While some of the best films of the year might not make their budgets back, their mere existence feels like a victory in itself. From festival favourites, to rousing genre exercises, these are our favourite films of 2025:

Though Paul Thomas Anderson hasn’t tackled the present in more than two decades, his riveting return to a contemporary setting feels deliriously attuned to our current, fractured zeitgeist like little else in our current cinematic diet. Spanning a breezy near-three-hour runtime, One Battle After Another erupts as a political powder keg of an epic—enthralling, hilarious, and steeped in revolutionary verve for a world that desperately needs it.

With Jonny Greenwood’s anxious score underpinning gorgeous widescreen compositions that turn the open road into an enveloping nightmare, Anderson’s family saga lands as a radical, transgressive shock to the system that unearths a paranoid, authentic, and darkly comic vision of America. It’s counterprogramming that insists the time for change was decades ago, leaving us to pick up the pieces before they’re truly swept under the rug. “Life man, Life!”

 

On the surface, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent reads as typical awards bait. Its tale about a dissenting technology researcher on the lam in 1977, during Brazil’s infamous military dictatorship, seems primed to be a weepy look at the open wounds of horrors past. But from its opening moments, it becomes apparent that it’s less interested in being an overarching document of its era than it is in being a messy, vibrant tapestry of a people.

Unfolding at a leisurely pace, Filho’s film fervently clutches at the fabric of Brazilian history, culture, and folklore. It eschews the conventions of its political thriller setup to manifest as a living, breathing cinematic novel. Full of wild genre swings and detours, Filho crafts a loving, textural reclamation of history that sees fiction not as a means of obscuring truth but distilling it.

 

Clint Bentley’s lyrical quasi-Western quickly penetrates the soul. Unfolding as a slow, leaping tide of time, Train Dreams patiently sketches the tumultuous life of a Pacific-Northwest logger who bears witness to the social and technological changes that shaped the American Frontier at the turn of the 20th century—examining the maltreatment of immigrant workers, the exploitation of nature by industry, and the honest lives lost to hard work.

Unfurling into a cosmic tapestry, it illuminates the life of an enigmatic man who would easily be lost to the annals of history, unearthing beauty and truth in each step he takes. As the mythic old world of flora and fauna gives way to concrete jungles, we begin to ponder our innate connection to it and our role in its intricate, grand design. Along with Will Patton’s goosebump-inducing narration, we come to embrace the enigma of it all. “Beautiful, ain’t it?”

 

Park Chan-wook paints a bleak vision of late-stage capitalism with the magisterial No Other Choice. Co-penned by Toronto native Don McKellar, it centers on a devoted family man unceremoniously let go from his longtime position. Unwilling to surrender his dream life, he banks everything on a coveted position inundated with candidates who exceed his qualifications. So, he takes the titular mantra to heart and decides to violently dispatch his competition.

Unfolding with barbed, acerbic precision, it slyly dissects the ouroboric state of corporate and workplace politics to deliver a layered portrait of our modern dog-eat-dog economy. Slinking its way through a hysterical set of moral quandaries and errors, Park’s film glistens off the screen as a grand tragicomedy. One that not only affixes us to the urgency of its dire message but also understands there’s little to do but laugh in a rapidly subsuming world.

 

The cinematic vampire is almost as old as the medium itself. The mythologies have been so endlessly reworked that it becomes almost Sisyphean for new offerings to feel fresh and inventive. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners stands as one of the great modern rebuttals to that sentiment, not because it plays with the formula of the vampire flick, but because it views the genre through an oft-neglected lens—through America’s ingrained colour line.

Vampire lore staples like stinking garlic, searing holy water, and sharp wooden stakes all appear in their unvarnished glory, but in steeping the mythos in raw, blood-spattered Americana, Coogler’s film builds a world unto itself, pulsating with passion, pain, and transportive music. the spectacular Sinners manifests as a phantasmagorical, Southern Gothic reckoning with the American experiment, in which the people of one race are already ostracized as beasts before the real creatures of the night arrive.

 

Revenge stories often filter into two thematic camps: “revenge is evil” or “forgiveness is virtuous.” Jafar Panahi’s latest rises above those surface-level inclinations to craft a layered reckoning with the Iranian Regime’s spiritual toll. Inspired by his own time in prison, Panahi’s humanist comedy of errors follows a formerly imprisoned mechanic who abducts someone he supposedly recognizes as one of his former torturers. Unsure whether he’s nabbed the right man, he visits other ex-political prisoners—including a soon-to-be Bride—to validate his act of vengeance.

As Panahi’s film sifts through a bevy of funny character interactions and confessions, it unfolds as a grounded take on a screwball road movie. One that cultivates a powerful community of shared suffering that blurs the line between personal and systemic trauma. In confronting such startling questions head-on, it put us in the hot seat of finding the answers for themselves. 

 

In a mad world, there’s nothing to do but dance the pain away. It’s a mantra sun-baked into the heart of Oliver Laxe’s enveloping Sirāt. As this purgatorial odyssey unfolds, it quickly becomes apparent that the sentiment is less of a coping mechanism and more of a grand act of submission. To the chaos of the world? To the indifference of the sublime? It’s not so clear, but after 115 techno-thumping minutes, Laxe’s film awakens us to the futility of our situation like few other experiences.

Its tale of a father searching for his raver daughter in the middle of the Moroccan Desert, alongside a caravan of veteran head-bobbers plunks us onto a grueling, symphonic path between paradise and hell. To enter Sirāt’s dominion is to enter a cinematic trance so engulfing that we become one with its oppressively gorgeous desertscape.

 

With English departments around the globe collectively forcing us to mull over The Bard’s tales to a mind-numbing degree, it’s hard to imagine anything drastically altering our perception of his ageless work. While the odd adaptation reinvigorates our appreciation of Shakespeare’s tragedies, they hardly redefine the way we approach them. Yet, Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet somehow peers into the liminal space between each word of The Bard’s lyrical prose, patiently and wordlessly extending its iconic iambic pentameter with a lush, naturalistic touch.

Following William Shakespeare and the tragedy that befalls his family, as seen through the perspective of his biophilic wife, Hamnet powerfully recontextualizes the thematic resonance of a literary giant’s text. In doing so, Zhao transforms The Bard’s ultimate tragedy into a quietly devastating treatise on art itself, as humanity’s only gateway into the metaphysical, eternal plane. You’ll never hear Hamlet’s famous soliloquy without bawling ever again.

 

The titular protagonist of Alex Russell’s Lurker, Matthew, wants nothing more than to wedge himself into the inner circle of a rising L.A. pop star. In a world where fame is only a viral interaction away, he festers with an existential urge to define his worth by his proximity to someone already embraced by the masses.

Though the character beats sound familiar—The King of Comedy’s Rupert Pupkin comes to mind—Lurker’s dissection of celebrity and transactional relationships is unnerving precisely because it resists exaggeration. Russell’s character study thrives on subtle gestures, quiet inflections that tap into the neuroses of our clout-chasing culture. Matthew’s menace comes from how ordinary he feels—a reflection of personalities that are more widespread than we think. In an age of parasocial bonds and curated feeds, Lurker doesn’t just capture the pathology of one character—it points the camera back at us.

 

To make a film about the “Summer of Covid” not only feels like a foolhardy task but a woefully premature one. At a time when many are still actively reeling from the ripples of that era, any attempt to dissect it feels thoroughly lacking in hindsight and perspective. Yet, out of the smoke of direct-to-video cash grabs, Ari Aster’s absurdist, slow-burning neo-Western strolls into the saloon as our first definitive look, tapping into our collective, tech-fuelled alienation like little else.

Set in May 2020, Eddington traces our slow regression into competing realities, where our glowing little screens pack a bigger punch than a cowboy’s six-shooter. As it barrels through histrionic confrontations and a final shootout that needs to be seen to be believed, it remains a deceptively complex film, illuminating how our endless consumption corrupts even the basest of human interactions. The town simply isn’t big enough for two doomscrollers.

 

In the pantheon of iconic movie characters, there’s a place reserved for the nervy, transcendent Marty Supreme. Set in the 50s and energetically soundtracked to the ’80s, Josh Safdie’s follow-up to Uncut Gems deliriously etches an enthralling, mercurial portrait of a dreamer so destructive he puts Icarus to shame. Timothée Chalamet, in a career-defining turn, stars as a gifted ping pong athlete with a god complex who teeters on the fine line between his infectious confidence and being a complete loser.

Though undeniably scummy, scheming, and self-obsessed, he manifests as a figure we hate to love, because to dream as big and wild as Marty is to live—he’s the American dream (or nightmare) made manifest. Armed with a sumptuous, anachronistic synth score from Daniel Lopatin (AKA Oneohtrix Point Never) and an oddball cast featuring Tyler the Creator, Abel Ferrara, and, weirdly, Kevin O’Leary, Marty Supreme survives a deeply romantic ode to fighting for your dreams, even if they don’t amount to much.