The Best Movies Of 2025: These Are The Top Films Of The Year

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Ignacio Weil

Entertainment - December 14th 2025, 17:00 GMT+1

Cropped the ugly stepsister — 15. The Ugly Stepsister

There’s a strange chill that runs through *The Ugly Stepsister* from the very first scene, as if the familiar fairytale framework is quietly collapsing under its own expectations. Emilie Blichfeldt reshapes Elvira’s journey into something that blends desperation with grotesque transformation, making the pursuit of beauty feel dangerous in a way that’s painfully believable. Whenever the film leans into gory body horror, it does so not for shock but to expose the emotional bruises hiding beneath the surface. What unsettles most is how easily the story slips from fantasy into something that mirrors real-world pressures, leaving you unsure whether to pity Elvira or fear what she’s becoming. Even the magical touches feel tainted, like someone dimmed the glow but left the shadows intact. By the end, the idea of a “fairy godmother” feels laughably out of reach. *The Ugly Stepsister* sticks around precisely because it refuses to grant the comfort the genre usually promises. | © Zentropa

Cropped Sinners 2025 — 14. Sinners

What makes *Sinners* so absorbing is the way it folds gothic horror into a family saga without ever letting one overpower the other. Ryan Coogler sets the tone early — the Mississippi Delta of 1932 feels heavy, humid, almost alive, and when the supernatural elements creep in, they feel like they’ve been lurking there forever. Michael B. Jordan’s dual role gives the film a fractured emotional core, as though the story itself is wrestling with two halves of the same wound. The vampiric mythology isn’t treated as spectacle; it’s a metaphor that stains every interaction, especially as the brothers confront their shared history. Music winds through the film like a pulse, grounding the bloodshed in a world shaped by blues and buried pain. There’s a sense of inevitability, too — that the violence was written before the brothers ever returned home. *Sinners* earns its title not by pointing fingers but by exploring how people carry the sins they inherit and the ones they choose. | © Proximity Media

Cropped the phoenician scheme 2025 — 13. The Phoenician Scheme

The charm of *The Phoenician Scheme* lies in how confidently it plays with the espionage genre while letting Wes Anderson’s quirks run absolutely wild. Every character moves through the story as if they’re aware they’re inside a perfectly arranged puzzle box, yet they bicker, plot, and panic with disarming sincerity. The stacked cast gives the plot a playful looseness, even as betrayals pile up and motives tangle into a beautifully absurd mess. Anderson’s symmetrical precision becomes part of the joke – spies tearing through a world so organized it barely has room for chaos. But chaos finds its way in anyway, dripping through the cracks with dry humor and unexpected stakes. The color palette softens the sharper moments, only for the script to cut back in with a line that lands harder than expected. By the time the “scheme” reveals itself, you realize the film’s real trick is how seamlessly it blends silliness with sharp commentary. | © Indian Paintbrush

Cropped nouvelle vague 2025 — 12. Nouvelle Vague

Instead of borrowing nostalgia, *Nouvelle Vague* behaves like it’s discovering it in real time, letting the black-and-white cinematography feel more like a choice of mood than a stylistic homage. Richard Linklater builds scenes that drift with an easy, conversational rhythm, giving the actors room to breathe, fumble, and collide in ways that feel almost accidental. The French dialogue adds another layer of softness, as if the film were whispering rather than performing. It’s the quiet interactions – the offhand remarks, the unplanned detours – that give *Nouvelle Vague* its pulse, reminding you how expressive small moments can be when they’re not rushing toward a climax. Even the framing feels intimate, pulling you closer instead of putting the past on a pedestal. The film doesn’t recreate the French New Wave; it lets its spirit echo in unexpected corners. That lingering sensation is what makes *Nouvelle Vague* so easy to fall into and so hard to step out of. | © ARP Productions

If I Had Legs Id Kick You cropped processed by imagy — 11. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

There’s a restless edge to *If I Had Legs I’d Kick You* that never quite settles, and that tension becomes one of its strongest tools. Mary Bronstein guides the story with a kind of quiet volatility, letting Rose Byrne’s performance simmer until the smallest shift lands with surprising weight. Characters don’t announce their turmoil; they leak it slowly, through awkward pauses, unfinished thoughts, and impulsive decisions that sting more than they shock. The film holds those moments without judgment, allowing the messiness of healing to unfold with unnerving clarity. Sundance audiences connected with that vulnerability – the feeling that the movie isn’t trying to teach or redeem, only observe. Humor slips in sideways, brittle and dry, grounding the heaviness without offering relief. When the title finally clicks into place emotionally, it hits like an inside joke shared in the middle of a breakdown. *If I Had Legs I’d Kick You* earns its impact through the honesty it refuses to smooth over. | © A24

Weapons 2025 cropped processed by imagy — 10. Weapons

There’s a heavy weight to *Weapons* from the moment the screen goes dark — the idea that seventeen children vanish at exactly 2:17 AM from the same small town class haunts long before the first whisper of supernatural horror. The film (written and directed by Zach Cregger) weaves together the perspectives of terrified parents, a distraught teacher, and the lone child who didn’t disappear, giving the mystery a palpable, living-through-it feel. As the plot unravels, ordinary suburban spaces – classrooms, homes, gas stations – warp into places of dread; the familiar becomes uncanny. Instead of cheap scares, momentum builds slowly: discomfort, suspicion, the sense that reality has cracked and no one knows what’s true anymore. The ensemble cast – from Josh Brolin to Julia Garner – grounds the horror in grief, confusion and utter disbelief, making the stakes feel real, not just cinematic. *Weapons* doesn’t offer clear answers; it thrives on questions that linger, long after the credits fade. | © New Line Cinema

9. Bugonia

There’s a sneaky kind of madness at the center of *Bugonia* – a wild, paranoid energy that keeps you off-balance. In this remake of the 2003 cult-classic, director Yorgos Lanthimos teams with a script by Will Tracy to turn a conspiracy-laden kidnapping into a satire that’s as unsettling as it is darkly comic. When the two obsessive conspiracists decide the CEO they're kidnapping is an alien hell-bent on destroying Earth, the film tilts from thriller into distorted morality play. Emma Stone delivers a chilling take on corporate power in crisis – calm, composed, and terrifying in her conviction. What pulls you in isn’t just the absurdity, but the way the film uses that absurdity to ask what we believe and why – about truth, authority, and panic. As the tension ratchets up, you find yourself questioning which side of the screen is real. *Bugonia* doesn’t scream its commentary; it whispers it – slowly letting dread seep in. | © Focus Features

Cropped sentimental value — 8. Sentimental Value

There’s something quietly devastating in *Sentimental Value* — a sadness that doesn’t scream, but lingers like a soft echo long after the story ends. When Joachim Trier and co-writer Eskil Vogt unveiled the film at 2025’s Cannes Film Festival, it got a nineteen-minute standing ovation – and it’s easy to see why. The characters are flawed, human, fragile – captured in moments of longing, hesitation, regret. There’s no grand tragedy, no big climax; there’s just life, heavy and messy, filled with choices made and left unmade. It draws you in not with spectacle, but with the intimacy of small decisions that echo. The performances – layered and subtle – let you sense the weight of memory, guilt, and hope without spelling them out. *Sentimental Value* doesn’t promise closure. It promises resonance – and it delivers. | © Mer Film

The Secret Agent 2025 cropped processed by imagy — 7. The Secret Agent

Watching *The Secret Agent* means leaning into a quiet, trembling tension: the kind born when the walls of trust crack and history looms heavy in personal choices. Under the direction of Kleber Mendonça Filho, the film resists grand gestures – instead it commits to the small, uneasy details of survival under oppressive circumstances. The protagonist moves through fear with a battered dignity, navigating betrayals and hopes that feel less like movie tropes and more like real human attempts to cling to dignity. The setting – tense, uncertain, shadowed – feels alive; the danger feels ongoing, not resolved. No easy morality here. What lingers is the sense that, sometimes, survival isn’t about victory – it’s about endurance. *The Secret Agent* doesn’t wrap up neatly, because life rarely does. | © CinemaScópio

One Battle After Another cropped processed by imagy — 6. One Battle After Another

Chaos and redemption collide in *One Battle After Another*, a film that throws its characters – and the audience – into a storm of secrets, regrets and half-spoken loyalties. With an ensemble cast carrying decades of baggage, every reunion, every whispered conversation pulses with tension: this isn’t a heist film, not really. It’s more like families in pieces trying to find each other again in the rubble. Trust fractures repeatedly, and when it does, it leaves scars you almost feel. The director’s hand doesn’t try to soothe things over: instead, the camera lingers just long enough to make the fear, desperation, and longing taste real. When the dust settles – if it ever does – you’re left with the heavy idea that fights don’t always end cleanly, and sometimes the hardest battles are the ones where the enemy is memory itself. *One Battle After Another* doesn’t make peace with itself. But it makes sure you don’t forget it. | © Warner Bros. Pictures

Peter Hujars Day cropped processed by imagy — 5. Peter Hujar’s Day

There’s a quiet magic in *Peter Hujar’s Day* – a feeling that the everyday can still carry meaning when viewed through the lens of memory and intimacy. Director Ira Sachs builds the film around a single afternoon: in 1974, photographer Peter Hujar recounts his previous day to journalist Linda Rosenkrantz, and that conversation becomes the movie. The result is far from dramatic melodrama; instead it’s a delicate portrait of creative uncertainty, friendship, longing, and the haunting beauty of routine. What you end up watching feels like a whispered conversation from another era – smoky apartments, creative restlessness, quiet humor, and art-born anxieties. Performances deliver that subtle tension – Hujar’s gentle insecurity, Rosenkrantz’s curious calm – and Sachs frames it all with reverence, letting silences speak louder than any dramatic twist. By the end, you feel you’ve lived a fragment of someone’s life: incomplete, modest, but rich in humanity. *Peter Hujar’s Day* doesn’t shout its significance; it invites you to notice it. | © Janus Films

Eddington cropped processed by imagy — 4. Eddington

Watching *Eddington* is like watching old wounds set to an itchy soundtrack — a Western reimagined for a broken, paranoid time. In the hands of Ari Aster, the film casts a dusty, tense gaze on a 2020 New Mexico shaken by pandemic-era distrust: a sheriff and a mayor lock horns, and the neighborhood cracks begin to widen. There’s violence, yes, but also a creeping dread that seeps in slowly – the kind that isn’t scared of guns, but of what happens when people stop trusting one another. Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal carry that tension with quiet rage, both believable and monstrous in their conviction. Cinematography by Darius Khondji gives the landscape a wide-open emptiness that mirrors the characters’ isolation. *Eddington* doesn’t offer easy answers. It stays sharp, uncomfortable, and unsparing – a modern western that feels more like a warning than a myth. | © A24

No Other Choice cropped processed by imagy — 3. No Other Choice

There’s a bleak humor in *No Other Choice* – the kind that makes you laugh, then immediately feel ashamed for laughing. In this 2025 film by Park Chan-wook, desperation isn’t cinematic flair: it’s the bleak realism of someone clinging to stability. The protagonist, a paper-industry technician laid off after decades of loyalty, gradually swallows his moral line, step by painful step. As the plan to remove his competition unfolds, the ordinary backdrop – wait-lists, job interviews, family dinners – becomes a battleground for survival. The film doesn’t sensationalize violence or evil. It frames it as a logical – if twisted – response to hopelessness. What’s terrifying is how human the downfall feels. *No Other Choice* is cruel, sharp, and terrifyingly plausible: a thriller you watch not for catharsis but for uncomfortable recognition. | © CJ Entertainment

Cropped Sirat — 2. Sirāt

*Sirāt* hits like a silent scream under a blistering sun – a desert journey that swallows hope and spits out reckoning. Óliver Laxe directs this 2025 film as part spiritual odyssey, part tragic search, sending a father across Moroccan dunes in pursuit of a daughter lost amid chaos. The vastness of the desert isn’t just a backdrop: it becomes a weighing presence, relentless and indifferent, mirroring grief, longing, and despair. The soundtrack, the shifting light, the isolation – all of it colludes to make you feel how small, how exposed, how fragile human will can be. Yet through that emptiness, *Sirāt* refuses despair: it squeezes hope from survival, from memory, from the stubborn act of not forgetting. It’s a film that guts you slowly, leaving after-shocks long after you scratch at the sand. | © Los Desertores Films AIE

It Was Just an Accident cropped processed by imagy — 1. It Was Just an Accident

Watching *It Was Just an Accident* feels like standing just outside a door that should never have opened – the kind that, once cracked, reveals too much. In his 2025 film, Jafar Panahi crafts a darkly poetic, morally disorienting thriller: a seemingly banal car accident spirals into a reckoning with past injustices, memory, vengeance, and collective trauma. As former political prisoners question whether a man they encounter might be their torturer, the film unspools in creeping dread, shifting tones between absurdist humor and gut-punch sorrow. The cross-cultural urgency – Iranian, French, Luxembourg coproduction – gives the story both local weight and universal dread. Panahi filmed under threat, without official permission, and that rawness bleeds into the work: what feels dangerous on screen feels dangerous in real life. *It Was Just an Accident* doesn’t deliver catharsis. It demands reckoning – from the characters, from the audience, from history itself. | © Les Films Pelléas

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Every year claims it’s “the year of cinema,” but 2025 actually brought receipts—plus a few popcorn stains we’re choosing to see as artistic flair. Between surprise indie gems and blockbuster spectacles that rattled theater seats in all the right ways, it’s been a surprisingly fun ride. And yes, we’re ranking them, because someone had to make the tough choices while everyone else was arguing about endings. If your heart is currently set on small-screen storytelling instead, we’ve also rounded up The Best TV Shows of 2025 for the fellow binge-addicts.

As the dust settles and the memes fade (well, some of them), the films that truly earned their spot keep shining through. These are the titles people couldn’t stop talking about, revisiting, or secretly gatekeeping until their friends found them anyway. So here’s a look at the year’s standout movies—the ones that made 2025 feel a little larger, a little stranger, and definitely more entertaining.