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Hideo Kojima Just Announced His Favorite Movies of 2025

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Ignacio Weil

Entertainment - January 12th 2026, 22:00 GMT+1

Cropped Conclave — Conclave

Smoke, silence, and soft-spoken menace do most of the heavy lifting here, and it works because the movie treats power like something you can smell in a room. The premise is deceptively straightforward: a pope dies, the doors close, and the Vatican goes into election mode while rival camps maneuver behind polite ceremony. What makes *Conclave* feel gripping is how it turns tiny choices – who gets a private word, who controls a document, who “accidentally” delays a vote – into real suspense. It’s easy to imagine that methodical, rule-bound pressure being the hook for someone like Kojima, who’s always been interested in systems that can crush a person while looking perfectly orderly. | © FilmNation Entertainment

Twilight of the Warriors Walled In G cropped processed by imagy — Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In

There’s a physicality to this one that doesn’t come only from the fights – it’s in the way the environment presses in, like the walls are part of the choreography. The story follows Chan Lok-kwan, a troubled young man who stumbles into the Kowloon Walled City while fleeing gang trouble, and ends up discovering a harsh kind of protection inside the maze. *Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In* treats the Walled City as a living organism: cramped corridors, rooftop paths, pockets of community, and the constant sense that danger can appear from any direction. That obsession with lived-in spaces and their unwritten rules is exactly the kind of world-building that tends to catch Kojima’s eye, even when he doesn’t spell out a reason. | © Media Asia Films

Cropped The Girl with the Needle — Girl with the Needle

Not many period dramas make desperation feel this immediate, like you’re watching someone bargain with fate in real time. Set in Copenhagen in 1919, the film trails Karoline as she’s pushed to the edge – unemployed, abandoned, pregnant – and then pulled into an “adoption” arrangement that initially looks like a lifeline. *The Girl with the Needle* keeps tightening the moral vise: the further Karoline steps into Dagmar’s orbit, the more the story starts to feel like a trap disguised as help. This is one of the rare picks where praise has been loud and clear from Kojima in public – he’s called it a stunning achievement across craft and themes – which makes sense given how controlled the tone is, and how the dread comes from plausibility rather than shock. | © Nordisk Film Denmark

Cropped Loves Lies Bleeding — Love Lies Bleeding

Some romances don’t bloom – they detonate, and you can feel the fuse burning from the moment the two leads lock eyes. Rose Glass sets *Love Lies Bleeding* in 1989 and lets the heat between a lonely gym manager and an ambitious bodybuilder carry the early scenes before everything curdles into noirish danger. The plot doesn’t just “go dark”; it keeps changing shape as family crime, obsession, and violence close in, with the couple’s desire turning into both shelter and liability. That refusal to stay in one lane – part love story, part thriller, part feverish nightmare – explains why it would end up in anyone’s favorites, including Kojima’s, even without a neat quote attached to it. | © A24

Quand vient lautomne cropped processed by imagy — Quand vient l’automne (When Fall Is Coming)

A simple lunch becomes a fault line, and what follows feels less like a twisty thriller than a slow reveal of who people really are when they’re trying to stay “good.” François Ozon plants *Quand vient l’automne (When Fall Is Coming)* in a Burgundy village where two longtime friends enjoy a quiet retirement – until a family visit goes wrong after poisonous mushrooms enter the picture. The fallout doesn’t explode; it seeps into everything: a strained mother-daughter dynamic, old resentments resurfacing, and the uneasy arrival of a young man whose presence changes the emotional weather of the house. Ozon’s gift is making the everyday feel faintly sinister without ever turning the characters into monsters, and that kind of tonal knife-edge is the sort of thing that tends to linger with viewers like Kojima. | © FOZ

Cropped Sinners 2025 — Sinners

Grit, sweat, and blues-soaked menace are doing a lot of work here, and the movie leans into that mood like it knows exactly what it’s selling. Set in 1930s Mississippi, *Sinners* follows twin brothers (both played by Michael B. Jordan) who come back home trying to build something of their own – a juke joint dream that’s supposed to be about music and second chances. Then the supernatural arrives, and the story pivots into a vampire nightmare that still feels rooted in the era’s heat, hunger, and danger. If this ended up on Kojima’s watch-order favorites, it tracks: it’s stylized, mythic, and built around a “homecoming” that turns out to be a trap. | © Proximity Media

Cropped heretic 2024 — Heretic

A polite conversation becomes a cage match, and the film is mean enough to let the words do the damage. Two young Mormon missionaries knock on the wrong door, and what starts as a seemingly awkward visit slides into a psychological game controlled by an eccentric man who knows exactly how to push, bait, and corner them. *Heretic* works because it doesn’t rush to the knife – it toys with belief, fear, and logic first, letting Hugh Grant weaponize charm until it curdles into something ugly. The scares come less from jump moments than from the dawning realization that the house itself is designed to keep them guessing. | © Beck/Woods

Cropped Sirat — Sirāt

Desert wind, speaker bass, and the strange vulnerability of searching for someone who may not want to be found – this one plays like an odyssey with sand in its teeth. The plot of *Sirāt* follows a father and son moving through southern Morocco alongside a group of ravers while looking for a missing daughter, and it’s built to feel sensory as much as narrative: bodies in motion, music as compass, vast landscapes that swallow certainty. The premise sounds straightforward until it starts behaving like a trance – part road movie, part spiritual quest, part cultural collision. It’s the kind of story that can sit in your head afterward because it treats the search itself as the point, not just the outcome. | © El Deseo

The shadows edge — The Shadow’s Edge

Old-school tracking versus modern surveillance is the kind of conflict that can feel like pure genre fuel, and this movie squeezes it hard. In Macau, a crew of professional thieves pulls off a slick heist by hacking surveillance, forcing police to turn to a retired expert who still trusts human instincts more than algorithms. *The Shadow’s Edge* builds its tension from the chase mechanics – watchers watching watchers – while keeping the stakes personal through grudges, loyalty tests, and a criminal mastermind who seems permanently one step ahead. Jackie Chan’s presence gives it that veteran gravitas, but the hook is the cat-and-mouse logic: every camera angle is a clue and a threat at the same time. | © iQIYI Pictures

Sentimental value cropped processed by imagy — Sentimental Value

Family history can feel like an inheritance you never asked for, and this film treats it like an object you keep tripping over in your own home. *Sentimental Value* centers on two sisters navigating the gravitational pull of their filmmaker father, with art and memory tangled together in a way that’s equal parts affectionate and bruising. Joachim Trier’s dramas tend to locate the heartbreak in small, recognizable moments – conversations that slip sideways, old wounds reactivated by the wrong sentence – and this one is set up to explore how creativity can both connect and damage a family. It’s not a story about grand revelations so much as the slow, uneasy accounting of what people owe each other. | © Mer Film

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Hideo Kojima just did what he does best: sent film fans spiraling with a fresh batch of recommendations. The Death Stranding creator shared his favorite movies of 2025, and the list is already sparking the usual debates – what made the cut, what got left out, and what it says about his taste right now.

One quick caveat before anyone turns it into a scoreboard: these films are presented in the order he watched them, not as a ranking or a measure of how much he loved each one. And yes – sharp-eyed readers will notice a few titles are technically 2024 releases, but Kojima clearly wasn’t sweating the calendar when he hit “post.”

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Hideo Kojima just did what he does best: sent film fans spiraling with a fresh batch of recommendations. The Death Stranding creator shared his favorite movies of 2025, and the list is already sparking the usual debates – what made the cut, what got left out, and what it says about his taste right now.

One quick caveat before anyone turns it into a scoreboard: these films are presented in the order he watched them, not as a ranking or a measure of how much he loved each one. And yes – sharp-eyed readers will notice a few titles are technically 2024 releases, but Kojima clearly wasn’t sweating the calendar when he hit “post.”