Best Films of 2025: #40–31

2025 is the year of the teeter-totter. We teeter on the first half of the decade, defined by death and the uninhibited embrace of a digital world, and totter on the second half, defined, so far, by malfeasance in all sectors of public life across the globe. The films on this list move that teeter-totter. Some kick up with hard-earned optimism, others push down with well-deserved cynicism; they all, one way or another, exert pressure on the crazy, awful, sometimes wonderful quagmire we’ve found ourselves in, and show us that cinema — even when backed into the far corner of the playground by Big Tech —still has plenty to offer. As we wade our way into 2026, may we take the offerings these movies share with us to heart.

In Happyend, a volatile mix of youthful exuberance and state violence forces a period of self-reckoning among Kou, Yuta, and their close-knit group of friends. For now, the sole source of liberation from the strictures of their own small lives is music. As with Sora’s first film, Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus, which captured the final public performance by the titular musician and actor — who happens to be Sora’s father — before his death, Happyend reveals a filmmaker guided by a primal belief in music not only as a form of self-expression, but a way to literally move through the world. In a near-future version of Tokyo on the brink of social upheaval and a 100-year earthquake, sneaking into underground DJ sets and mixing beats after-hours in their school’s retrofitted music room are Kou, Yuta, and their friends’ sole means of self-expression. Sora understands that markers of identification are just as exploitable in the hands of the state as they are liberating in the hands of young people. His considered but playful direction is always conscious of the blind spots in the frame, and provides a clarity of vision for the viewer. Like these teenagers, we come to realize anew that the tendrils of fascism are blind to more than we think; they’re susceptible to a united, rather than divided, front. And while there are times when the existential questions Sora foists upon Kou, Yuta, and his classmates strike the viewer as Activism 101, there’s an aching thrill in witnessing how these teenagers, for whom either nothing or everything matters, will answer them. — CHRIS CASSINGHAM

Oblique, offbeat, and curiously, increasingly entrancing, Matthew Rankin’s second feature, Universal Language, is one of the year’s most charming and intriguing features. In an alternate Canada where Persian is the dominant language, three stories of subtle desperation and profound dislocation converge: a government employee quits his job to return to a hometown he now finds deeply foreign; a tour guide leads a group on possibly the world’s most tedious trek; and two schoolgirls embark on a tiresome quest to complete the seemingly straightforward task of retrieving a stash of money inexplicably frozen in ice. It’s basically one elaborate joke, where Rankin fashions threads of contradictions and inconsistences, spins them together into a unified fabric, then leaves the wearer to figure out how (and why) he did it. It’s gently, cheekily provocative, but ultimately extremely compassionate in Rankin’s powerful sympathy for his characters, and his decision to form a unity between them not despite their differences but through them. And all its little quirks and questions reverberate long after viewing — Universal Language is a deceptive movie, apparently quaint and simple on first watch, then ever more rich and complex as it digests in the memory. And Rankin possesses both a terrifically sharp, droll sense of humor, and a superb feel for style and tone — fans of his debut, 2019’s Twentieth Century, will already know this. Still, it’s endlessly impressive to see him demonstrate these talents in a different mode here, yet to equal effect. — PADAÍ Ó MAOLCHALANN

The Zürcher twins’ animal trilogy, which reached its conclusion in 2025 with The Sparrow in the Chimney, can perhaps be best understood on narrative and spatial terms according to a loose interpretation of collision theory. If the overarching project is one of placing people (molecules) in pointedly intimate proximity and watching the resultant stress (kinetic energy) build until the films hum and vibrate with unspoken, even uncertain, but undeniably seismic feeling, then Sparrow represents the ultimate explosion of this building tension. Interestingly, then, though it at first moves in much the same visual manner as the previous two entries — specifically, through domestic corridors and cramped rooms, weaving around bodies, surveying individuals in both the unrelenting presence and temporary absence of others — Sparrow sees the Zürchers begin to at last zoom out: first, to the outdoors for barbecues and swimming; then, to dinner at a restaurant; next, to a nearby woodland cabin a short spitting distance away; and finally, rooting itself within a pulsing, pumping late-night party where the leaking interiority of The Strange Little Cat and The Girl and the Spider are made manifest and external in the form of throbbing EDM. Then, the inevitability: grand conflagration. What’s so thrilling, here at the conclusion of this trilogy, is the way the Zürchers understand this to be no conclusion at all. Nor, do they suggest, is this a beginning. What we see, what we’ve seen, is not the hellfire of an end or the prescribed burn of a renewal. The psychological and existential violence of family is cyclical, persistent, and too often dosed with gasoline. It’s durable, but also endurable. The fire all the time. — LUKE GORHAM

With 2014’s L’il Quinquin, Bruno Dumont inaugurated a new phase in his career, shifting away from the austere, neo-Bressonian surfaces of his earlier films, and effectively reworking the savage spectacle of L’Humanité (1999) into slapstick seriality. His latest, The Empire, an absurdist space opera focalized around the inhabitants of a small fishing village in northern France, culminates the improbable achievement of this recent run. On the surface a Star Wars spoof that follows a Manichean battle between the forces of light and darkness — complete with lightsabers! — the film extends Dumont’s enduring interest in the fact that such conflict, whatever else it may be, must be embodied, physical, corporeal. Thus, although The Empire operates on a cosmic scale, we see its movements refracted through the inhabitants of a small fishing village on the Opal Coast countryside, whom agents of light and darkness “possess” over the course of the film. And although there is some prophecy about an infant child, much of the film’s fascination simply derives from watching these extraterrestrial agents of good and evil having to navigate the bare and wondrous fact of having a body, with all the limitations but also the possibilities that such a condition implies. This is also to say that Dumont’s incorporation of CGI spectacle, so weightlessly deployed in Hollywood blockbuster cinema, only accentuates the hard, even brute physicality of his film-worlds, and his understanding that an extended sequence of a boat being winched onto a trailer can be just as, if not more, forceful than any cosmic vista. — LAWRENCE GARCIA

The whirling trill of suspicion and guilt — its anticipated excitements and inviting allure — so playfully fold atop one another, reflexive, here, of the perversions of intrigue. With this third installment in the Knives Out series, Rian Johnson decides to ardently protagonize his pastiche-encrusted narrativity, shifting away from the foggy leeriness of an ensemble-centered enigma, casting doubt now not through that puzzlebox we preempt, but the idiosyncratic faith and mistrust of a devout and idealistic priest. This shift in register reconfigures the thematic competency of these films, which prior to this, it could be argued, were determined via the flattening of cultural signifiers without much of an edifice to reflect upon them. Here, who the murderer is, as espoused many times across the runtime, isn’t as much the point, but what the murder reveals about the positionality of those close enough to the crime is where attention has shifted. Its most potent moments observe the patience of kindness and grief, set against the toiling machinations of a whodunit. This is accomplished not in a manner that patronizes the genre, but one that extrapolates from it a variety of methods that desperation is rendered: violence and confession become acts of catharsis, discerned for their interlaced qualities. Utilizing a pointed array of cinematic gestures, Wake Up Dead Man informs its diegesis through an unabashed transparency in its technical construction. On repeated instances, our characters will be interrupted by sculpted light, altering the trajectory of informational reveals, a move that recalls this subversion at the core of the film, where the articulated anguish of an individual becomes more incisive and telling of contextual clues than their plausible insight into the crime. Wake Up Dead Man becomes about the weaponization of ideology, then: the manner in which religion becomes wielded to provoke agendas, be them reactionary — an anger beset by the abstraction of our accelerated cultural ethos — or a progressive egalitarianism that sees everyone else through a kind of empathy, devised by the self in reconciliation with one’s pain. Where anyone was during the murder doesn’t matter here, and more important is why they’d be in the room in the first place; what might’ve brought them there and the repressions — a popular theme in religious storytelling — they all fight against. — ZACHARY GOLDKIND

“Beat” Takeshi Kitano is largely celebrated for his serious business, with heavyweight titles like Sonatine, Hana-bi, and the Outrage trilogy standing out as the more renowned works in his considerable filmography. But the iconic Japanese filmmaker is also an established funny man in his native country, and he reflexively demonstrates his knack for both modes stupendously in Broken Rage, his twentieth feature film. Running at just over an hour, the first half of Broken Rage follows Kitano as a stone-faced yakuza hitman who gets busted by the cops, forcing him to cut a better deal for himself by turning against his allies as an undercover police informant. It’s the kind of dramaturgically sound thing that Kitano can do in his sleep. But just when this story seemingly reaches its naturally tragic conclusion, Kitano flips the script entirely, restarting the same tale from the beginning, only this time everything’s played out as a broad slapstick comedy. Pratfalls, goofy sound effects, surrealistic sight gags — anything and everything is thrown at the screen as Kitano finds himself teeming with ZAZ-inspired energy, transforming Broken Rage into an exercise in style that proudly becomes a parody of his old self. While the first half of the film offers an intense Mexican standoff, the second half resolves matters through a hilariously rousing game of musical chairs. Broken Rage is one of the most uproarious films of the year, and it just goes to show that even as a septuagenarian, Kitano can still knock ’em dead with the best of them. — JAKE TROPILA

“Abandon yourself to the world. You will notice how generous it is to you.” These are the words a Japanese monk addresses to Edward, the protagonist of Grand Tour. Yet the proclamation resonates beyond the film’s narrative, inviting the viewer to surrender to an experience where past and present collapse into a single temporal plane. Time in Grand Tour is not simply revisited, but rendered unstable, reaffirming a motif that has long shaped Gomes’ cinema, most notably in Tabu (2012). Set in 1918, the movie follows Edward, who abruptly abandons his fiancée Molly and embarks on a journey across Southeast Asia, a route familiar within the colonial imagination of the period. Certain of her love, Molly decides to follow him, tracing his path across multiple countries. The film unfolds as an unconventional manhunt, an anti-Odyssey in two formally opposed movements. Edward’s journey is filmed in an almost documentary style, a Markeresque travelogue where the camera lingers on landscapes, from Vietnam to China, Thailand, Japan, while Edward recedes, reduced to a figure waltzing through the director’s visual and conceptual itinerary. This estrangement is reinforced by Gomes’ use of voiceover and archival footage, blending present-day images with scenes staged in the past. By contrast, Molly’s section is more intimate and emotionally grounded, emphasizing her endurance and desire, and culminating in a finale that reveals the film’s fictional construction. Grand Tour emerges, then, not only as one of the most visually accomplished films of recent years, but as a lucid synthesis of Gomes’ ongoing interrogation of time, movement, and cinematic form. — OMAR FRANINI

I remember saying of Zach Cregger’s solo debut Barbarian that it was a film that needed to be either scarier or sillier; his follow-up, Weapons, is thankfully both. Its polyvocal narrative, revolving around the disappearance of an entire classroom of children and the ensuing civic pile-on against their teacher, initially suggests a well-trodden vein of American metaphorror, and to be fair there are a few pretentious flourishes nudging in that direction — not least Josh Brolin’s nightmare vision of a giant AR-15 floating above his home. Yet even as Cregger plays with familiar flashpoints — addiction, police brutality, the parental rights movement, school shootings — he avoids the kind of tidy allegorical pinning-down that’s become the default since Get Out. It’s fitting that these anxieties circulate through the film without ever inviting a solution as such. In its broadest sense, Weapons is about our shared sense that something is profoundly wrong and our inability to agree on what, exactly, that is — as well as how badly, in amongst all this disagreement, we’ve let down the younger generation. More straightforwardly, though, it’s a fun, dumb mystery that trades a witch-hunt for a literal witch and has the decency to stay funny about it. As in Barbarian, Cregger gets tremendous mileage out of a bozo who doesn’t realize he’s in a horror movie — and this time he sticks the landing with a punchline that’s both hilarious and cathartic. — THEO ROLLASON

Two teenage girls, bonded for a summer, share a song: “A dream is pulling out my heart and spirit / And I’m scared to fall, I’m scared of death,” Anna von Hausswolff sings in “Stranger.” The song forms a motif in Sound of Falling, Mascha Schilinski’s haunting, enrapturing sophomore film. Death looms over four generations of women, all of whom live on the same German farm, and who are connected not only by their shared place of residence, but by acts of physical and psychological violence that reverberate in mysterious ways. Schilinski slips between the four timelines — during World War I, World War II, the 1980s, and sometime around the present day — not within a linear structure, but by unpredictable chains of relation and causation, reflected formally with surprising edits, angles, and framing. The overall effect is, somehow, both hypnagogic and jolting: Schilinski lulls the viewer with a dreamy rhythm, which is punctuated by regular acts of shocking misogyny and brutality. The film, though, is not merely an artfully composed montage of cruelty, but a piece which immerses the viewer in the lives of the women at its center with profound, intimate depth. One of the final scenes shows the macabre staging of a death portrait, with a photographer posing morose, living family members around their deceased relative. Schilinski’s remarkable film both echoes the form of the death portrait and transcends it. The women populating Sound of Falling are constantly constrained and pinioned, even after death; yet in moments of startling grace, they float away from their shackles into states of otherworldly freedom. — ROBERT STINNER

Sorry, Baby is primarily about the complicated aftermath of a sexual assault committed against a graduate student, Agnes (writer-director Victor) by her advisor (Louis Cancelmi). Most strikingly, Sorry, Baby is organized around a palpable absence. The assault is depicted only by a medium-long shot of the professor’s house and the passage of time after Agnes has gone inside. Then, in an excruciating long take, Agnes sits in the bathtub describing the assault to her best friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie). The film, then, is not about the assault so much as Agnes’ fluctuating trauma responses, how she is forced to adjust to her life being divided into a Before and an After. But this does not mean Agnes remains a victim. It speaks very precisely to what it means to be a survivor, and how Agnes, who from what we see has always been a bit awkward and analytical in her demeanor, has had her life forcibly shifted, like a lenticular photograph that reveals another aspect of things that to some extent was always there. In the final scene, Lydie and her wife Fran (E.R. Fightmaster) visit Agnes with their newborn, Jane. In a calm voice, Agnes speaks to Jane like she is a little adult, warning her that the world will hurt her. Agnes says she cannot prevent this, but she will always be there to listen and offer support. Agnes knows that someday, something will happen to Jane, after which she will never again experience her world in the same way. When that shift occurs, Agnes will be waiting. — MICHAEL SICINSKI