It already feels like it’s been five years since last year with everything that’s been going on in the world, but the year 2025 in film is still very much front of mind. And what a year it was. Sure, Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair (both Vol.1 and Vol.2 as one film) trolled today’s sorry state of cinema as the best film released in theatres. But even as movies continue their steady decline in the 21st century, 2025 has done a lot of heavy lifting to try and flatten that downward curve.

One clear indication of how great of a year it’s been is the list of films that didn’t make the cut for my Top 20. Titles like Bugonia, Die My Love, Is This Thing On? No Other Choice, Blue Moon, A Useful Ghost and The Mastermind are all great, some even excellent, and, in some other year, they could’ve all made it in. Even big studio movies made for the most general audiences excelled. Superman was surprisingly great - a film I saw twice in theatres because it was so fun, embraces its comic book character and nature whole heartedly, and is more politically courageous than any film nominated for an Oscar. James Cameron’s third Avatar film was also an absolute treat to experience in IMAX 3D, and would’ve made the cut if it weren’t for the formulaic story.

What also strengthens my belief in the goodness of the year in film is that, on a personal note, I was able to properly attend and cover the London Film Festival. This made a huge difference in the quantity and quality of candidates for my list. Of the 30 films I saw at the festival, 12 made the cut.

So, in a year filled with films about grief, parenting, politics and cinema - a year where spirituality took on multiple dimensions, depression wore many masks, and the crossroads between adolescence and adulthood collided with growing up despite all efforts to the contrary - what were the best of the lot? Read on to find out.

20. 28 Years Later

Visceral, mercurial and filthy in ways that’ll make you want to take a decontamination shower, Danny Boyle’s return to his signature world plagued by zombies-on-meth is a primal scream that has echoed in my nightmares all year long.

It stretches the usual boundaries of conventional horror with the most out-of-the-box batshit contagious score of the year by Young Fathers, a gripping mother-son emotional core anchored by coming-of-age energy, Oscar-worthy editing, arresting cinematography, and an electric Ralph Fiennes who delivers one of the best supporting performances of the year. Bring on The Bone Temple!

19. Rose of Nevada

Mark Jenkin’s maritime-traveling 16MM experiment, about two boatmen who board the mysterious Rose of Nevada only to go back to the past, feels like it was pulled out of a vat of sludge and scraped off with seaweed. Whatever power it conveys, it’s the kind that can only be transferred through the medium of film. Its analogue texture makes it the grimiest film of the year, so if you’re after pretty aesthetics, you won’t find it here but the result is really something quite mesmeric.

The discomfort from unconventional means leads to comfort from metaphysical ends. Our relationship with the past and its relationship with us has rarely been confronted in such an audacious way.

18. Roofman

Derek Cianfrance doesn’t flex his directorial muscles to the limits he’s reached before with films like Place Beyond the Pines (2012) and Blue Valentine (2010), but there are still levels to Roofman that make it more profound than meets the eye.

The cast is remarkable - especially Channing Tatum and Kirsten Dunst, who should be attending all of these awards shows as nominees right now - and the bizarre true story of Jeffrey Manchester builds up to an incredibly moving climax. Very entertaining and funny, and packed with stuff that makes the human condition such a wondrous, beautiful, oddity.

17. The Ice Tower

Get through the challenging first act of Lucile Hadžihalilović’s beguiling film and you’ll discover dark and mysterious corners of cinema that few directors have the talent to tap into. The story follows orphan-on-the-run Jeanne (Clara Pacini) who takes shelter in a film set of The Snow Queen and gets a little too close to its main star.

There is an indisputably Lynchian shiver that runs throughout this brooding coming-of-age movie that twists its cues from The Brothers Grimm but is really about obsession, voyeurism, infatuation and power. The raw power that the worst kinds of monsters in human clothing desire and believe they’re owed. Never meet your heroes has rarely felt so chilling an adage. Features Marion Cotillard’s most freighting - and fantastic - performance in years.

16. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

The pangs of single motherhood with all its horrors and joys (mostly horrors here) are tactfully, thrillingly depicted by director Mary Bronstein who has so much confidence in Rose Byrne that she gives her all the heavy lifting. And boy does Byrne lift. You’ve rarely seen acting range flexed like this, from darkly funny to painfully tragic and everything in between. She spars with Timothée Chalamet for best performance of 2025.

The beauty is that the script, editing, supporting cast and direction all sync up perfectly with Byrne to create a truly masterful experience of what it feels like, down to the core, of being a working parent in a stress-addled world.

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15. Miroirs No. 3

The liminal space in Christian Petzold’s mellow drama is like a hoarder’s attic — filled with a lifetime of pain and emotion. There’s a lot that’s left unsaid here, but thanks to the sophisticated direction and the measured performances, Miroirs No. 3 creates a sense of uncertainty and suspense that had me glued from start to finish. And with depression and post-personal tragedy resilience as the core themes here, it’s a real magic trick to pull that off.

In a year filled with films dealing with trauma and grief, Petzold’s is the most understated. As the title suggests, the power music has to unlock the emotional mystery boxes of our minds is also handled beautifully here. Listen out for Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons’ ‘The Night’ as one of the most effective uses of music in 2025.

14. Two Prosecutors

I’ve developed an allergy for the anti-Russian sentiment that has the entire UK under a spell, and when you’ve seen one Sergei Loznitsa film (be it documentary or fiction) you’ve seen them all in terms of his personal feelings about Russia under Putin.

Luckily, Two Prosecutors is an example of a brilliantly told story about ideals suffocated by the cold hands of totalitarianism that doesn’t make any overt attempts at drawing direct parallels to the modern world. It also gets my pick as the best cast film of the year, where every face is like a painted portrait of a different shade of life under tyranny.

13. Resurrection

The film that demands a second viewing more than any other on this list, Resurrection is not recommended for tired eyes. A near 3-hour science fiction epic that’s filled with history, Buddhist theology and a very literal love of cinema, where a woman enters the visions of a creature who still has the capacity to dream in a future where humanity has lost this ability. Through his multiple resurrections, she aims to uncover fragmented truths of the past. Wild, right?

In large enough parts, Resurrection left me in breathless awe of Bi Gan’s imagination, creativity and poetic talents as a filmmaker. His love of cinema, during the age of streamers and fledgling box office numbers, burns brightly and contagiously, as the sum of all the parts is one big magnificent ode to the wonder and magic of the moving image and sound. The final long take (a Gan signature), and the final image, is beyond astonishing. Embodiment trumps cognition, with a touch of the sublime, in Resurrection.

12. Eddington

As with the phantasmagorical, psychoanalytical nightmare Beau is Afraid (2023), Ari Aster proves that he’s ahead of the game with his latest. Compared to the more critically adored One Battle After Another - and the comparisons are bountiful - Eddington captures the contemporary political climate in a much more nuanced, sophisticated and multivalent way.

It also juggles a multitude of tones and genres while still feeling like a cohesive whole with a focused point about the absurdity of humanity we all collectively experienced during the pandemic. Needless to say the ensemble nails it, none more so than Joaquin Phoenix as the fumbling neurotic town sheriff, who reminds us why he’s one of our greats.

11. Sinners

I’m not a fan of the subject of race, but there’s no avoiding it when you’re talking about a movie set in the Mississippi Delta of the 1930s, directed by a black director. The brilliance of Sinners is that it’s such a fresh, entertaining and musical take on the topic. A period gangster film about the blues that pulls a From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) and becomes a vampire horror set in a single location? Yes please.

Ryan Coogler trips up on a few cliches, but all is forgiven with one of the year’s most spine-tingling transcendental sequences that truly transport. I’ve been rocking Ludwig Göransson’s score all year on Spotify, and the fact that it’s one of the year’s biggest box office success stories, R-rated and all, guarantees its legendary status. In most recent news, Sinners has made Oscar history with 16 nominations (more than any other movie ever) which has predictably set the internet on fire. But that’s a topic for another article.

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10. Silent Friend

It’s a film about a tree, which is a tough sell for audiences in 2025. But those with open minds could be lucky and feel as transformed as I did after Ildikó Enyedi’s meditative botanical odyssey. Silent Friend feels like a balm for the soul, a scarce resource these days, and the three different time periods and stories, seep in, slowly but surely, gripping you in ways that will make you feel genuine emotions about the natural world, and the central tree in particular.

It’s not so much the conventional elements that elevate Silent Friend to the realms of cinematic greatness — performance, cinematography etc. — but the direction and vision, and the sense of exploration and discovery. Magnificent in a multitude of surprising ways.

9. Black Bag

This is the best thing Steven Soderbergh has directed since The Knick (2015), so it’s been a minute. With not a single frame or line of dialogue wasted, Black Bag moves through its gripping story of espionage and double-cross with panther-like stealth and precision.

Led by a remarkable ensemble, with Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett perfectly paired as the killer couple at the centre of it all, we watch as betrayal and loyalty tango in suspense that ratchets up towards a brilliant conclusion. There’s not much under the surface here but what’s on it is so captivating and touches upon so many tantalizing themes, that the taut 1hr 30m breezes by in a flash. Films like this are much needed these days - intelligent, apolitical, grown-up entertainment.

8. The Testament of Ann Lee

If you’d have told me last year that I’d have a musical about the Shaker movement starring Amanda Seyfried and written by the same team behind the bloated Brutalist, in my Top 10, I would’ve thought you insane. Fast forward to my jaw dropping, my heart stopping and my mind reeling more than once while being completely under the spell of one of the year’s weirdest, most spiritual, films.

Seyfried fully commits to this role and shifts her career into a whole new level as a result, but she’s just one piece of the enchanting puzzle. The story of how the Shaker movement was born in the impoverished neighborhoods of 1800s Manchester and transported to America, on the wings of motherhood and faith, is ludicrously captivating. And that music, those harmonies, the dancing? Authentically mystical.

7. One Battle After Another

In many ways, this is the movie of 2025, with one of the highest Metascores around and on its way to win big at the Oscars, One Battle reaffirms Paul Thomas Anderson as probably the greatest American filmmaker working today. It’s one of the most engrossing and entertaining films of the year, preformed to perfection. As an action genre film, it’s damn near flawless.

Where it falters, and why it’s more PTA-lite compared to his previous masterpieces, is the canvas used for the story. It’s a bit like fine wine served in a plastic cup: a film with a beautiful message about family and legacy, told against a backdrop of safe, clichéd, intellectually inert politics (White supremacy! Kids in cages! Black power!) which feels unfortunately performative for someone who has built a reputation on a streak of principled masterpieces that go against the grain. One Battle is very much in line with the grain.

6. Weapons

As I said in my article on the genre, we are in a golden age of horror and Weapons is the film that crystallized that for me in the clearest way. The cocktail of shock, terror, suspense and pitch black humor that Zach Cregger conjures up here delivered one of the biggest dopamine hits to my system in 2025.

Amy Madigan’s instantly-iconic Aunt Gladys who haunts everyone’s dreams is malevolence personified, a terrifying villain unlike any other. That she doesn’t overshadow the entire film is a testament to the rest of the outstanding cast, Cregger’s masterful story-building told through a multiple POV structure, and one of the best screenplays of the year.

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5. It Was Just An Accident

Jafar Panahi has been sentenced to one year in prison by the Iranian court, for alleged “propaganda against the state”, while he’s been touring Europe and the US with his latest film. He’s already been in Iranian jail and banned from making films but he just keeps going, and his latest - a riff on the concept from Roman Polanski’s Death and the Maiden (1994) - might be his crowning achievement.

The premise of a group of ex-political activists kidnapping a man they’re pretty sure was their torturer is magnificently layered, deceptively entertaining and psychologically rich. Viewing and thinking about the film through the lens of Panahi’s real life struggles with the Iranian regime gives it that extra meta kick, right between the blurry line that divides life and art. It Was Just An Accident also has the kind of ending that the absolute cinema meme was made for.

4. Marty Supreme

Just like One Battle After Another isn’t a political movie, Marty Supreme isn’t a sports movie. It’s hard to pin down what Josh Safdie’s crazy movie is exactly, outside of obviously being a character study of a young, cocky, selfish, ping pong wizard with a big dream. One that’s portrayed by soon-to-be-Oscar-winner Timothée Chalamet in ways you cannot prepare for.

This shapeshifting quality of the film is part of its allure; its set in the 1950s but anachronistic in cadence and music, it’s a gangster film, a dog film, a reckoning with parenthood, an odyssey of a hustler all set in post-WW2 1950s Jewish neighborhood of New York while avoiding all the cliched traps lesser filmmakers would fall into. The two and a half hour running time whizzes past in what is one of the most purely entertaining films of the year.

3. The Secret Agent

There hasn’t been a shortage of big political movies or movies where politics plays a big role this year. Four have already featured on my list here. But it’s this fifth one that gets my vote as the best of the lot; Kleber Mendonça Filho’s scintillating neo-noir is imperceptibly rich and features the year’s most delectable cornucopia of characters.

Wagner Moura delivers the second greatest male performance of the year as an academic researcher, sheltered by anarcho-communists and on the run from sleazy assassins, dodging dirty cops and trying to hold it all together for his son and in-laws in the sun soaked asphalt jungle of 1970s Brazil under a brutal military dictatorship. An entire subplot is dedicated to the wonder and magic of movies and the theatre experience, and the final act builds up to quiet move filled with so much symbolism and meaning, it’s nothing short of breathtaking.

2. Train Dreams

We are in a different realm altogether with Clint Bentley’s monumentally moving spiritual search for some kind of order in the chaos of life. Terence Malick is my favorite director, and Train Dreams leans heavily on Malickian techniques with the magic hour nature cinematography, and a camera that feels present rather than imposing, capturing the trajectory of an ordinary man’s quietly extraordinary life as a silent observer. Some see that as the film’s weakness, I see it as strength (although yes, I am biased). Besides, it has much more of its adapted source material, Denis Johnson’s novella, and much less of Malick’s religious overtones, so the whole affair strikes me more as inspiration than imitation.

Train Dreams is the most stoic film of the year, examining a life that’s worth living even when faced with the most unspeakable and arbitrary tragedy. The passage of time, the advancing world around us, the mysteries of life and the connection to all things man, animal and the natural world are all the big ideas swirling in this gentle hug of a film. My cup runneth over.

1. Sentimental Value

The margins in my top 5 of 2025 are razor thin, so it was no easy task picking number one. That makes it pretty tough to describe what Joachim Trier’s film does to earn that spot. All I know is it took all of 2 minutes into the film for me to know, deep in my bones, that Sentimental Value hits the bullseye of the bullseye of my wheelhouse. Anchored by the year’s best screenplay, and four seismic performances by Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas and Elle Fanning, everything Trier explores in this movie hits hard, with perfect pitch and tempo.

We have a multi-generational story of how a house became a home, an aging father’s attempt to reconnect with his traumatized and depressed daughter, two sisters as each other’s rocks, a film-within-a-film (what the French wonderfully call mise-en-abyme) as therapy, the filmmaking process in the age of Netflix, and the psychology behind performing a part. Herein lies a complete universe packaged into something so impossibly intimate and personal, with none of the outside world’s petty distractions (politics, religion, culture wars, etc.) allowed to enter and disrupt from what really matters. Family and home and one’s sense of place in them is at the core here, and there are few more meaningful subjects to explore in this life.

If Die Hard is not a Christmas movie because the story and plot would unfold in the same way regardless of the holiday, then Marty Supreme is not a ping pong movie. It’s a character study disguised as a sports movie. Deeper still, under the sports mask lies a psychological odyssey into the depths of the human soul, in search for the stuff that gives people drive and self-belief. It’s Taxi Driver meets Uncut Gems in how it depicts a dirty, corrupt, sleazy New York — embodied most spectacularly by the great Abel Ferrara’s dangerous criminal who only loves his dog — as we follow a protagonist who relentlessly pursues his goal, regardless of how much he lies and cheats, and who he hurts, along the way.

Marty is a difficult person to love. There are glimpses of a heart during his Japan-bound odyssey, as one hustle after another gets more intense and critical, but it’s mostly hard shell. This is a man driven by an unholy belief in himself, with animalistic tenacity that works like a primal survival instinct. And like most narcissists, he’s incredibly charismatic and funny, but he tends to see people as either obstacles or stepping stones along his path to glory. Marty Mauser’s arc is less nihilistic than some of his other screen counterparts, but the big question is: how late is it by the time life’s emotional freight train steamrolls him? Is it too late to care? Are people like Marty Mauser redeemable? And what does it say about those of us who find his dogged persistence so contagious and captivating, even when some of his actions are repellent in so many ways? Like, what did his poor mother ever do to him to deserve such treatment?!

Marty Supreme is the Danny DeVito “So anyway, I started blasting” meme of movies. It’s some of the most liberated and freewheeling direction, dialogue, editing and acting of 2025, with Chalamet (who is also credited as a producer) spring-boarding even further into superstardom. He is an acting wunderkind, and Marty is his career-best work following a string of career-defining roles. He chews every scene with the feral compulsion of a starved artist whose very life depends on this role, and it’s spellbinding to watch. If there was any doubt he’s a generational talent, Marty Supreme puts it to rest. He is so larger-than-life that it’s easy to forget the rest of the ensemble, but they are all excellent - from A’zion to even Tyler the Creator who plays fellow table tennis hustler Wally.

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Something else I really respect about Safdie’s approach in Marty Supreme is the resistance of leaning on the overdone movie trope of the post-WW2 Jewish struggle as a crutch. The film had many opportunities to do so, as Marty’s Star of David necklace works a subtle reminder of this part of his identity throughout the film, but his attitude to the Second World War is non-existent aside from one Auschwitz joke, and Safdie doesn’t let any of the many supporting Jewish characters play the obvious card either. On the contrary, the film features one concentration camp flashback, when ping pong rival-turned-mate Béla Kletzki (Géza Röhrig of Son of Saul fame, adding a pinch of extra meta for the moment) recounts his story to Rockwell, but it opts for grotesque and uncomfortably funny over pitiful and austere which instantly makes it an all-time original WW2 flashback. It’s refreshing to see this somewhat blasé, subversive and courageous attitude towards such a sacred Hollywood topic in 2025.

All of this makes Marty Supreme one of the most refreshing experiences at the moves this year. It’s a story loosely inspired by real life table tennis pro Marty Reisman and his autobiography, but it feels original as hell — similar to how One Battle After Another is a loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon yet still feels wholly unique. Chalamet’s unbridled ferocity is the propane to Josh Safdie’s fiery and dynamic direction, and the result is cinematic combustion. Paced to perfection, filled with unpredictable twists and turns, and performed with real audacity, Marty Supreme lives up to the hype as one of the most entertaining films of the year, and ends up unveiling a deceptively touching reflection on parenthood.

American cinema is not what it used to be. The 2020s have not been kind, and one could even argue that it’s all been one slow, steady downward tumble since the early 2010s. Shouldering the burden of keeping the pulse of American cinema beating in creative, deep, and original ways is much too much for one Paul Thomas Anderson to handle. And as good as One Battle After Another is, it’s still pretty mid compared to his earlier masterpieces.

So Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams arrives to the station, like a breath of fresh pinewood air. A much needed oxidant for polluted cinephile lungs, heavy with the wheeze of toxic fumes from the politicised junk of the Hollywood factory. It’s been over a month since I’ve seen it and not a day has gone by that I haven’t thought of it in some shape or form.

Netflix has reached a new high with Train Dreams. This is Capital-C Cinema not lowercase-c content, the most prestigious art film from the streaming giant to date. The appetite is satiated with a myriad of flavourful riches. Adolpho Veloso’s gorgeous magic hour cinematography of the deep American landscape; the reverent reflections from Arn Peoples (William H. Macy) as he puts our place in this world into soulful perspective; the moments of deep love between Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) and his wife Gladys (Felicity Jones) and daughter Kate, the centre of his tiny, inconspicuous universe; the wolf-dogs that keep Robert sane in times of dire need; the conversation Robert has with Claire Thompson (Kerry Condon) about how even the smallest of creatures serve some imperceptible yet no less meaningful purpose on Earth.

Train Dreams feels like some kind of tiny miracle of a film. The ensemble is terrific, led by a never-better Edgerton, with lived-in performances that support the story without needing to dominate it. Even more impressive than the actors is the passage of time that Clint Bentley manages to evoke. It’s only his second feature film as a director, and yet the transitions from scene to scene, weaved through the warm embrace of storytelling in the form of Will Patton’s comforting cadence in voice over, makes one think it’s directed by the steady hand of a veteran who’s experienced all of life’s tragedies and wonders. For that is the essence of the film: the multitudes of life’s ebbs and flows.

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Set along the Idaho panhandle, in the northwestern US region, with Los Angeles over 1,000 kilometres to the south, New York and Washington DC over 3,000 kilometres to the east, Train Dreams feels like it’s in a different American universe from a different American dimension. A million miles away from the cesspools of concrete, callous politics and tribal ideologies that split humans into bits.

Nature is very much a lead character here, which makes the comparisons to Terrence Malick accurate, and most welcome. Train Dreams is more temporal and Malick’s stuff is more spiritual, though Bentley doesn’t completely shy away from God and the metaphysical, since these centripetal forces all move towards the great mystery of life, which is - as the magnificent ending indicates - the core of the film.

The geographical setting is just as important to the film’s potency as its historical one. The 1910s and 1920s bridged the two centuries through the powerful invention of the locomotive train, the great symbolic herald of the fast-approaching technological age of interconnected networks. Robert Grainer works as a logger and throughout his life, though barely travelling, he bears witness to the advancing science of machines, trying to make sense of it all as a simple man whose only vocation required brawn over brains.

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The atmosphere of this particular point in the film’s space and time creates a wondrous resonance. This environment, this era, and this character form a trifecta that arrive as a much needed tonic for those of us who appreciate living in an age of highly advanced technology, but can’t seem to shake off the feeling of a great detachment within. Train Dreams is the cinematic equivalent of escaping to the country. The answer for that restless feeling city dwellers get when they want to just “get away from it all”.

The film has such a calming and meditative affect on the spirit, in fact, that a 22-minute Immersive Audio Journey was created as a “Sleep Story” for the popular meditation app Calm. A brilliant marketing move because it directly speaks to the film as a balm for the restless mind. Complimenting this is its philosophical contours, which are decidedly stoic in nature. So much so that you can close your eyes and point a finger at any random passage in Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, and the dots to Train Dreams connect themselves...

Keep in mind how fast things pass by and are gone — those that are now, and those to come. Existence flows past us like a river: the “what” is in constant flux, the “why” has a thousand variations. Nothing is stable, not even what’s right here. The infinity of past and future gapes before us — a chasm whose depths we cannot see.

Book 5, Paragraph 23

Or,

Anyone with a feeling for nature — a deeper sensitivity — will find it all gives pleasure. Even what seems inadvertent. He’ll find the jaws of live animals as beautiful as painted ones or sculptures. He’ll look calmly at the distinct beauty of old age in men, women, and at the loveliness of children. And other things like that will call out to him constantly — things unnoticed by others. Things seen only by those at home with Nature and its works.

Book 3, Paragraph 2

Impossible not to think of characters like Arn Peoples or Robert Grainier’s quiet moments in the forest or on the train, when reading passages like that.

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You can’t get lower to the earth than the extraordinarily ordinary Robert Grainier - the kind of man authors don’t write books about, certainly not the kind of book directors adapt into Netflix movies. That is of course exactly what makes him, and the film, so special. I purposefully avoided getting into the specifics of plot or what kind of tragedies and wonders befall Grainier here. I’d also urge readers to steer clear from the teasers and trailers, which give away much of what deserves to be experienced with fresh eyes. This is the kind of picture whose surprises and ambiguities deserve preservation, so that the film happens to you as life happens to Grainier - flowing past like a river.

None of this would be possible without Denis Johnson’s original novella. I bought it soon after I saw Train Dreams at LFF, and I finished reading it - on the train, as it happens - in the same amount of time it takes to watch the movie. It’s a beguiling piece of literature, more violent and shocking than the film in a few ways, but carrying the exact same unpretentious profundity as the film.

In closing, I’ll leave you with one of my favourite passages. A taste of the primal beauty and wonder that, for those inclined, can stir something in the soul.

Grainier felt sure this dog was got of a wolf, but it never even whimpered in reply when the packs in the distance, some as far away as the Selkirks on the British Columbia side, sang at dusk. The creature needed to be taught its nature, Grainier felt. One evening he got down beside it and howled. The little pup only sat on its rump with an inch of pink tongue jutting stupidly from its closed mouth. “You’re not growing in the direction of your own nature, which is to howl when the others do,” he told the mongrel. He stood up straight himself and howled long and sorrowfully over the gorge, and over the low quiet river he could hardly see across this close to nightfall... Nothing from the pup. But often, thereafter, when Grainier heard the wolves at dusk, he laid his head back and howled for all he was worth, because it did him good. It flushed out something heavy that tended to collect in his heart, and after an evening’s program with his choir of British Columbian wolves he felt warm and buoyant.

“Train Dreams” (2012, Granta Books) — Denis Johnson

Train Dreams is streaming on Netflix from November 21, 2025.

Earlier this year, while walking out of a theatre and into the midnight darkness of New York City, it dawned on me that horror fans have been eating well. So well, in fact, that it must mean we’re somewhere at or near the peak of a new golden age of the genre.

Nothing will likely touch the definitive, auteur-driven golden era of horror that was the 70s and early 80s. I mean, we’re talking The Exorcist (1973), Don’t Look Now (1973), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Jaws (1975), Halloween (1975), Alien (1979), The Shining (1980), The Thing (1982). As high as that bar is, it feels like we’re in new, unchartered, psychologically terrifying territory of the so-called elevated or arthouse horror.

Perhaps this new era doesn’t externalise the fears as well as those iconic 70s and 80s films, but it does tap into something bending inward in all of us in a far more visceral way. The best of them are cracked mirrors in some shape or form, reflecting our deepest, darkest anxieties, insecurities and traumas. Our own moral and mental demons, wrestling in perpetual struggle, come to life through the power of story.

Asking when an age starts is like asking how long a piece of string is, but hindsight is 20/20 and mine tells me this one begins in 2014. To celebrate this modern golden age of horror, in honour of Halloween, I’ve selected one film from each year since that beginning, up to and including 2025, that best reflect our collective psyche in this modern, anxiety-riddled, age.

Of course, 12 films are only 12 films and cannot, by themselves, define an entire era. That’s why there are honourable mentions of films that are worthy of being in the conversation, and add some shine to the gold.

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1. The Babadook (2014) - dir. Jennifer Kent

Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook gets first dibs. I still recall the waves it made when it premiered, 11 years ago. A masterpiece horror film that deserved a Best Picture nomination and a Best Actress win for Essie Davies, who delivers one of the genre’s greatest ever performances as Amelia, a widow crushed by the weight of being a single mom and dealing with a difficult kid (Noah Wiseman, also excellent).

Themes of depression, unprocessed loss and motherhood are beautifully baked into an otherwise frightening film, with blood-curdling moments of the creature that lurks in the shadows. The Babadook is a modern classic that stands the test of time as the genesis of this new golden age of artistic horror.

Honourable Horrors from 2014: It Follows, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

2. The Witch (2015) - dir. Robert Eggers

Robert Eggers announced himself to the world with The Witch, a horror film that uses the myth of religious hysteria to explore the fears people have of God, of nature and even womanhood itself. Set on the edge of a puritan wilderness, the film follows a family exiled from their colony and undone by their own faith. Their crops rot, their baby vanishes, and paranoia starts to slowly creep in. Anya Taylor-Joy, in her breakout role, is extraordinary as Thomasin, the teenage girl blamed for it all and declared a witch.

Eggers became an instant director-to-watch with the way he obsessively recreated 17th-century New England. His use of elemental cinema, the silence, the candlelight, the repressed atmosphere, all build up towards an unsettling sense of liberation.

Honourable Horrors from 2015: Crimson Peak, The Gift, The Visit

3. The Wailing (2016) - dir. Na Hong-jin

Religion, folklore, disease and paranoia are the centrifugal forces in Na Hong-jin’s The Wailing, a masterpiece that’s like a juggernaut of cinematic delights. What starts off as a small-town murder mystery, with a police officer investigating a string of bizarre deaths in a remote Korean village, ends as a full-blown spiritual war zone, filled with superstition, shamanism, and biblical dread. The horror sinks its teeth in slowly and, before you know it, you’re already way passed the first circle of hell. Jun Kunimura’s nameless Japanese man has haunted me ever since I saw this film when it premiered at Cannes.

It’s the ambiguity that makes The Wailing so unnerving; there has rarely been a film that uses morbid curiosity to its advantage as well as this one.

Honourable Horrors from 2016: Raw, Don’t Breathe, Train to Busan, Terrifier

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4. mother! (2017) - dir. Darren Aronofsky

Some films were destined to be misunderstood upon their initial release, only to thrive on re-examination as they mould their way into cult status. Darren Aronofsky’s mother! - an allegorical nightmare about the corruption of Mother Nature by a narcissistic Artist/God, with a brilliant cast led by a towering Jennifer Lawrence - is a claustrophobic fever dream that will leave you gasping for air by the end.

It’s experimental, it’s visionary, and it’s certifiably fucking insane. It also holds up really well as a mirror to our anxieties and polluting ways, better than the critical darling Get Out, which cleverly uses racism to tap into the Zeitgeist but isn’t as cinematically bold and impressive.

Honourable Horrors from 2017: Get Out, It Comes At Night, It, The Killing of a Sacred Deer

5. Hereditary (2018) - dir. Ari Aster

Ari Aster is, like Eggers, an essential new voice for the golden age of horror. His debut Hereditary is, scream for scream, the scariest film on this list and maybe even the scariest of the century. It’s disguised as a family drama, but very quickly descends into shock, horror and pagan madness, with the domestic space - family home, the dinner table, bonds between mother and child and wife and husband - all twisted into a demonic knot. A tragic scene that happens fairly early in the film, let’s call it a road accident, is one of the most heart-stopping shocking moments I’ve ever seen on film.

Toni Collette gives a career-defining performance as Annie Graham (another running theme in this golden age: insanely strong lead female performances) a woman who resists, and ultimately succumbs, to madness. Aster directs his feature film like a veteran who’s been at it for years; redefining fright and tapping into the psychology of trauma and guilt unlike anything before it or after.

Honourable Horrors from 2018: A Quiet Place, Mandy, Upgrade, The Nightingale, The House That Jack Built

6. Doctor Sleep (2019) - dir. Mike Flanagan

2019 was one of the best years for the genre in the past decade, with Aster, Eggers and Jordan Peele all releasing excellent golden-age-worthy horror films, but it’s Mike Flanagan’s overlooked Doctor Sleep that gets the honours here. More precisely, the 3-hour Director’s Cut version of this direct sequel to The Shining, which flies by as a labor of love that doubles as faithful to the spirit of its horror-master Stephen King’s source material, and spine-tingling homage to Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece. It hits all the right notes, from True Blood-style camp to genuine, psychologically deep chills. I’m convinced that the bathroom lady is still one of the most frighting images every put on screen.

Ewan McGregor is perfect as the adult, traumatised Danny Torrence, as is Rebecca Ferguson as the film’s charismatic villanelle, but it’s the Overlook Hotel that ends up being the MVP. Again.

Honourable Horrors from 2019: Midsommar, Us, The Lighthouse, Saint Maud

7. The Night House (2020) dir. David Bruckner

Grief is the canvass used to paint the horror that unfolds, from the point of view of Beth (a transcendent Rebecca Hall) who is looking for answers about her dead husband. David Bruckner’s The Night House is a ghost story unlike any other, with an ingenious approach to how interior space can be used to create the sense of another presence. What makes the whole affair especially unsettling is Beth’s unravelling realisation that she didn’t really know the one person she thought she knew the most. Piecing her husband’s secret life after his death, wading through nightmares and some seriously bone-chilling moments that live in the in-between world of reality and dark imagination, she confronts the void of the afterlife head on.

Incidentally, for a film that premiered at Sundance in 2020, and was delayed for a whole year due to COVID, The Night House also perfectly captures the psychological milieu of early pandemic uncertainty and isolation.

Honourable Horrors from 2020: Possessor, The Dark and the Wicked, His House, The Wolf of Snow Hollow

8. The Innocents (2021) dir. Eskil Vogt

Children are a big theme in this new golden age of horror, and the biggest in Eskil Vogt’s The Innocents, a film about the horrors that lurk when adults aren’t around. Vogt brings his dramatic writing sensibilities from his collaborations with Joachim Trier (Sentimental Value) to full effect here, and puts the kids centre stage in a chilling tale about that prepubescent gap where impulse and reason get blurred, and where empathy and morality still hasn’t quite developed in little boys as it has in little girls. All wrapped around a brilliant twist on the otherwise grossly overused concept of superpowers.

Ben (Sam Ashraf) is one of the scariest villains on this list and he’s only 9, while little Ida’s (Rakel Lenora Petersen Fløttum) character arc is a visceral rollercoaster for any parent. Titane shockingly won the Palme D’Or in 2021, marking a new milestone for the genre, but that film is a pretentious mess that will only go down as one of the worst Cannes winners of all time. The Innocents, on the other hand, is timeless.

Honourable Horrors from 2021: Lamb, The Medium, The Black Phone, Malignant

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9. Speak No Evil (2022) dir. Christian Tafdrup

The horrors of complacency, of “going with the flow”, of ignoring blood-red flags, of parental powerlessness. That is the meat of Christian Tafdrup’s Speak No Evil, a film that gradually crawls under your skin, burrows deep into your bone marrow, and in its final 15 minutes, squeezes the essence out of your sharking core. A horror film so good, Hollywood instantly remade it, releasing its own version a few years later. Stick with the original on this one.

What starts off as an innocent invitation to a country house turns into an unspeakable nightmare. It’s impossible not to feel for Bjorn (Morten Burian) and Louise (Sidsel Siem Koch), as the nice Danish couple try to navigate their way through the unpleasantness of their strange Dutch hosts Patrick (Fedja van Huêt) and Karin (Karina Smulders). Tafdrup turns the banalities of the everyday into ingredients of one of the most unsettling horrors I have ever seen.

Honourable Horrors from 2022: Barbarian, Smile, Talk To Me, Enys Men, X, Pearl, Crimes of the Future, Terrifier 2

10. Late Night with the Devil (2023) dir. Cameron and Colin Cairnes

Cameron and Colin Cairnes’ Late Night with the Devil is where The Exorcist meets Network (1976), an unlikely pairing that’s as inventive in execution as it is on paper. A deliciously clever blend of found footage and talk show reality TV, the film playfully toys with nostalgia as it recalls that defining age of horror, the 1970s. Desperate TV host Jack Delroy (a superb David Dastmalchian) takes desperate measures for his late-night broadcast, and welcomes the literal devil onto the stage, in the form of an innocent, but possessed, young girl. The warm hues and lights of broadcast TV create the most demented setting for the evil that emerges, which is scary as fuck all the way through to the absolutely brutal ending.

The film works as both a satire about the media industry’s obsession with sensationalism (how topical!) and a meta examination of our own inability to unglue ourselves from the screen, the soul sucker that possesses us all.

Honourable Horrors from 2023: Infinity Pool, Scream VI, Evil Dead Rise, Beau is Afraid,

11. Longlegs (2024)

Osgood Perkins' Longlegs is the stuff nightmares are made of, giving Hereditary a run for its money in the scare department. It features on my Best-of-2024 list at No. 11 and, together with the previous entry and the next one, solidified my opinion that we are witnessing an absolute tear in terms of elevated horror films.

As a spiritual cousin to The Wailing, this also begins as a detective story that quickly spirals into a biblical abyss of evil, where the mystery keeps tearing down all logical barriers and keeps you guessing until the final frames. Nicolas Cage got his make up done in Hell for this role, he is unrecognisable and so unfathomably chilling as the killer being chased by Maika Monroe’s FBI agent.

Perkins joins the ranks of Eggers, Aster and Kent as a fresh new voice for the horror genre that demands our attention. Longlegs redefines existential dread, as all mental faculties of an analytical mind are torn to shreds.

Honourable Horrors from 2024: The Substance, Nosferatu, Oddity, Smile 2, Terrifier 3

12. Weapons (2025)

Zach Cregger’s Weapons, the follow up to his brilliant Barbarian which was very close to making the cut for 2022, cements the idea that we are experiencing the peak of a new golden age of elevated horror. As I walked out of the theatre, still shaking from a mixture of ecstasy and fright after what I had just witnessed, I wondered if I had ever seen anything like this. A story told from multiple perspectives, balancing dark humour, jump-scare horror and psychological nightmare in such a sophisticated, compelling way. It features incredible performances from the entire ensemble but especially Amy Madigan, whose career has been deservedly reignited thanks to her Oscar-worthy portrayal of Aunt Gladys.

Not to mention the story itself - a whole classroom of kids mysteriously disappearing in the middle of the night, leaving the powerless adults to figure it all out by themselves. The film taps into a real 21st century fear of our society today - what happens when our kids get weaponised by some foreign evil entity we can’t even begin to understand.

The cherry on the cake is that Weapons is one of the biggest financial success stories of 2025. A film that has grossed $268 million on a $38 million budget at a time when so many other big movies led by A-list stars are struggling in theatres. The other big financial success story of the year? Ryan Coogler’s excellent Sinners, another horror film.

Here’s hoping this golden age of horror keeps on shining.

Honourable Horrors from 2025: Bring Her Back, Sinners, Good Boy, The Black Phone 2

The way Christian Petzold uses audience curiosity as the building blocks for his story is remarkable. From the moment we meet Laura, alone by the riverbanks, we get a sense that she’s not okay. She goes back to her flat and her boyfriend Jakob (Philip Froissant) who seems more annoyed than concerned. As they take their trip, which is for Jakob, our attention and thoughts remain firmly focussed on Laura. What is going on with her?

Before the car accident, Linda and Jakob pass by Betty’s house, and there is one of those serendipitous moments that rarely happen in life. Laura and Betty lock eyes and an invisible energy courses through the screen. Petzold films this moment, and one just like it as Linda and Jakob pass by Betty’s house again on their way back, beautifully, unassumingly, and yet full of the kind of magic that stops time. We just know these two characters are destined to change each other’s lives in some way. But, how? Who is this woman?

The story unfolds from there, after a bizarre car accident with a shockingly gruesome element. Laura and Betty are kindred spirits, but once Max and Richard get into the picture, it quickly becomes clear that Betty is compensating for something while Laura is simply trying to get back to her old self.

It’s a rare feat for a film to keep the audience teetering on the edge of their seats in such an effortless way, just through the quiet interactions between four gentle souls. Broken dishwashers, cooking and eating dinner, playing the piano, listening to music at a garage, getting a bicycle fixed, painting the fence; this is what makes up the bulk of the action in Miroirs No. 3 and yet, it contains multitudes. There is so much buried pain here, that as it gets slowly unearthed, we are fully invested in these characters, as if they were our relatives or neighbours.

It’s one of the most engrossing films I saw at the London Film Festival, and as the scenes keep coming back to me in flashes, I keep marvelling at how Petzold can write a script so imperceptibly layered. The performances, especially from Beer and Auer, are essential glue and both shine in their own, subtle, ways. Not every curiosity will be satisfied, not every question will be answered, and you’ll never guess how that feeling of strange, loving satisfaction in the film’s climactic scene will be conjured up.

Miroirs No. 3 is an absolute marvel of a movie, one of the most sophisticated films I’ve seen in a long time.

Sergei Loznitsa, famous for documentaries like Maidan (2014) and Donbas (2018), returns to what I think he does best: fiction. Or, more appropriately, “fiction”. Two Prosecutors is based on a novella by Georgi Demidov, an engineer-turned-author who served 14 years in the Kolyma labor camps after his arrest in 1938. The tale we watch unfold through the young, naive and innocent point-of-view of Prosecutor Kornev, is directly inspired by Demidov’s first hand experience and stories told to him by fellow inmates.

As the premise suggests, this is no barrel of laughs. It’s a bleak, barren, bureaucratic terrain of totalitarianism, painted in monochrome brown and shades of grey, expressed in portraits of anaesthetized faces. Kornev’s Kafkaesque descent ends up being a circular hell, and it’s best tracked by noticing how gradually more tired he looks throughout his quest, on account of spending most of his time waiting to be seen by whoever is in charge.

The people Kornev interacts with along his infernal journey - the prison governor (Vytautas Kaniusonis), his duty assistant (Andris Keiss), the prisoner Stepniak (Aleksandr Filippenko), the Procurator General Vyshinsky (Anatoliy Beliy) among others - tell the story of how a State crushes its own from various angles. The casting is as close to perfection as you can possible get on film; Loznitsa really has a rare gift for finding exactly the right faces he needs.

I remember being blown away by Loznitsa’s previous feature film before this one, A Gentle Creature (2017), but I would have to watch it again to determine how it stacks up against Two Prosecutors. Right now, it feels like I haven’t seen a better depiction of the dread, the hopelessness, and the Sisyphean struggle of citizens who are still guided by working moral compasses. Through the sheer power of dialogue and performance, Loznitsa has crafted an incredibly powerful and crushing feeling of being under the boot. After all, who is the second prosecutor from the title?

With hardly a landscape in sight, let alone a horizon, the bleakness can feel dejecting. It’s a quintessentially Russian film in that respect, bringing to mind that old adage about Russian stories: everyone suffers and then they die. But, of course, there is something inexplicably compelling about watching a story full of misery like this - it’s at once a warning and a lament. As Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Only in the darkness can you see the stars.”

Richard Linklater directs a multi-pronged francophone ode to the French New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard, and Breathless (1960), Godard’s monumental feature debut that has since become synonymous with the entire Nouvelle Vague movement and one of the most influential films period. Fans of this popular era and the Cahiers Du Cinema gang who went on to become some of the greatest French filmmakers of all time (next to Godard, Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Pierre Melville et al.) will easily fall in love with Linklater’s adoring tribute.

It’s a cinephile’s wet dream version of “Who’s Who?” right from the start, as the names of all those in the inner and outer circle pop up in quaint title cards whenever any one of them appear in a scene. But Godard is the star and his personality is larger than life, arrogant, encyclopedic. A filmmaker with a God complex and an answer to every question in the form of a quote, dying to make his first film while his peers Truffaut and Chabrol already have a head start. How Breathless is conceived, financed, cast and shot is the engine of the film, with Marbeck as Godard and Zoey Deutch as Jean Seberg standing out from a packed and impeccably cast ensemble.

It’s fascinating to compare Nouvelle Vague to the other Linklater film about a self-obsessed real-life genius artist this year. It’s wild that the same director made both films which speaks to Linklater’s versatility and astuteness; in Blue Moon, the spotlight needed to be on Lorenz Hart so he can hog it in a chamber piece. Here, it’s more on the filmmaking process and the community, from which Godard emerges triumphant.

The look and feel of the film, draped in grainy Nouvelle black-and-white Vague, as if it’s a discovered artifact from an old, dusty cinephile vault, is an essential ingredient to the filthy charm. As are the cameos from the giants Bresson (Aurélien Lorgnier), Melville (Tom Novembre) and Rossellini (Laurent Mothe) who are full of advice on the burdensome, magical process of making movies. It’s all so cloyingly affectionate that it becomes a little, as Godard himself would have lovingly said, dégueulasse.

The writing team behind The Brutalist (2024), Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold, are back with The Testament of Ann Lee, with director’s chairs flipped around and Fastvold taking the reins from Corbet. The movie is all the better for it, because not only is Ann Lee one of the most compelling (and harmonious) musicals I have ever seen (and heard), but it’s a story that could only really be told through the female gaze.

Similar to Die, My Love and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, a film that deals with motherhood at its epicentre should only be directed by a woman. Like those two films, Ann Lee puts a microscope on a woman who feels the pangs of a mother’s pain, but unlike Grace and Linda, Ann’s mothering nature is her overriding setting; as paramount as oxygen to her very existence. One child-related tragedy after another brings Ann to her knees, before God, where she finds herself making a solemn vow to Jesus and only Jesus, promising to be mother to all who follow her as she spreads His word far and wide.

As the name suggests, the Shakers (an offshoot of the better known Quakers) repent their sins and connect with God by chanting and shaking their bodies in a trance. They also sing beautiful hymns and anthems as a way to connect spiritually with one another as a community. It’s strange, and Fastvold leans into the strangeness by turning the film into a musical. And because the songs and the music are so integral to the Shakers, whenever there’s a song and dance sequence, it feels like the most natural, organic thing in this strange world of faith, spirituality and unyielding trust in their cause.

The harmonies are glorious and the performance by Seyfried is stupendous - she commits herself fully to the role and easily gives the performance of her career. Pullman, Thomasin McKenzie (who does double duty as narrator of the tale and Ann Lee’s right-hand disciple) and Christopher Abbott as Ann’s sexually frustrated husband, all feed off of Seyfried and never buckle, rounding up an excellent ensemble.

Not only do I find The Testament of Ann Lee a better film than The Brutalist, but as someone who is usually not a fan of musicals, I can’t remember the last time one bewitched me quite like this. Beautifully shot, composed, performed and designed; Ann Lee is unlike any musical you’ve ever seen and, if you let the strangeness of this unique religious community in, you may find yourself profoundly moved and shaken.

It’s been too long since Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here (2017), one of the best films of the 2010s. She finally returns with an adaptation of a little-known Argentinian novella called Die, My Love, and the result is another typically harrowing Ramsayian experience. Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson follow in the footsteps of previous actors (Joaquin Phoenix, Tilda Swinton, Samantha Morton..) who’ve had the honor of working with the great director, and deliver some of the best work of their careers. Lawrence is especially liberated, candid and caustic; she plays the ironically-named Grace like a free spirit possessed by the Devil.

This is as disturbing, naked and unrelenting a depiction of depression we have gotten since Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea (2016). Ramsay’s direction and Lawrence’s performance are just as committed as Lonergan’s and Casey Affleck’s were, but there are two key differences in Die, My Love. The affliction is more externalized, and it’s distinctly female in nature.

Postpartum depression is such a particularly feminine experience that it’s most authentic lens is the female gaze, and us men can empathize and appreciate all we want; but truly understanding it feels impossible (and presumptuous). Grace externalizes her state of mind — crawling on the floor like an animal, barking back at the dog, running around a field with a knife, jumping through a glass door, etc. — but she has a very hard time communicating her feelings. She’d rather jump out of a moving car, literally.

As such, as a man, it’s hard to penetrate that wall of feelings. Not even Jackson’s mother, Pam (the wonderful Sissy Spacek), can reach her. In fact, Grace’s most kindred spirit in the movie, other than wounded animals, is Jackson’s dad Harry (Nick Nolte in a rare role that’s tiny and devastating) but she seems to connect to his dementia more than him as a person.

As elusive and volatile as Grace’s melancholia is, there are clear and obvious clues that Jackson misses. He is as flawed as he is good natured, and his inability to read the room has a direct effect on Grace. Pattinson and Lawrence conjure up a dark chemistry in a house that morphs from home to prison, feeding off of each other like ravenous wild beasts. She’s often the one who ends up chewing him up, along with the scenery.

Die, My Love, as its emotionally paradoxical title suggests, is a tough one to get through. Every laugh it coaxes, and there are many, is mired in discomfort. It’s the second best horror film about motherhood of the year, after If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, but the first in terms of visualizing the gradual psychological breakdown of a woman in crisis. Best represented in a scene which will stay with me forever:

Grace, an aspiring writer who hasn’t been able to put a single word to paper since giving birth and having just come back from feeding her baby, stands over a blank sheet, spraying black ink blots across it. Milk drips from her exposed breast and mingles with the ink, the mixture transitioning into a starry sky that Jackson is looking at through his telescope. Pure cinema.

Richard Linklater reunites with Ethan Hawke after a decade to deliver a one-man-show in the form of a linguistically-driven chamber piece and something resembling a biography of Lorenz Hart. The forgotten genius lyricist who the remembered genius composer Richard Rodgers worked with, before the latter paired up with Oscar Hammerstein and formed the infamous Rodgers-Hammerstein partnership.

Similar to Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy (1999), which was about the British musical duo equivalent of Gilbert and Sullivan, you needn’t be a fan of Golden Age musicals to be completely captured by the stories of these men and their approach to art. In Linklater’s case, 95% of the film is set in a single location with 80% of that setting in a bar where Hart drowns his sorrows and waxes lyrical, philosophical and cynical about how he found himself at this point in his life. A recovering alcoholic whose joie de vivre wrestles with his melancholy in perpetuity, while he slowly slips off the wagon, one whiskey shot at a time.

Hawke plays Hart like a man possessed. The film is written so as to give him room to suck up all the oxygen and he does so brilliantly; with a somewhat distracting hairline and contact lenses that make him look like he’s channeling John Malkovich. Through Hart’s monologues and interactions with the barkeep (a perfectly sardonic Bobby Cannavale), real-life famous children’s book author E.B. White (a calmingly present Patrick Kennedy), his protege and ungettable emblem of desire Elizabeth Weiland (an endearing Margaret Qualley) Rodgers (the ever-reliable Scott), we get a portrait of a complicated artist and human being, with the gift of the gab and cursed with a victim complex.

Hart’s famous songs - “My Funny Valentine”, “Manhattan” and of course, “Blue Moon” - get a whole new complexion once we see this tragicomic portrayal, which evokes both awe and sadness in equal measure. It’s a very funny, very watchable movie, thanks to Hawke’s can’t-take-your-eyes-away-from-it performance and Robert Kaplow’s screenplay that’s filled with so many zingers and witty quips it’s impossible to catch them all in one sitting.

Far from being Linklater’s best work, with dips, lulls and predictable outcomes dragging the story down a few notches, Blue Moon is still well worth investing your time. If for nothing else but to see a masterful performance of a creative force of nature who now, deservedly, gets the spotlight he never got in life.

Do plants have feelings? Do they have a language? When we are in a park or a garden, and we observe a tree, does it observe us too? Are flowers intelligent? And where in the hierarchy among the corpus of human experience across time, through all of life’s transgressions, discoveries and loves, would a lonely ancient tree in a botanical garden sit?

These are the questions Ildikó Enyedi grapples with in Silent Friend, one of the most mature films of the year and a supremely powerful meditation on the significance of the natural, non-animal, world. From all of the films I’ve seen at the festival, it reminded me most of Train Dreams, because it has the same meditative calmness about it, a stoic hue of oneness and interconnection between people and nature is omniscient in just about every scene.

It’s not an actor’s showcase, though it’s very much an ensemble film; the three central actors do excellent work, with Tony Leung Chiu-wai as the soothing neuroscientist and Luna Wedler as the resilient student the true standouts. The really magical thing about this movie, though, is that it’s the two non-human characters which generate the most emotional resonance. An ancient ginkgo biloba tree which is at the epicentre of all three stories, and whose extracts people today eat for circulation, cognition, and brain health, also known as the themes of this film. A young geranium also has a lead role in the 1970s timeline, and is involved in the film's most deeply felt moments of joy and pain.

Very much like The Red Violin (1998), a film about how an instrument affected all the people that came across it, Silent Friend upends convention to make the humans feel like supporting characters. The people moments though, such as the ones between Grete and a kind, old photographer (Martin Wuttke) who takes her in as an apprentice, or between Tony and a hardened groundskeeper who starts to come out of his shell (Sylvester Groth), recall some of the best moments from that gorgeously human tapestry of a film, Magnolia (1999).

It’s a film that strips narrative convention down and challenges the audience to be patient with its pedantic pace. Abstract cuts of nature documentary-style images take some getting used to. But for those who stay with it, and put their trust in Enyedi, patience is rewarded with a mesmerizing story that earns a corner all of its own in cinema’s living room. Great movies have the power to shift your thinking, calibrate your senses and feelings into new frequencies. That’s what Silent Friend does; if you pay close enough attention, you’ll walk out of the theatre and never look at another plant or tree the same way again.

Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice is hellishly entertaining; an extremely dark comedy about a desperate family man trying to keep it all together after losing his job and making one desperate choice after next to do so. The fact that a paper company is simultaneously the centre of all his worries and the solution to all of his problems, with rival paper companies very much part of the plot, immediately calls to mind The Office, one of the greatest TV shows of all time and certainly the funniest one about a paper company.

Park sinks his teeth into the same corporate elements The Office fans are familiar with; the paralyzing prospect of unemployment and redundancies, the corporate rat race, the cold indifference of upper management and the camaraderie of work friends which can turn sour on a dime. The picture that’s painted about people’s dependence on their jobs as a result is equal parts fiendish, hilarious and a rallying cry. The modern phenomenon of workaholism and how imprisoned our way of life is to mindless corporate culture is at the epicenter of the film’s question: is there a choice?

Of course there is always a choice, but Park sadistically traps his audience in a spiral of horrible ones made by Man-soo. Byung-hun (The Front Man from Squid Games) is truly superb, delivering one of the performances of the year as a nervous wreck of a man whose survival instinct is fueled by the adoration of his family.

No Other Choice is replete with symbolism, not being able to see clearly because of direct sunlight being a very a big one. We are all too blind to see the better choices in front of us. Too riddled with anxiety to stop and think of a better solution, guilty conscience (in the form of a persistent toothache in the film) be damned.

All that’s well and good, but here’s the trouble. Park gets a little too drunk on his own style, where seemingly every scene has to have some kind of stylistic flourish, which starts to feel a bit gimmicky. The choices Man-soo makes get increasingly sillier and bloodier, and the whole film ends up being a bit of an uneven mess because of it. The goofiness especially creates narrative vacuums where you’re just left wondering “why?” while it plays out like a sordid comedy of error after error.

Movies like this live and die by their endings, and this one is lacking in a few key ways, but spoilers prevent me from going any further than that. Suffice it to say that No Other Choice is a fun ride and satirical parable with a critical message, delivered in a bit of a sloppy way, on the importance of a healthy work-life imbalance.

The struggle of motherhood as a canvas for pitch dark comedy bordering on body horror is a choice. Mary Bronstein directs a visceral psychodrama that needs to be experienced on the big screen with big sound, if only so that the audience can see and feel what it means for an actor to embody a role so completely that her entire soul gets exposed. Rose Byrne is the canvas, and she carries that struggle as if it’s sucked out of her bone marrow and injected into every fiber of her being. She is Mother, one that has gone to Hell and came back with notes.

Bronstein makes a bold creative choice that becomes evident maybe 10 mins into the film, but it’s so ingenuous that ruining the surprise would be tantamount to spoiling. All I’ll say is, offscreen presence has rarely been this effective. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You lives up to its deliciously tantalizing title by peaking with its highest highs as the most subversive genre film of the decade so far. The hole in Linda’s apartment, and everything that becomes associated to it, would make the maestro of body horror David Cronenberg proud, and a particular transition from a hamster to a lasagna should be nominated for Best Transition of the Century. I don’t recall the list time a cut made an audience erupt in so much in grossed out laughter.

“Being a mother is the toughest job you’ll ever love,” or so the saying goes. In this story, that love is stretched to its limits, where it starts to feel like anything but. Rose Byrne bears it all. She’s in just about every scene, and Bronstein gets up and close, excavating her expressions to uncover all the signs of fatigue, pain, impatience, frustration and every other feeling that every parent at their worst moments will instantly recognize. Believe it or not, thanks to Byrne’s comedic and dramatic prowess, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is filled with a ton of laugh-out-loud hilarious moments right up until the final few scenes.

While Byrne carries the entire thing, she has plenty of essential support from her fellow cast members who play roles that serve to illuminate new paths in Linda’s journey. Conan O’Brien is an odd choice as Linda’s nonplussed therapist at first, but because his presence alone is hilarious, the off-kilter balance works. Watch out for his fantastic monologue about a mouse experiment. A$AP Rocky as flirty motel neighbor James, Danielle Macdonald as Linda’s unhinged patient, and Bronstein herself in the role of the horrible Dr. Spring are all memorable and help to elevate the story to its volatile heights.

While the ending doesn’t do justice to everything that the film was building up to, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is still an unforgettable showcase of on-screen and off-screen talent. Rose Byrne gives the best performance of the year, male or female, and while the whole thing is uneasy and tense like Darren Aronofsky’s best movies about obsessive individuals in crisis (The Wrestler, Black Swan, Mother!), it’s essential viewing for any parent, especially struggling moms.

If Terry Gilliam, Wes Anderson and Apichatpong Weerasethakul had a baby, it would be called A Useful Ghost. Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s absurd film about a possessed vacuum cleaner digs far deeper than its bizarre premise might suggest. It’s a far out story that touches upon a whole host of themes, including what’s clearly a satirical dissection of Thai politics. The one that resonated the most with me though is the idea of dreams and memories as conduits for remembering the past, something we can’t escape and might as well embrace or it may be the death of us.

The film also glides through as a modern example of queer cinema, with ladyboys, gay sex and backward Thai repression of homosexuality all coming together to push a strong sub-current about the modern way of life for gay people in Thailand. But by far, the most outlandish concept here is the idea of dead people coming back in the form of haunted home appliances. It’s as mad as it sounds. Just wait till you see a vacuum cleaner undressing a man and playing with his nipples with its wand (using the brush nozzle, in case you were wondering) or hoovering the dust from another man’s eyes. Welcome to freaky cinema!

And that’s perhaps the best word to describe this movie - freaky. Love, sex, death, dust, dreams, family dynamics, family businesses, ghosts, memories and even the Bloody Massacre of 2010, when more than 90 innocent people were killed during a military crackdown, are all blended together to create quite an unforgettable cinematic cocktail. Unique Thai sense of humor is also an essential ingredient, which was more hit than miss with me though it does need some getting used to. Once you do, you’ll find many scenes drunk on pure joy and it’ll start rubbing off.

It’s also an ensemble piece, with many characters playing essential roles and making an impression. Standouts for me are Suman (Apasiri Nitibhon), the deadpan mom who has way too much shit to deal with: a son who is in love with a vacuum cleaner, a factory business she inherited from her husband where all the appliances seem to be possessed by poltergeists and a gaggle of elders who she dreams about murdering. And the striking Hoorne plays the ethereal Nat, a ghost who isn’t without her own flaws, beautifully.

The ending did start to lose me, as if Boonbunchachoke lost the thread of his own overly complicated narrative, but then the last few seconds does tie it all together (weirdly, of course). Next to Rose of Nevada, A Useful Ghost is the most brash, unmistakable cinematic movie I’ve see at the LFF. It’ll stay with me for quite some time.

The eagerly awaited return of Daniel Day-Lewis, probably the greatest actor of all time, is a bittersweet affair. He is tremendous, of course he is, in his son’s film Anemone. The trouble is the film is anything but. The technical execution and much of the writing reeks of everything a film school undergrad thinks art films are about. Extreme close ups to build mood, a garishly loud score aiming to burst your eardrums with capital A atmosphere, and symbolism so overt it makes you want to laugh.

The cast next to Day-Lewis, namely Bean and Samantha Morton who plays Nessa, the mother, are excellent. But they’re not given much because the entire thing (written by both father and son Day-Lewis) is centered around a couple of earth-shaking monologues written to be performed by the giant that is DDL. Each is a breathtaking verbal evisceration, the first targets religion, the second war, two of the darkest clouds that hovered over the Northern Ireland conflict known as The Troubles (1960s-1998).

The price of admission is worth it, I suppose, for those two seminal monologues. Other than that, Ronan Day-Lewis clearly has a good eye as some of the landscape shots are undoubtedly beautiful, but he has a ways to go yet when it comes to steady direction. Anemone is filled with gaps left by uncomfortable silences that the score and overt motifs can’t fill. A story that has great potential on the bonds between fathers and sons, and the trauma of war, is drowning in the sloppy mess of this film somewhere. I couldn’t find it, and after about an hour, I gave up trying, keeping one eye on the bright green Exit sign of the theatre while waiting for the next Daniel Day-Lewis scene to come.

After the very serious and brooding Maestro and the big and loud musical with Lady Gaga, A Star Is Born, Bradley Cooper has toned it considerably down with his latest. Treading familiar territory that Cooper likes to explore (namely, what makes marriages and relationships tick or stop ticking), Is This Thing On? is a much more by-the-numbers straight shooting picture, without the gravitas of layered symbolism, meticulous shot compositions, or grandiose character arcs. This is an intimate story about a marriage that has fallen apart long before the opening credits, and how two people who still care so much about each other circumnavigate around their own feelings, their two sons, their lifelong friends and two grandparents.

The camera is up close and personal, and there were a few moments where I was internally screaming “pull back!” or “make it just a little wider!” but it’s obvious what Cooper was going for. The weight of the film’s messy themes (love, marriage, happiness, coping etc.) can only be carried on the shoulders of the two gigantic performances by Arnett and Dern, both of whom are brilliant and wonderfully comfortable with each other. We can always rely on Dern to come up with the goods, so it’s Arnett, the wild card, who impresses the most. He’s never been this serious, or this funny in a serious role.

Is This Thing On? works best as an ensemble piece, so the rest of the cast are much needed glue for the story to hold until the end. Standouts are Ciarán Hinds (who just makes anything he’s in instantly better) as the juice-drinking grandad with an absolute killer of a scene in the final act of the film, and Cooper himself, who relegates himself the role of a spaced out sidekick/comic relief best friend. The result is some of the most laugh-out-loud moments of 2025.

Stand up comedy as therapy is also a fantastic narrative angle that Arnett and Cooper really lean into. Using the art of trying to make people laugh by just telling them your life story contains within it a pretty powerful message about the human need for community and communication. Is This Thing On? isn’t trying to make any big splashes, keeps the 2025 tradition of having an absolute banger for an ending, and for being so anti-ostentatious in its nature, may just be Bradley Cooper’s finest film yet. Low key best, at least.

I was pulling all kinds of faces while watching Mark Jenkin’s Rose of Nevada. Disgusted, confused, in awe, creeped out, amused, beguiled; I went through so many motions it made me seasick. While I’m not sure I’ll be watching this one again any time soon, I know that I’ll be catching up with this director’s previous works - Bait (2019) and Enys Men (2022) - because Jenkin definitely has my undivided attention. He manages something that’s very hard to accomplish these days: originality. Proper, never-seen-or-felt-anything-like-it unique experience.

Shot in 16MM, and frantically edited with so many shots that have a discarded cutting-room floor feel to them, Rose of Nevada is all texture and atmosphere. It’s a film that’ll make you want to take a shower after you watch it, it shoves and spits its scenes at its audience with the bellicose attitude of a sea captain who’s on his fifth pint and has horrible breath. It’s an experience unlike any other, and one that - if you’re okay with grimy aesthetics - I highly recommend getting in a theatre, so that you can see and hear it all around you while it worms itself inside you.

The story itself is hard to follow but gets easier as you get used to the grueling vibe. And tucked away underneath its unpolished exterior, is a poignant remark on how the past can haunt the present, and how the passage of time is a construct that you eventually just have to give in to and accept. The gallery of characters are all memorable in their own ways but it’s the sea captain (Magee) and the local dockhand Mike (Edward Rowe) who chew the scenery with fantastically rugged accents and voices, and larger-than-life screen presence.

“The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness,” writes Joseph Conrad in his autobiography The Mirror of the Sea. Jenkin uses all sorts of tactile methods - distorted voice overs, discomforting close-ups, arthritic camera movements, sporadic editing, lots of shots of muddy boots and rusty metal - to create an affront to all your senses and turn Conrad’s quote into a reality as only cinema can. The sea, along with the primeval profession of fishing, is itself turned into a medieval force where all of time and space gets sucked into.

Rose of Nevada is my most pleasant surprise and my favorite new discovery of the festival so far. The more I think about it, the more astonishing it becomes.

Whenever someone starts framing their thoughts on a movie in terms of how many Oscars it’s likely to be nominated for or win, I start to check out. Films like One Battle After Another, Sentimental Value and others have been getting “Oscar buzz”, but I will always find it weird to think of movies from filmmakers like Paul Thomas Anderson or Joachim Trier in the context of how much representation they’ll get at the Academy Awards, a.k.a. the highly politicized pageant show that’s essentially the most expensive popularity contest on the planet. It’s so clear to me that these movies just aren’t made with awards in mind.

The flipside to those kinds of movies is something like Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet. Here is a film that eye-roll-inducing phrases like “Oscar buzz” and “Oscar bait” were made for. After the critical success of Nomadland (2020), another overrated slopfest posing as serious art, which won Best Picture and Best Director, Zhao completely lost her way in Hollywood’s Luna Park by directing the forgettable box-office Marvel turd Eternals (2021). Not something she is proud of, I’m sure. So now she’s back to where she feels more comfortable: directing emotionally engineered movies that pull at the heart strings like Quasimodo pulls on those Notre Dame bells.

That’s not to say that Hamnet is all that bad. Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal and the young Jacobi Jupe who plays young Hamnet are all super committed and give great, expressive performances. My personal favorite of the three is Mescal, who apart from a few unnecessary scenes (did we really need that “to be or not to be” scene?) internalizes his sorrow and grief in ways that are truly moving. Buckley just unleashes in very melodramatic ways, and all those Gen Zers on Film Twitter who are screaming “queen’s going for that Oscar!” are not wrong. She is going for it and she’ll likely get it.

While no doubt beautifully shot and scored, Hamnet is just too heavy-handed for my tastes. And when I see my fellow critics lapping it up the way that they are, I can’t help but think it’s much ado about nothing much. Perhaps I’ve been too spoiled by three exceptional films that tackle grief in more sophisticated, subtle and profound ways - the aforementioned Sentimental Value, It Was Just An Accident and Train Dreams. Either way, since I’m not made of stone, I was of course stirred by the scenes that Zhao, her actors and composer Max Richter wanted me to feel with all my feelings. I was stirred, but not shaken.

It was really only the final scene that truly seemed to move the ground beneath my feet. Both Mescal and Buckley deliver their career-best work in these final moments, and as an English Lit major who has revered Shakespeare since high school, and someone who considers Hamlet the greatest piece of literature written in the English language, the final scene hits multiple right notes for me. It’s just a shame that the beauty of this final evocative scene renders everything that came before it even more ostentatious and contrived. But hey, Shakespeare in Love (1998) was also beloved by the critics when it came out and ended up making a big splash at the Oscars. How did that one hold up?

“A tragi-comic slice-of-life film with an everlasting aftertaste that pulls all the right strings” is how I described Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World (2022) when I wrote about it the 9th best film I saw that year. Not only do those some same sentiments ring true for his follow-up, but he has - like all great artists - outdone himself. Sentimental Value is my personal favorite film of the London Film Festival so far, and is currently in the lead to end up as my favorite film of 2025.

Like every deeply layered story, there is so much going on between the lines, powered by the emotional undercurrents of the three central relationships between the two siblings and their dad. The film is also about a house that has seen generations of Borgs come and go, filled with memories of great joy and great sorrow alike. The opening, with a narrator describing 6-year-old Nora’s letter she wrote where she imagined herself as her house, is impossibly moving.

Sentimental Value is also a story of how artists use their art as a means to communicate with each other, or with themselves. Which one imitates which one again, life or art? Through this exploration, the film also, miraculously, manages to be a movie about the pains and joys of making movies. As the story unfolds, Gustav’s and Nora’s journeys take unexpected turns through which we get an exclusive insight into the artistic process. Whether it’s Nora’s love-and-hate relationship with stage fright, or Gustav circumnavigating the pangs of a Netflix production as a 70-year-old filmmaker who hasn’t made a feature film in 15 years.

Every thread, some of which take us back to Gustav’s childhood, is beautifully connected to create a profoundly moving family portrait. Similar to the maturity on display in It Was Just An Accident, every ordinary moment is colored with emotional complexity of what it means to be human. It’s no surprise that Trier won the Grand Prix for Sentimental Value, the second biggest award given in Cannes.

The performances of the three main actors are out of this world, and Elle Fanning who has a significant role to play as a Hollywood star, more than holds her own. But the standouts, it must be said, are Reinsve and Skarsgård. All of their scenes, especially the ones they share, are stunning examples of subtextual acting. Expressions and microgestures of regret, angst, hope, despair, and love that move mountains.

Trier has directed and written something truly special here. As Sean Penn said when he introduced it at the Lumiere Festival a few days ago, it’s “everything I want cinema to be”.

When is Sentimental Value getting released?

The UK release date is December 26.

Yorgos Lanthimos continues to remind the world why he’s one of the most singular visionaries working today. Bugonia is a wild ride, a few gears wilder than his previous wildest Poor Things. As a remake of the Korean film Save the Green Planet! (2003), the premise alone is a mouth-watering prospect for a director of Lanthimos’ sensibilities. It turns out his muse Emma Stone is the perfect fit for the role of Michelle, a no-nonsense CEO who embodies every habit of corporate success personality and has the arrogance (or is it confidence?) to try and control the room even when she’s tied down in a basement.

Jesse Plemons, it also turns out, is equally perfect casting as Teddy, the brains behind the abduction operation, who has abandoned everything and everyone in his life — including basic hygiene but not including cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) — to fully devote himself to contacting the aliens.

The film works as a museum piece that stands out in the gallery. You walk by and can’t but not stop and stare, fascinated, disgusted, amused and entertained all at once. It blends genres more deftly than any previous Lanthimos film (that’s that Korean influence), juggling hilarious dark satire, shocking torture porn, conspiracy thriller and absurdist sci-fi all at once. Some pins are dropped, it wobbles in parts, but it mostly stays, astonishingly, intact. That said, it works best as a hysterical absurdist critique on corporate culture. A bit on working hours, Michelle’s inability to not converse in management speak, these are the moments that stick their landing best.

It has a much bigger and deeper message by the time it ends (and what an ending!) which can’t be discussed without spoilers. Where the film loses me is in its lack of humanity. In that way, even though it may be the best scripted Lanthimos film yet (credit to Will Tracy on the adaptation), it was hard to emotionally invest in any of the characters. The heart does go out to cognitively-impaired Don, who ironically represents the best of humanity in the story, but it’s not enough when so much of the story’s oxygen is reserved for Teddy and Michelle.

In that way, it reminds me of Lanthimos’ more cold and calculated films that are devoid of emotion that I couldn’t connect with, like The Lobster (2015) and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017). Bugonia is, thankfully, much better thanks to how well it’s held together by the fantastic performances, remarkable genre-juggling script and intellectually provocative commentary on humanity’s modern way of life.

Spellbinding as a painting in a museum, with touches of the sublime even, but I’m not sure I’d hang it in my house.