The best family movies of 2025 (so far)

A throwback to the cuddly creature features of the 1980s, The Legend of Ochi doesn’t come close to ET or Gremlins, but what could? It’s still a sweet, beautiful-looking movie about interspecies empathy, following a young girl (Helena Zengel) in a remote European mountain village who befriends a critter she’s been taught to fear and ventures out to reunite it with its family, putting her at odds with her father, an ever-yelling Willem Dafoe. And yes, the little guy is cute as heck, and somehow not CGI.

The live-action update of Disney’s first animated classic boasts a committed musical turn from Rachel Zegler in the title role and a fun, campy Gal Gadot Evil Queen. The seven dwarves are admittedly less successful, but the love story and the moral – it’s important to lead with kindness – have had a welcome glow-up.

Like Hanna-Barbera’s canine hero Hong Kong Phooey, except without the cultural appropriation and filing cabinet jokes, Dog Man crashed onto the screen from the pages of Dav Pilkey's super-popular book series in suitably anarchic fashion. Based on the – let’s face it – horrifying premise of a dead cop and his trusty pooch being reanimated into a single entity, the movie is a whirlwind of split screen visuals and sugar-high plotting. Kids’ll love it. And for our money, Flippy the Fish is a much better villain than Galactus.

The first two live-action Paddington movies are some of the best family films of all-time. The third… less so, but not so much that it isn’t still a warm, fuzzy good time. In this chapter, everyone’s favourite marmalade-loving ursine, along with his adopted British family, returns home to the jungles of Peru in search of his Aunt Lucy. Also featuring the always-delightful Olivia Colman as a Julie Andrews-ish nun. What’s not to like?

If you’ve seen the animated version, there’s not too much in this live action origin story to surprise or astound. Nevertheless, props to returning director Dean DeBlois for injecting a load of fresh heart and plenty of vertigo-inducing aerial sequences as Hiccup (Mason Thames) and his scaly pal Toothless prove their worth to a village of sceptical Vikings.

‘Do we really need more Jurassic Park sequels?’ Dude, do you hear yourself? Complaining about having too many movies where dinosaurs run amok on mankind? Sure, some are worse than others, but the most recent reboot easily leapfrogs all the Chris Pratt ones, and has at least a small but recognisable strand of the Steven Spielberg original in its DNA. Warning: probably not one for the younger kids. Again, sorry little Billy. 

The biggest movie of the year is basically unheard of outside China, where it’s grossed an astounding $2 billion, making it the highest-grossing animated film of all-time. Naturally, that’s been the main talking point around Ne Zha 2, and what it means for a shifting global film economy. But how is it as, y’know, a movie? Pretty fun, actually, and wonderfully animated, with a story steeped in Chinese folklore and an engaging hero in the rebellious demigod Ne Zha. An English dub, featuring the voice of Michelle Yeoh, is finally getting a US release, so we can see what the fuss is about.

Old-head critics were somehow dumbfounded when a movie based on the most popular video game of all-time, starring the ever-bankable Jack Black, turned out to be a massive hit. Whatever you think of the juvenile humour, eye-searing colour palette and Jack Blackness of it all, it’s maybe the first Gen Z event picture not tied to a previous generation’s IP. Parents won’t understand any of it – which is another big selling point, come to think of it. 

Mid-range Pixar is still better than most animations and while Elio, a sci-fi space adventure about a boy whose dream of space travel becomes a kaleidoscopic reality, is no Wall-E, it has charm in abundance, loads of fun characters and a Spielberg-y emotional core. It’s Close Encounters with training wheels, and it pops with the exuberance and thrill of discovery. 

The first Bad Guys was a sleeper hit, a kiddie heist flick starring anthropomorphic animals attempting to go straight full of references to classic crime movies only adults would recognise. The inevitable sequel is also a hoot, with a classic ‘one last job’ scenario involving the original gang and a new all-female crew of furry, feathered thieves, led by a raven with the unmistakable voice of Natasha Lyonne.

Twenty-two years after the 2003 original, Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan return for a body-swap sequel. And this time they’ve got company. When mother and daughter Tess (Lee Curtis) and Anna (Lohan) switch bodies with their family’s two teenage members, wacky hijinks ensue until everyone learns some important life lessons. It’s incredibly silly, but with nothing but fun on its mind and some extremely game performances from everyone involved, particularly Lee Curtis. It would be very hard not to have a freaking good time.

This year, Korean culture is big, big, big. Adults have had the final season of Squid Game, while kids have relished this enormously popular Korean animation – and we think they might have had the better deal. The story follows K-pop girl band Huntr/x who use their pop bangers to protect humans from demons who masquerade as boy bands and other nefarious entities. It’s Netflix’s most-watched animation ever, with a Billboard topping chart hit in ‘Golden’ and rumours of an Oscar Best Song bid. Expect many sequels.

If you’re surprised by how well this live-action remake of the 2002 Disney flick did at the box office, you clearly weren’t a kid at the turn of the millennium, when the animated original became the zoomer version of the House of Mouse’s Renaissance-era classics. Like all of the company’s recent remakes, it mostly just ports the same story over – in this case, that of a lonely Hawaiian girl who befriends a blue, puppy-like alien – but unlike many of them, it loses far less charm in the translation. 

Movies without dialogue are a tough sell for kids, we know, but this one is an exception. A talkless movie that says so much, Latvian animation genius Gints Zilbalodis’s Oscar winner is The Incredible Journey by way of Studio Ghibli. A cat, labrador, secretarybird, capybara and lemur float through an unexplained flood and across a watery landscape full of mystery and wonder. Not just the most magical family film of the year but one of the movies of the year full stop, Flow is worth pushing the boat out for on streaming.