The Best Movies of 2025 – Updated December 2025

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.

📍 Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning: a travel guide to the globe-spanning blockbuster

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.

There’s been 400 or so adaptations of Mary Shelley’s classic work of gothic romanticism – excluding The Munsters – but none has been made with as much love as Guillermo del Toro’s sweeping passion project. Oscar Isaac is a petulant, entitled Victor Frankenstein who unleashes a creature he can’t control and doesn’t understand: a father figure broken by his own cruel dad (Charles Dance). But it all comes alive with its monster in a second half that strobes with menace and heart. Elvis’s Jacob Elordi delivering a performance of physical might and deep emotional need; the most modern character in del Toro’s antique world. 

Prey revived the Predator franchise after decades of terrible sequels. This, again directed by Dan Trachtenberg, continues the winning streak. A predator, the runt of his tribe, aims to prove his worth by conquering an unkillable beast, but victory will require something unthinkable: working with others. Smart, action-packed and surprisingly emotional.

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.

This doc follows American journalist Seymour Hersh, looking back on some of the biggest stories he broke – the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, the abuse in Abu Ghraib – and his relentless, obsessive pursuit of the truth. He seems to hate the limelight (it took director Laura Poitras 20 years to coax him into participating), even threatening to quit the film at one point. But whenever he’s recalling a story, relishing holding power to account, he’s utterly lit up. Wickedly funny, too. We witness him interviewing sources in Gaza: a reminder, if we even need it, of why investigative journalism remains so vital.

The year’s second great movie set during Brazil’s military dictatorship of the 1970s, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s conspiracy thriller has all the paranoia and familial drama of I’m Still Here, but also a dead shark, a two-faced cat and a severed leg that comes to life and goes on a kicking spree. Wagner Moura, of Netflix’s Narcos, is an academic who pisses off the wrong bureaucrat and goes into hiding, as two hitmen are dispatched to take him out. Filho unfurls the story slowly, folding touches of playful absurdism into the rich period details, but Moura is never less than captivating as a man who’s not particularly political yet ends up a government target anyway – because that’s just how authoritarianism works.

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.

Clint Bentley’s sophomore film is a tiny epic, small in scale but big in theme and impact. A terrific Joel Edgerton is Robert Grainier, a logger in the Pacific Northwest at the turn of the century, clearing forests to make way for railroad tracks (cue some of the most memorable images of 2025). But the heart of the story is the beautifully rendered relationship between Robert and strong-willed Gladys (a never-better Felicity Jones). It’s gorgeous, heart-rending stuff that is the film in microcosm: the simple stuff that makes up life – love, work, home, children death – delivered in the most nuanced, moving, cinematic terms imaginable. 

The heartwarmingly kinky feature debut of Harry Lighton really gives new meaning to the coming-of-age film. Adapted from Adam Mars-Jones novel Box Hill, It follows the sexual awakening of Harry Melling’s Colin, a shy parking warden from Bromley, who embarks on a BDSM romance with Alexander Skarsgård’s enigmatic bike gang leader Ray. Chockful of humour and heartache, it captures the bittersweet hope of first love with palpable performances from its odd-couple leads. 

A black comedy from South Korea about the inhumanity of late-stage capitalism is going to draw inevitable comparisons to Parasite, but Park Chan-wook’s blood-soaked satire is somehow darker and funnier than its predecessor. After getting laid off from his job at a paper company, a bumbling middle-manager (Squid Game’s Lee Byung-Hun) determines to find employment by any means necessary – even if it means killing off his competition. While the message is delivered with hammer force, Chan-wook’s kinetic visual style achieves new levels of sinuous virtuosity, sending his camera gliding over rooftops, through beer mugs and into his protagonist’s mouth for the second-most uncomfortable bit of DIY dentistry in his oeuvre. 

Drawn partly from his own persecution at the hands of the Islamic Republic, Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’Or winner is his version of a genre movie, a revenge thriller filtered through Waiting for Godot. A onetime political prisoner (Vahid Mobasseri, somehow a first-time actor) kidnaps the guard he believes tortured him for months with the intent of burying him in the desert, only to be struck by a tinge of doubt that he’s got the right guy. Intense stuff, but funny, too, as the cast grows into an ensemble of ex-prisoners arguing over what to do with whoever it is he’s got locked in a trunk in the back of his transit van. The denouement, however, will have you holding your breath all the way to the parking lot.

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.

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. 

Timothée Chalamet is ping-pong wizard in a sports movie that plays like a Scorsese-era crime classic. The American dream has been explored a thousand times on screen but rarely with the kind of (literal) balls-to-the-wall that Josh Safdie packs into two and a half hours. As finely-tuned a piece of cinema as something with this much anarchic energy can be, Marty Supreme feels like a sprawling 1950s epic but somehow only spans less than a year in the life of hyper-ambitious table tennis player Marty Mauser. It packs in some strongest performances of the year, not least from its star, but also Odessa A’zion as Marty’s confidante and Gwyneth Paltrow as the fading movie star who falls under his chaotic spell. 

Paul Thomas Anderson might be the best filmmaker of his generation, but nothing he’s done to this point suggested he would one day make an all-time great action movie. In his second Thomas Pynchon adaptation, the director slams the pedal down on a timely story of revolutionaries, girl-dads, the militarisation of America and the failure of parents to leave a better world for their children, maintaining headlong propulsion for 170 quickfire minutes and drawing a top-tier Leonardo DiCaprio performance along the way. It’s breathless, funny, absolutely elite moviemaking. Viva la revolucion!