Taylor’s fearsome militant Perfidia Beverly Hills, Regina Hall’s conscientious freedom fighter Deandra, and Benicio del Toro’s cool, comforting community leader Sensei Sergio St. Carlos. Few major Hollywood films this decade have so deftly balanced rousing excitement with raucous entertainment. (Full review)
2. It Was Just An Accident
Iran, France, Luxembourg
His first film since being released from prison, Jafar Panahi delivers what he calls “visual justice” to his idiosyncratic and deeply relatable cast of characters in It Was Just An Accident. A comedy-of-errors wrapped in the director’s harrowing experiences, it follows a group of former detainees of the Iranian Royal Guard who believe they’ve nabbed their one-legged interrogator—the man who tortured them in captivity. The only problem is, like Panahi himself, they were all blindfolded, so they can’t be sure. This uncertainty, coupled with the characters’ reliance on their other sense, allows Panahi to craft a riveting morality play, filming largely from an unobtrusive distance as his cast lets loose in improvisational fashion. The resultant drama circles wounds that may never be closed, and embodies the anguish they still cause, while challenging the perceived certainty and superiority of the structures that inflicted them. (Full review)
1. (tie) Marty Supreme
United States
Set in the 1950s, and based loosely on real table tennis maverick Marty Reisman, Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme is a shot of adrenaline and unbridled optimism, buoyed by some of the most intriguing faces any camera has captured this year. At the movie’s center is the young, ambitious Marty Mauser, played by Timothée Chalamet in his career-best turn as a rising, fast-talking paddle prodigy who practically propels the movie forward with his ferocious energy, towards the character’s next hustle, gambit, or self-centered sexual escapade. A sports drama interspersed with unusual crime capers, the movie charges forward at lightspeed, capturing the corrosive allure of the American dream. It’s a charm and a thrill. (Full review)
Now in theaters
1. (tie) Sorry, Baby
United States
In their stunning feature debut, Eva Victor cast themselves as the lanky, jovial northeastern college professor Agnes, a woman dealing with the lengthy emotional and physical fallout of her sexual assault—an experience she seldom puts into words. With flashbacks that trace the characters’ numerous relationships as a student, Sorry, Baby explores the complicated contours of Agnes’ memories, including her mixed feelings towards the perpetrator, and the unexpected ripple effects of the event several years later. Through gentle drama and surprising comedic flourishes, Victor captures the physical and emotional complexities of trauma in a manner that’s as troubling as it is soothing, resulting in a film that confronts the unspoken by eliding the need for language altogether, and in its absence, becomes a balm for the soul. (Full review)
Published on December 19, 2025
Words by Siddhant Adlakha
Siddhant Adlakha is a critic and filmmaker from Mumbai, though he now lives in New York City. They're more similar than you'd think. Find him at @SiddhantAdlakha on Twitter
Art by Ryan Quan
Ryan Quan is JoySauce's social media manager, associate editor, and all-around visual eye. This queer, half-Chinese, half-Filipino writer and graphic designer loves everything related to music, creative nonfiction, and art. Based in Brooklyn, he spends most of his time dancing to hyperpop and accidentally falling asleep on the subway. Follow him on Instagram at @ryanquans, and check out his work on his website.