The best movies of 2025 (so far) – the new films that are making our year at the cinema

The latest film from anime great Naoko Yamada is a joyous tale about three teenagers using music to explore their next steps in life. Full of flighty fantasy and mind-expanding abstractions, but never disloyal to the inner life of young high-schooler Totsuko, a girl who can see people’s ‘colours’, the A Silent Voice director has conjured up a beautiful, deeply sensitive coming-of-age animation. It’s early to say it but it might even be the year’s best.

If the underwhelming Phase 5 of the MCU has given us something to get excited about it’s Florence Pugh. The Brit’s turn as broken-up Russian assassin Yelena Belova lights up a consciously scrappy team-up movie that plugs into relatable matters of trauma, depression and mental health in its battles with a new superhuman peril. And props to Marvel for shifting away from endless VFX battles to a more in-camera approach overseen with understated flair by ex-indie director Jake Schreier (Paper Towns). The rest of the Thunderbolts are an enjoyable mob to ride shotgun with, too, with David Harbour an infectious joy as an ex-Soviet superhero confronting obsolescence and a bulging midriff. Heck, even the post-credit sting is worth sticking around for on this one.

Paul Greengrass has built a career on mixing hyper-kinetic action with moral complexity. This time, Matthew McConaughey’s struggling school bus driver – think Otto from The Simpsons without all the goofy bonhomie – is a man who finds redemption comes at about a million degrees as he tries to rescue 22 schoolkids and America Ferrera’s doughty teacher from California’s 2018 wildfires. There’s few better than the Captain Phillips and United 93 director at this kind of widescreen epic and almost no one better than McConaughey at essaying this kind of understated blue collar heroism.

Robert Eggers’ world-building breathes (or rather, bites) new life into one of the oldest tales in the horror canon. While faithful to FW Murnau’s original 1922 Dracula riff, the production design puts the ‘grand’ in Grand Guignol, masterfully using light, shadow and jaw-dropping set pieces to pull audiences under its spell. Speaking of trancelike states, Lily-Rose Depp delivers a remarkably physical performance as a possessed woman torn between her husband and her psychic demon lover. And though there’s no usurping Max Shreck for creepiness, Bill Skarsgård’s mustachioed Count Orlok is at once the most human and most repulsive the character has ever looked.

Cheese and sex, friendship and family, but mainly cheese are the subjects of Louise Courvoisier’s fantastic debut. Boasting wonderful performances from the young leads, particularly Clément Faveau as the teenager who must adult up to fill the wellington boots of his dead dad. His solution to join a cheesemaking competition gives the film its through line but it’s as much about the meandering of a summer in the working countryside so vivid you can smell the cut grass and dung.

Steven Soderbergh fails at retirement once again, returning as his own cinematographer, cameraman and – sort of – lead actor in this haunted house story told from the ghost’s point of view. This silent presence watches a new family move in, led by Lucy Liu’s hard-charging mother, and sees a drama play around daughter Chloe (Callina Liang). It’s not about scaring so much as witnessing, but it makes for an effective twist on the ghost story.

As a film critic, the biggest risk is of bad posture (and bad taste). As a saturation diver, the biggest risk is of suffocating to death at the bottom of the ocean. Filmmaker Alex Parkinson enlists Woody Harrelson, Simu Liu and Finn Cole for this dramatic remake of his own 2019 documentary based on a real incident. The fascinating procedural specifics of a dangerous diving job power a tense, heart-in-mouth adventure thriller that never forgets its human stakes. Just remember to breathe...

Bong Joon Ho doesn’t make bad films, but he does occasionally make flawed interesting ones. So it is with a English-language space adventure that shares more DNA with his dystopian train thriller Snowpiercer than the Oscar-winning Parasite – but contains equal amounts of barbed social critique and barbed humour. The Korean auteur takes the premise of a human signing up to have his memories stored so he can be endlessly resurrected and uses it to dig into the ethics of cloning, white supremacy, and colonial legacies. Robert Pattinson makes a strong case for being one of the most interesting actors working today as the film’s two reprintable, expendable Mickeys.

A fake biopic and a semi-real jukebox musical walk into a rock doc, and well, that’s the whole joke, which is appropriate for a movie about ’90s slacker heroes Pavement. As a band that never took itself very seriously, director Alex Ross Perry’s half-sincere, half-ironic approach, featuring a collage of staged events alongside genuine footage, gets closer to articulating the group’s whole deal than an assemblage of talking heads ever could. The uninitiated still aren’t likely to get it. But then, when it comes to Pavement, what else is new?

Comedian Hannibal Buress once joked that a baseball game is great if you need a quiet place to catch up with someone you haven’t seen in years. Filmmaker Carson Lund might agree: his directorial debut is a tribute to America’s slow-moving pastime, but the focus is on the conversations that happen during the many lulls in the action. A quintessential hangout movie, it watches as a group of middle-aged weekend warriors in small-town Massachusetts play their final innings at their home field before it’s converted into a school. Wistful and funny, it’s as much about the erosion of the so-called ‘third place’ as the game itself. But baseball proves an especially apt metaphor for the passage of time: most often, eras end not with a grand slam but with a walk.

In 2002, Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later single-handedly ushered in a golden age of the undead – one that’s still going strong today. So returning to the series after 23 years came with high expectations. Working with original screenwriter Alex Garland, Boyle’s blood-drenched sequel resists all the easy genre clichés, instead asking big questions about decaying society and focusing on a humble, heartfelt relationship. At its core, 28 Years Later is a moving coming-of-age story about the bond between a boy (superb newcomer Alfie Williams) and his mum (Jodie Comer), whose life is hard enough even without raging cannibals. It’s moving and, of course, very, very scary. A great start to a potential trilogy.

An underdog racing drama turns to sports movie gold on the back of Brad Pitt’s star power and the clean lines of Joseph Kosinski’s hyper-stylish filmmaking. Pitt’s veteran driver, ​an old pro with a reckless streak the length of the Nürburgring, is obviously going to do Top Gun Maverick things ​at some stage, but F1 ​always earns its big hero moments. The races are exhilarating, Damson Idris brings extra charisma as the insecure protégé, and Doja Cat spearheads a proper Bruckheimer blockbuster soundtrack.

Did you know that Fidel Castro was a Jaws fan? Or that the famously tumultuous shoot for Steven Spielberg’s breakthrough blockbuster was once nearly interrupted by an actual Great White. This rollickingly entertaining doc assembles filmmakers, fans, oceanographers and the odd Massachusetts local to find tell the tales of one of ’70s cinema’s most enduring classics. What emerges is a vivid depiction of PTSD, not just for shark-hunters Quint, Brody and Hooper, but a bright-eyed movie savant still haunted by nightmares of a broken mechanical shark 50 years on.

We’re happy to report that Aussie animation wizard Adam Elliot has finally followed up 2009’s Mary and Max with another sallow-eyed stop-motion yarn. This one, a more-than-slightly autobiographical story of a kid who wants to make stop-motion animations that look a lot like Memoir of a Snail, is full of the pains and sorrows of growing up neglected and downtrodden in 1970s Melbourne. But Elliot’s greatest skill, apart from crafting a world gnarled with a sense of the macabre, is sweetening the morbidness with dark wit, heart and hopefulness. The result is like Aardman for weirdos – in the best way possible.

Co-stars Kyle Marvin and Michael Angelo Covino wrote this Apatowian farce about two longtime friends who decide to open their respective marriages, with disastrous consequences. (They also cast Dakota Johnson and Aria Arjona as their wives and, well, who among us?) Like many comedies about ‘alternative relationships’, the movie ends up making a conservative argument in favor of traditional monogamy. Unlike many of them, it’s funny as hell, with jokes flying from all angles, and a fight scene that finds the precise midpoint between They Live and Pineapple Express.

From the makers of Nick Cave concept film 20,000 Days on Earth comes a kind of extended music video for a 2024 concept album by Icelandic singer-songwriter Emilíana Torrini. The music was inspired by a collection of love letters discovered after the eponymous Miss Flower’s death, and this film combines performances of the music with heartfelt readings, interpretive dance, acted vignettes and multimedia flights of fancy. Guided by artists utterly in command of their concept, Torrini and her collaborators – including Cave, Alice Lowe and Richard Ayoade – turn this recipe for pretentious pudding into an exquisitely intimate yet cinematic feast for the senses.

Though the Scandi noir era was over? Magnus von Horn’s gripping period thriller turns the clock back to 1919 for a half-forgotten true-crime story with shades of Wiene and Murnau. Godland’s Vic Carmen Sonne is a dogged guide to a weary post-war Copenhagen where slipping through the cracks means falling into a​n underworld full of horrors straight out of a Grimm brothers’ tale. Cinematographer Michał Dymek’s expressionist black-and-white lighting provides plenty of shadows for monsters to lurk in. 

Steven Soderbergh’s second film on this list is a spy thriller-stroke-marital-drama (think ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Marriage Counsellor’) that harks back to where it all began for the American auteur. Surveillance, eavesdropping and the secrets we keep, the same themes of Sex, Lies, and Videotape, underpin a horndog espionage caper with a sharp wit and locked-in performances from Michael Fassbender, Cate Blanchett, Marisa Abela and Regé-Jean Page. The well-picked London locations are perfect for its devious ‘guess the traitor’ plotting too.

A famous conductor (Benjamin Lavernhe) discovers a long-lost brother (Pierre Lottin) and tries to build a connection through their shared love of music. There are more than hints of Brassed Off in the younger man’s post-industrial landscape, but this is a big old-fashioned story of family, community and brotherhood, anchored by the leads’ strong performances and a stirring, uplifting soundtrack.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s irascible Pansy may have been overlooked by the Academy Awards and, honestly, it just saves her having to clear a bloody space on the mantlepiece thanks very much anyway. A woman who can’t enter a public car park or sofa retailer without it all kicking off, she’s a Mike Leigh character for the ages: a stewing mass of complications and frustrations that she can’t begin to articulate, whose self-loathing seals her off from those who love her despite it all. Bittersweet and tragic, Hard Truths sits alongside Another Year in the Mike Leigh-iverse as a character study of endless insight and sympathy.

A franchise that’s hardly straightforward at the best of times gets really complicated in a blockbuster series closer that weaves in about 30 years’ worth of Mission: Impossible throughlines. But overly ambitious storytelling doesn't detract from another Tom Cruise action masterpiece. The daredevil A-lister takes the breath away in two big set-pieces that defy gravity and belief. Writer-director Christopher McQuarrie keeps the doomsday dramatics bubbling away as Cruise and a gold-plated support cast pull solemn faces and strain every sinew to entertain. Mission accomplished.

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A political thriller that crash lands into a domestic drama, Walter Salles’ true-life tragedy, set during Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s, examines the personal toll of authoritarianism to devastating effect. Fernanda Torres is spectacularly stoic as Eunice Paiva, whose husband, a former congressman, is taken in by police for ‘routine questioning’ and never returns. It’s a moving performance, but the film isn’t weepy. As the title implies, it’s ultimately about a matriarch’s resolve – even if justice remains frustratingly elusive, even decades later.

Is it possible to enjoy a biopic that, a) is about a pop star you’ve never heard of, and b) has that same pop star played by a CGI chimp? While American moviegoers argued about the validity of seeing a film about someone they needed to Google, this Robbie Williams biopic entertained the rest of us royally with its confessional look back at a troubled life beset by drugs, dad issues, more, stronger drugs, and the discovery that being in a boy band is basically a toxic relationship. The chimp conceit pays off royally, lending feral energy and a clever metaphor for imposter syndrome and the inner wildness of a man whose boyhood dream came true in all sorts of terrible ways.

‘I had many adventures with Goebbels,’ says Nazi-era auteur Leni Riefenstahl in this compelling and knotty archive-led documentary. It’s the kind of statement that would undermine her attempts to distance herself from Hitler’s regime for decades after the war, especially with a 1930s filmography – Triumph of the Will, Olympia – that put a cinematic lustre on the Nazis’ ideology of hate and racial supremacy. Director Andres Veiel mines a rich seam of archive footage, still photography and tempestuous interview appearances to paint a picture of an artist touched by genius and a deeply unsympathetic human being.

It’s vanishingly rare that the fourth film in a series is the best one – with apologies to die hard Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol fans – but that’s what Renée Zellweger and co have pulled off with a delightful, consistently funny and occasionally ugly-cry-inducing romcom that picks up with a fiftysomething Bridge picking herself up after the death of Mark Darcy (Colin Firth). Newbie director Michael Morris nails the delicate tone of slapstick silliness and genuine pathos, and the new additions – Leo Woodall and Chiwetel Ejiofor as the two studly love interests – match up to the returning faves. Hugh Grant, almost inevitably, stuffs every scene he’s in into a swag bag and makes off with it as the still-caddish but increasingly loveable Daniel Cleaver. V v good. 

A nurse spins out over one stressed-out night in Petra Volpe’s outstanding Swiss character study. Putting in one of the year’s best performances, Leonie Benesch (The Teacher’s Lounge, Babylon Berlin) is a caring, highly-skilled professional under intense pressure in an understaffed hospital ward full of demanding patients. What follows is a gripping, Safdies-meets-social-realism cri de coeur for a vocation in urgent need of bolstering. Warning: your blood pressure will soar.

Eva Victor proves a triple-threat with her astonishing debut, Sorry, Baby. The writer, director and star of the comedy-drama delivers a delicately nuanced portrait of a college professor grappling with life after a traumatic event in her youth. Her beautiful script, injected with wit, pathos and enlivened by a stellar supporting cast, will make you laugh, cry, and find hope even in the darkest of times.

Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin are odd-couple cousins who embark on a Holocaust tour to their Jewish grandma’s old Polish roots in Eisenberg’s brilliantly observed and astute road-trip gem. The film itself has made a journey of its own from Sundance to the Oscars – a much smoother one than that undertaken by two estranged relatives half-reconnecting within an often funny-awkward group dynamic. Simple on the surface – Planes, Trains and Automobiles with those fortysomething actors you like – it reveals additional depths with every watch. A low-key modern masterpiece.

A big-budget gangster vampire blues musical period piece? In this economy? Writer-director Ryan Coogler reinvigorated the MCU and the Rocky franchise, and he shoots much-needed adrenaline into blockbuster filmmaking in general here. Michael B Jordan plays twins, hustlers returning to the 1930s Mississippi Delta to open a juke joint and facing Klansmen by day and banjo-strumming bloodsuckers by night. An excellent ensemble cast, including Delroy Lindo and newcomer Miles Catron, carry the ‘survive the night’ narrative, but it’s Coogler’s bold vision that makes the film a true event – particularly the big-swing mid-movie music sequence that’ll have folks talking for years.

Go big or go home, right? With only his third feature, Brady Corbet makes a bid for the canon, an ambition reflected in his protagonist, Hungarian architect László Toth, played with passion and pathos by Adrien Brody. Escaping the Holocaust, he lands in rural Pennsylvania and, under the patronage of Guy Pearce’s industrialist, embarks on a project that’ll consume him for years. The grand themes, wide-scale vision and mammoth runtime are grasping at the capes of masters from Francis Ford Coppola to Paul Thomas Anderson. Will it place Corbet among them? For now, it’s impressive enough just to see a young auteur making the reach – and, truth be told, getting pretty damn close.

Fun as it was, Ryan Cregger’s breakthrough horror Barbarian was only the warm-up act for this masterful small-town fable, a horror-mystery that offers a Pulp Fiction-like collage of perspectives and themes (alcoholism, dodgy policing, high-school shootings, social schisms) to complement its shocks and deeply satisfying freaky side. Julia Garner is a harried teacher who gets the blame when 17 classmates go missing one night. Only this puzzle has many more pieces than Josh Brolin’s angry dad is prepared to accept. A genius, madcap final act brings it all together in memorable fashion. 

Who needs dialogue? Gints Zilbalodis doesn’t. The Latvian animation wizard piloted this spellbinding survival epic from his laptop all the way to the Oscars – and all without a word of the stuff. Unless, that is, you count the odd ‘miaow’ emanating from the inquisitive cat that it follows through a giant flood in the company of a ring-tailed lemur, a Labrador, a secretary bird and a capybara. Mystery, spirituality and plain old big-screen magic flow through a universally resonant tale of friendship and teamwork that’s worthy of Studio Ghibli.

First-person perspective in cinema isn’t entirely novel – you’ll find another example on this list, in fact – but rarely has the approach drawn viewers into the inner world of its protagonists as deeply as in RaMell Ross’s kaleidoscopic portrait of two Black youths whose lives intertwine at a brutal reform school in the Jim Crow South. Adapting Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel, Ross, previously a photographer and documentarian, arranges the narrative as an impressionistic collage of images, experiences, memories and dreams, some mundane, some surreal, some horrifying. The effect is disorienting at first, then absorbing, and finally profound in its elicitation of empathy. An essential triumph.