The Best Films of 2025

Sinners 

A morally provocative exploration of guilt and redemption, in the skin of a Vampire film. It uses metaphors of race, music, and cultural theft to challenge viewers to confront who profits from another’s pain and who is allowed to write and rewrite cultural narratives. 

Lynnette Lounsbury

One Battle After Another

Though David Crosby appears nowhere on the soundtrack for Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, the spirit and title of his 1971 album If I Could Only Remember My Name pair well with the narrative. Identity verification is the chief motif of Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, as potent in the protracted comedic business of phone conversations that go nowhere as it is in the tense, climactic scenario of proving one’s familial commitment.

Shaggy and sprawling, the action of One Battle After Another concerns the limits of idealism, the risks and blind spots of activism, and the inability to control what the next generation does with the jam their parents put them in. Anderson seems to be saying that lucidity or closure might eventually come, but only after several bumps in the road.

Tommy Britt

It Was Just an Accident

Ja’far Panahi’s film, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, begins with a late-night breakdown on a rural road. Mechanic Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) recognises the squeak of a prosthetic leg, a tell-tale rasp that seems to expose his former torturer, Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi). What follows is an odyssey across Tehran, gathering (in Iranian New Wave fashion) an ensemble of non-professional actors playing former political prisoners — a photographer, a bride- and groom-to-be, a volatile friend — all crammed into a run-down van.  Avoiding gratuitous spectacle, and refusing the obvious, Panahi stages a searching, uneasy debate rather than definitive ‘payback’. Part revenge thriller, part group therapy session, Accident is not without the agile, absurdist humour of Panahi’s finest work, all while prodding the nature and limitations of retribution, and against whom it should be directed. When the familiar squeak returns in the finale's breath-stopping one-take, these questions remain unresolved. Vahid (and those watching) are left with the understanding that what befalls him is shaped as much by the system’s cruelties as by circumstance. Violent conflict will prevail unless something, no matter how fragile, interrupts its path.

Nicole Ngo

A House of Dynamite

Kathryn Bigelow is the undisputed Maestra of tense thrillers about characters (usually men) who risk death as a way of life. Whether such characters are in this position for sport, for money, or as a vocation or expression of duty, the potential for lives to end—the contingency of death—is what enlivens the narratives. The Hurt Locker was a turning point for Bigelow’s political curiosity, memorably ending with its protagonist seeking meaning in deploying for another round of a war whose purpose was unclear.

A House of Dynamite advances and intensifies all these aspects for the post-Global War on Terror, post-pandemic world of video conferences, bad connections, and worse intel. Reacting to “a single, unattributed missile…launched at the United States” is the premise of the film. But the meaning is found in the structure, in which protective redundancies are overwhelmed by uncertainty, bureaucracy, and system vulnerabilities. As the action repeats itself time and again, the certainty of doom regarding nuclear weapons is the last thematic question left standing; precisely the conversation Bigelow and writer Noah Oppenheim intended to provoke.

Tommy Britt

Eddington

Ari Aster is one of the most challenging, original, and uncompromising filmmakers to have come out of Hollywood in the last decade. Eddington is so much more than a film about COVID - it philosophises, structures, models, and performs the unique intersection of the loss of all stable footing we’d ever had as individuals and social citizens. A defining moment in contemporary American cinema.

Bruce Isaacs

The Story of Souleymane

Over three days and nights, Boris Lojkine's The Story of Souleymane follows a Guinean immigrant’s precarious pursuit of survival, in the entrails of France’s pitiless gig-economy and its insuperable asylum bureaucracy. As Souleymane Sangaré, Abou Sangare (in his debut role) draws partly on his own experience as a residence-seeker in France; his mesmerising performance — lithe, instinctive, yet notably gentle — gives the film its frenetic pulse. Renting a food-delivery account, Souleymane forfeits most of his pay to keep working, cycling through an unromantic Paris each night in search of shelter. At the same time, he rehearses a tale of political persecution, coached by fixer Barry (Alpha Oumar Sow) to satisfy a system hungry for a plausible back-story. In the final asylum-request interview, something finally gives. Can the truth set Souleymane free? We are invited to bask in it, even as it leaves us, Souleymane and his case officer decidedly wary of the machinations that will ultimately decide his fate. 

Nicole Ngo

Flow 

A visually poetic reflection on the currents of human existence (without a human in sight), using movement and rhythm as metaphors for the interconnectedness of life. Winner of numerous awards including the Best Animated Feature Oscar.

Lynnette Lounsbury

Kpop Demon Hunters 

As we all know, there is social tendency to dismiss pop culture phenomena as base or unworthy. But I don’t think we can dismiss K-Pop Demon Hunters because we could not avoid it (or indeed avoid attempting to hit THAT note ourselves). It was everywhere, tapping into a social-mediatised world and bringing the existing K-pop phenomenon of performance and spectacle into a glossy, playful animated film that hides a surprisingly coherent thesis about women navigating systems that profit from their image.

Sabina Rahman

A cultural breakout moment and the number #1 streamed film of 2025. A subversive fusion of pop culture and mythic horror that critiques the machinery of fame while celebrating collective empowerment. Also, the soundtrack had a firm hold on most of the planet for most of the year.

Lynnette Lounsbury

Woman of the Hour 

Anna Kendrick's tense, formally restrained film exposed how power operates through social coercion, how public image and how women are perceived is literally linked to survival. I made these choices on a whim at the end of our final meeting of the year but in writing this little wrap up, it seems pretty clear that my year is dominated by ideas about women performing roles imposed on them, a snapshot of a year where pop and cinema both leaned into a feminist self-reflexivity, which is a great note to begin the next year with as we head into a symposium on Sisterhood. 

Sabina Rahman

Kathleen is Here 

Screened at Sydney's Irish Film Festival in 2025, Kathleen Is Here is Eva Birthistle’s tense domestic drama set in the closed ecosystem of a small semi-rural town. Fresh out of foster care, Kathleen becomes a volatile catalyst, setting fragile routines on edge and forcing long-buried tensions to the surface. Hazel Doupe is mesmerizing as the troubled teenager, capturing both defiance and vulnerability with disarming precision. There's no sensationalisation here, it can be difficult viewing, but the film’s pacing, restraint and emotional honesty leave the audience with a rare, hard-won sense of empathy for those that struggle.

Daragh Henchy

A Complete Unknown / Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere 

Two biopics, two iconic musicians, two very different career arcs: one on the ascendant, the other in crisis. After Todd Haynes’s inspired dismemberment of the Dylan mythos (I’m Not There, 2007), A Complete Unknown's James Mangold delivers what is really a two-hour fan-service. Yet the film oversteps these self-imposed limitations, because it (unwittingly) poses a vexing question: what if Dylan’s electric turn was a mistake?

The solo, acoustic numbers, shaded with harmonica, are transfixing, vaguely ominous, and almost incidentally anthemic. Timothée Chalamet, as Dylan, has the careworn voice and enough beat-derived swagger to breathe life into even the most prosaic sequences. In dramatic terms, it means that Chalamet’s Dylan has electrified the folk scene without ever strapping on a Fender Stratocaster. The arrival of “Like a Rolling Stone”, over the closing credits, seems more of an afterthought than a deliverance.

The biographical subject of Scott Cooper's Deliver Me from Nowhere, Bruce Springsteen, was once hailed as a (not the) ‘new Dylan’. Eight years later, he underwent a more fundamental plight of identity, wrestling with the demons of fame whilst warding off depression. Consequently, where A Complete Unknown is an ensemble piece – Dylan and Joan Baez, and Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie, and Johnny Cash, and ‘Sylvie Russo’ (i.e., Suze Rotolo) – Deliver Me is virtually a two-hander, a series of encounters between Jeremy Allen White (Springsteen) and Jeremy Strong (Jon Landau, his manager / producer / mentor / protector) that increasingly resemble therapy sessions.

As a biopic, A Complete Unknown is the better of the two, with its loving recreations of Greenwich Village (shot in Jersey City!), its savvy, astute casting, and Chalamet’s spooky simulation of the Bob-voice. But Deliver Me is the superior film, because it cuts so much deeper. With almost more despond than a biopic like this can bear, it easily transcends its putative premise about the making of Nebraska, the album that channels and intensifies all of Bruce’s inner darkness. As a moving, haunting lament for a man who’s lost his way, it confounds the music biopic template just as decisively as I’m Not There did, almost twenty years ago.   

Paul Sheehan