If 2024 was the subject of much “bad film year” discussion over the course of its running (and, let’s be honest, rightly so), then 2025 may very well have us yearning for the good ol’ days of “Anora” discourse. Approaching the halfway point of the first quarter-century of this millennium, it’s clear that cinema is, for the moment at least, treading water in its attempts to make this milestone moment matter, and outright fumbling this aim at nearly every turn. It isn’t so much that “the movies are dead” as it is that they’re currently lying comatose, waiting for the right spark to jump-start any sense of excitement beyond the endless sea of franchise rehashing that has tragically defined the art-form for well over a decade now.
One film, famously, has come close to jolting the year awake (and rest assured, we’ll get there), but in the meantime, cinema in 2025 still has its modest share of films worth celebrating in the first half of the year before many of them come to be—unjustly, to be fair—drowned in a sea of buzzy awards vehicles to come. Granted, the vast majority of these films were borne from this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
But as usual, that is where the year’s most exciting projects—at any time—tend to find their footing. (Full disclosure: in that sense, we’re not getting too wrapped up in the minutia of release dates, limited or wide; if a film is generally perceived to have been released—or set to be released after having already premiered—in 2025, we’re counting it. Because at this point, what does it matter, really?) Between these world cinema powerhouses and the springtime juggernauts that DID manage to give some semblance of hope in the year to conclude, here are the 25 best movies of 2025, so far:
25. The Encampments
The widespread injustices being faced by pro-Palestine camps across the world are, in the grand scheme of things, a drop in the water compared to the horrific dehumanization and extermination being faced by the very group these camps were erected to support in the first place. What stays consistent on both fronts, though, is the continued efforts by Western powers to suppress the impact of this crucial movement at a time when worldwide sentiment is on the verge of finally shifting towards some semblance of humanity. With “The Encampments,” Michael T. Workman and Kei Pritsker fast-tracked their document of this shift to show how the forces in power would rather burn us all—themselves included—to the ground before they’d let their blood money fall into the fire.
In conjunction with the unlawful detainment of student activist Mahmoud Khalil (who is featured heavily in this documentary), “The Encampments” proves a crucial (and crucially timed) examination of America’s willingness to suppress the very tenets of freedom they purport to uphold every day, so long as it’s convenient to maintain the status quo. A timely examination of a hypocrisy that runs down to the very roots of the most influential nation in the world, “The Encampments” may not be doing much more than telling you what you already know if you’ve been paying attention—and what you already agree with if you have any sense of compassion—but Workman and Pritsker show this to be a message still worth propagating, until the last breath.
24. The Wave
The last time a male-directed, Spanish-language musical about gender issues premiered in Cannes, the results were—as you might remember—something of a publicity shit-storm. Perhaps that’s why Sebastián Lelio’s “The Wave,” inspired by the 2018 feminist student protests in his native Chile, hit the Croisette with more of a muted splash. As was the case when “Emilia Pérez” premiered with strong buzz only to flounder completely upon the widespread viewing from the very demographics it depicted, time will only tell whether Lelio’s attempt at allyship will be deemed completely tone-deaf. But if nothing else, “The Wave” seems, unlike Jacques Audiard’s film, to be a genuine attempt at solidarity despite its own self-identified limitations.
With a forceful attitude and genuinely stimulating numbers across its (too long) two-hour runtime, “The Wave” makes a concerted effort to channel its kinship with its depicted feminist movement through the acknowledgement of the difficulty in fostering a campaign that finds the ideal engagement with all concerned parties; Lelio, for his part, is aware that his own position as a man at the helm is contentious with regards to the solidity of his message, but nonetheless, the director and his film are confident that a solution may be reached if we find ourselves willing to follow the tide created by those voices that matter most in this battle.
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23. F1
Boy, Tom Cruise sure knows how to pick ‘em. After his partnership with Christopher McQuarrie—at the time, an ostensible director-for-hire—resulted in the action filmmaker carving out his own distinct lane in modern tactile blockbuster filmmaking, the time has come for Joseph Kosinski to prove that he can drive off into the sunset without the crutch of Cruise Control. After the flyaway success of “Top Gun: Maverick,” Kosinski takes matters to the pavement to prove that he’s just as capable in the seat behind the camera, no matter which movie star is occupying the seat in front of it.
“F1,” by most accounts, more or less follows the “Maverick” formula to a tee—find a hunky movie star, place them in a vehicle and set them off as they come to examine their own raison d’être—but Kosinski’s Formula One feature, if nothing else, proves that he’s damn good at making that blueprint work to his benefit. With a sincerity that matches its simplicity, “F1” won’t be leading the pack of blockbuster cinema by a wide margin, but given Kosinski’s adeptness at keeping the rubber burning right up to our noses, the film arguably doesn’t have to… at least, for the time being.
22. Magellan
Lav Diaz: the man of few words and many minutes of runtime. At this point in his career, it’s impossible for the Filipino filmmaker to be even remotely dissociated from his reputation of creating some of the longest, most inaccessible monochrome films ever made—oftentimes, seemingly just for the sake of it—which may very well be why “Magellan” stands out among his output. A two-and-a-half-hour drama filmed in color with a relatively famous leading actor portraying a centerpiece figure in colonial European history, “Magellan” manages to find Diaz at his most accessible while, simultaneously, sacrificing none of the director’s density in his examination of the oppression in the Philippines that echoes through to today.
Just as slow as any one of the director’s eight-(or more-)hour features, “Magellan” concentrates its languid pacing towards a more effectively atmospheric and entirely bleak view of colonial expansionism, distilling in perhaps Diaz’s most effective manner yet the horrifying banality of indigenous extermination propelled by vanity. If the compromises that “Magellan” exemplifies in Diaz’s style are made to expose the film and filmmaker to a wider potential audience, it only comes in service of exposing them to the same horrific realities that he has been preaching from the start.
21. Black Bag
And speaking of directors with whom I have a… contentious relationship. At this point, Steven Soderbergh has dipped his toes into so many genres and so many styles of filmmaking that his chameleonic efficiency would be downright inspiring were it to result in more than one good film for every four made. This quantity-over-quality approach has certainly come to be exemplified in 2025, as Sodey’s first feature of the year, “Presence”—a laughable slog of cheap gimmickry—was almost immediately followed up by the release of what’s easily the director’s best movie in years. “Black Bag” may not be doing anything to reinvent the spy film, but the assurance of Soderbergh’s hand, combined with a David Koepp script that actually appears to have been finished, results in a project whose clinical precision seeps from the craft and into the characters, to great entertaining effect.
Bolted down by a slick cast who make the most of their sparing (by design) characterization, “Black Bag” offers perhaps the most incisively intriguing examination of the ever-popular proposition of espionage entangled with marital devotion. Soderbergh is largely running on autopilot here, but this time, the approach comes in favor of a film that most benefits from a director whose biggest self-imposed challenge was “How do I make long conversations interesting?” To be sure, Soderbergh found a way without getting in his OWN way, but “Black Bag,” as a thriller, surely works even outside the realm of backhanded compliments.
Read More: The 15 Best Steven Soderbergh Movies, Ranked
20. Highest 2 Lowest
Spike Lee doesn’t exactly have the most promising history of remaking unimpeachable classics of Asian cinema. But where his famously disastrous retelling of “Oldboy” proved why the lifetime New York legend was the last person fit to step in Park Chan-wook’s shoes, his reinterpretation of “High and Low” shows why Lee may very well have been the only person fit to take on Akira Kurosawa’s legendary piece of class commentary. The director’s enduring “no fucks given” attitude, here, extends not to his approach to Kurosawa’s material, but rather to the distinct sense of contemporary New York flavor that makes “Highest 2 Lowest” such a propulsive, charismatic take on a story in which power and influence can only take you so far when everything, and everyone, is on the line.
Anchored by an expectedly enchanting turn from longtime Lee collaborator Denzel Washington and surprisingly fiery acting novice A$AP Rocky, “Highest 2 Lowest” reimagines Kurosawa’s classic as a more straightforward affair, whilst never sacrificing the core understanding of what drives one to risk it all; for Lee, it’s about family, and if that truth necessitates a schmaltzier avenue to reach that final destination, the least he could do is crank those subwoofers and make that ride a memorable one.
19. Grand Theft Hamlet
To hijack or not to hijack; that is the question. It’s safe to say that if you have no established interest in either Shakespeare or Grand Theft Auto, then the unexpected and surprisingly potent marriage of the two in Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls’s “Grand Theft Hamlet” will have absolutely nothing to offer you. In fact, I’d go so far as to wager that, if you have no interest in Shakespeare and only GTA, then the documentary will have just as little to whet your artistic appetite; in short, at least a passing interest in the Bard is essential here, largely because “Grand Theft Hamlet” runs primarily on the enduring power that the scribe’s words possess even up to a moment in time when the communal warmth of theater felt all but entirely snuffed-out.
Possibly the most interesting—or at the very least, most emotionally engaged—musings on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, “Grand Theft Hamlet” utilizes the contrast between its two mediums (theater and online video gaming) and melds them through the prism of our own beloved medium of cinema to ponder what it means to stare at that skull in your palm (or, in this case, that shiny chrome glock) and truly contemplate what it is that’s staring back at you.
18. The Wedding Banquet
Nobody was really clamoring for a remake of Ang Lee’s Golden Bear-winning family drama “The Wedding Banquet,” which is probably why it was well-suited enough to be remade in the first place. Rather than banking on name recognition or flash-in-the-pan stars, Andrew Ahn’s take on the cross-national material finds him uniting with the original screenwriter James Schamus to re-envision the challenges of intercultural LGBTQ+ relationships in the modern day, with all the heart and sincerity necessary to achieve more than a hangover-addled reception you’ll forget the next week.
Owing to the subtlety of vision that made “Driveways” such a quiet revelation, Ahn does not attempt to over-exert his comedic sensibilities, but rather allows his cast and the chemistry between them to elevate “The Wedding Banquet” into a respectable remake that finds its own reason to exist in a shifting landscape—one whose tolerance is in constant threat of being extinguished under the veil of needless hatred. Content to frontload all of its clichés in order to get to the meat of the story further along the road, “The Wedding Banquet” ensures that there’s more than enough here to flesh out all these new faces and voices with the tender touch of a love too often held in the shadows.
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17. Young Mothers
By now, if you don’t know what you’re going to get when it comes to a new Dardenne brothers film, that’s likely a result of you never having seen an old Dardenne brothers film. Which isn’t to say that Jean-Pierre and Luc haven’t had varying degrees of success in their enduring neorealist-influenced style, but rather that the style itself has more or less remained intact, as has the level of empathy they attempt to exhibit towards different marginalized factions of Belgian society. With “Young Mothers,” the brothers set their sights on (who would’ve guessed it?) a group of teen mothers as they navigate the differing challenges that come with such a daunting leap into the next—and for many, defining—stage of their lives.
Not typical for the Dardennes, though, is the sheer number of subjects being covered here, examining a handful of mothers in this housing unit and, by proxy, the disparate problems they come to face. Some are faced with a dearth of attention from their own families, while others are saddled with too much attention from those best left in the past. In these interweaving spaces, the Dardenne brothers find an uncommon (for them, at least) and refreshing ray of hope, shining down on the solidarity felt between these young women, whose courage in the face of this next step is only matched by the strength they exhibit when standing together.
16. Den of Thieves 2: Pantera
“Den of Thieves 2: Pantera” was released in the dreaded cinematic dumping ground known as January, and in truth, the film could likely never be mistaken for one released at any other time on the calendar. Somehow, though, this works to the film’s benefit, as Christian Gudegast’s belated sequel turns the dial way up on every facet of “Dudes Rock” cinema to embed within his hyper-masculine thrill-ride a distinct sense of brotherly bonding. Much tighter and more engaged with its meatheaded characters than its predecessor, “Pantera” gives Gerard Butler the space to prove why he’s the undisputed king of January—and why, for once, that’s not an insult.
Functionally speaking, “Den of Thieves 2” may very well be a carbon copy of the first film (minus, thankfully, 50 Cent’s acting chops), but Gudegast’s commitment to the film’s fish-out-of-water thread allows Butler’s greasy demeanor to engage with European class with a far more organic tinge. And this is all before we even get to the heist of it all, which is here executed with surprising precision and less surprising bombast that brings all of the film’s influences (namely, Michael Mann and general stupidity) to a head for a hell of a ride along the Mediterranean coast.
15. Woman and Child
Saeed Roustaee’s 2022 Iranian drama “Leila’s Brothers” absolutely wowed those of us who actually saw it with its thorough characterization and firm grasp of familial tension in a changing global landscape, nonetheless adherent to local values. The problem is that those of us who saw the film are few and far between, owing to the local regime’s censorship of the film for its refusal to adhere to established filmmaking and release doctrines. Roustaee’s follow-up, “Woman and Child,” doesn’t seem to face this problem in large part because of the director’s somewhat disheartening collaboration with the powers that be, but on a fundamental level, the film is still an undeniably engaging and full-fledged melodrama.
If there are two things Roustaee loves as a filmmaker, they would be towering group shots and even more towering performances, and “Woman and Child” provides both in spades to unload a heartbreaking domestic drama of unwavering intensity, thanks in no small part to the central performance of a shattering Parinaz Izadyar. Even when the film threatens to unravel due to its seismic sentiment, Roustaee never relents and instead hits the gas full-throttle, keeping “Woman and Child” focused on the paralyzing visages of a family falling deeper and deeper into the clutches of social suffocation.
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14. Sentimental Value
For many, the clear standout of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, “Sentimental Value.” Joachim Trier’s follow-up to his previous runaway Cannes hit “The Worst Person in the World” once again unites the Norwegian director with his new muse Renate Reinsve to examine the unspoken complications of finding oneself in the modern world. This time, though, matters are complicated by the looming shadow of familial baggage, hence why “Sentimental Value” actually proves, more than anything, to be a wondrous showcase for Stellan Skarsgård playing Reinsve’s largely absent father.
Once again, it’s these performances that elevate Trier’s work, his Eskel Vogt-aided writing contingent on the actors’ abilities to find pockets of empathy in roles that seem designed to put everyone, including themselves, at a distance. “Sentimental Value,” though, takes up this challenge with a full heart, and Trier subsequently examines the unravelling of life through art as a means of engaging with a past looked upon aplenty, but only really examined with the true benefit of hindsight. When exactly that hindsight comes to pass is anyone’s guess, but one thing Trier and his film are sure of is that it may very well come too late, and only a direct confrontation with the ellipses of our lives may be enough to find what was missing in those spaces from the beginning.
13. Sound of Falling
Back when it was still set to be titled “The Doctor Says I’ll Be Alright, But I’m Feelin’ Blue”—a title that everyone, including Cannes head programmer Thierry Frémaux, has gone on record as wishing had remained the case—Mascha Schilinski’s “Sound of Falling” was amassing heaps of pre-festival buzz as an unsuspecting powerhouse picture to shake up the arthouse scene. To be sure, the film’s ethereal grasp of editing and imagery put it in a league of its own, and even if they do just as much to abstract the potential impact for many, not a frame of this film feels as though it could have come from anywhere else.
A haunting and often impenetrable examination of death and depression, “Sound of Falling” will certainly never be accused of providing viewers with too much excitement, but Schilinski’s assured vision weaves together four generations of women weighed down by the burdens of their lives both seen and unseen in ways that can only be described as chilling in their celestial pull. Undoubtedly stitched-together with all the cohesion of a makeshift patch-job, “Sound of Falling” makes that roughness an integral part of its power, as if forcing us into a spectral role of viewers outside the dimensions of space and time, made only to observe whatever ebb and flow of life and death is placed before us.
12. Friendship
As is typically the case with comedian-centered films, the person behind the camera of “Friendship” is hardly as integral to the widespread appeal of the project as the man whose disturbed mug we all came to see. Regardless, whatever unifying material Tim Robinson’s offbeat comedy offers to keep the film afloat is only bolstered by writer-director Andrew DeYoung’s ability to match his energy with a surreal feature that never devolves into a series of strung-together “I Think You Should Leave” sketches. If Robinson’s voice was far too cracked and disturbed for his brief stint on “SNL,” it sure as hell has found its place on the big screen.
Matching Robinson’s energy with a dreamlike atmosphere that fully complements the star’s rigid demeanor, DeYoung brings out of the comedian a dimension of fractured masculinity almost akin to “American Psycho” if Patrick Bateman had all the life ambitions of Ned Flanders. If you’re at all familiar with Robinson’s off-kilter comedic work, then “Friendship” is unlikely to break any new ground in your understanding of the comedian and his abilities; what that means, though, is that you’ll find no shortage of side-splitting hilarity, either.
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11. Materialists
Celine Song’s debut film “Past Lives” was so raw in the power of its unspoken bonds that the prospect of a typical romantic comedy as her immediate follow-up almost seemed just as heartbreaking as the film itself. Fortunately, Song being Song, “Materialists” has proven itself to be anything but a typical rom-com, understanding of the power of the genre’s tropes while simultaneously aware of just the right places to subvert them for a cynically moving take on the state of love in the age of dating apps.
Riding a thin line between sorrow and sincerity, “Materialists” expertly navigates the current romance landscape without ever succumbing to distancing ironies; rather, Song finds the space in an intimate two-shot to slowly unravel the truth in the lies we tell ourselves and each other every time we find ourselves on the lookout for Mr. or Mrs. Right. Even if you don’t buy into where Song takes this narrative, her view remains steadfast in its honesty; “Materialists” exhibits a willingness to examine the terrain with enough venom to see it for what it is, and enough hope to ask what it could be.
10. The Love That Remains
Arguably the most renowned filmmaker currently working out of the remote reach of his native Iceland, Hlynur Pálmason has achieved this status with a distinctly austere vision that captures both the stark natural beauty of his homeland and the quiet intimacies of a space so out of reach from most viewers watching from the comfort of wider metropolises. “The Love That Remains” may not quite be Pálmason’s greatest achievement as director, but it certainly comes close, acting also as the film’s most emblematic of his talents as a master of environmental and tonal manipulation.
In marrying these two elements together, Pálmason brings light to the quietude of a small family strung together only by the awe-inspiring immensity of a land that bends for no one—and also, a lovable pooch that steals every scene he’s in. “The Love That Remains” truly embodies its title in seeking out whatever affection can be found in those small pockets of uncertainty, all the while imbuing every one of those moments with an absurdity befitting the mercurial reality of human relationships; much as we’d like to deny it, we remain fundamentally tied to the natural order of things.
9. Yes!
Is it hypocritical to include an Israeli film on the same list that opened with praise for a documentary that explicitly highlights the atrocities facing Palestinians and those who support them? One certainly can’t be blamed for asking as much, particularly with an Israeli film so fundamentally tied to national identity in the face of the ongoing escalation of those atrocities. Nadav Lapid is well aware of the hypocrisies he himself faces as a director critical of a regime from which he still finds himself tenuously tied, and with “Yes!,” it appears as though the troublemaker has finally had enough.
Directly confronting the thirst for revenge from within the walls of the settler aggressors’ home, “Yes!” is Lapid’s answer—quite literally—to the question of complicity in the war crimes of the regime, and the shame felt in abetting them for so long. With his usual flair for dynamism behind the camera, the filmmaker utilizes excess as a sharpened knife that cuts through its own artifice and lets the underlying heartlessness of local indifference bleed out all over the carpet. There’s no room left for ambiguity in this fight, and Lapid has finally cast aside the convenience of vague deniability to express, in no uncertain terms, the unabashed guilt he feels in being the most recognizable director of a homeland soaked in the blood of the oppressed.
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8. The Secret Agent
Titled like a generic spy thriller but constructed like a seminar on Brazil’s military dictatorship as told in scattered order, “The Secret Agent” constitutes director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s most grippingly decompressed feature yet. A boldly stylistic exercise that retains the demanding pace of all of his work (and an even longer runtime than ever before), Mendonça’s latest film weaponizes the very expectations and subsequent contradictions between its title and its execution to illustrate the depths of subversion forced upon a population whose greatest crime is seeking the most basic of equalities, in education and in life.
“The Secret Agent” rides high on the efforts of a disarmingly subdued Wagner Moura, who anchors the film with a nonchalance befitting his relative star-power, but more crucially, befitting his character’s own status as a man thrust into hiding when the forces in power see the greatest threat in a man who won’t submit to every whim of every complacent government mouthpiece. Mendonça has always evaluated his nation’s tumultuous past with an intentional opacity, but “The Secret Agent” is the most direct assertion of Brazil as it was and, consequently, where it may end up again if people like Marcelo must always live with a target on their back.
7. Die, My Love
After such a long wait since her last film, Lynne Ramsay’s long-awaited return to filmmaking, “Die, My Love,” polarized audiences in Cannes this year. Such reception to a generally acclaimed filmmaker may betray the reality that, despite her consistent critical lauding, Ramsay’s work has always had a distancing effect on viewers. Her latest merely acts as an extension into new thematic territory as she continues her examinations of the darkest corners of the human mind, where only she and her actors seem daring enough to venture.
Here, Jennifer Lawrence gives a whirlwind performance as a young mother bearing the brunt of a mass confluence of debilitating circumstances—a crumbling relationship, mental distress, postpartum depression—unleashing her strain in seismic fashion. To be sure, subtlety is not the name of the game with “Die, My Love,” but amid Ramsay’s unrelenting subjectivity channeled through the always-committed performances she pulls from her actors, nuance is always there, hiding in the corners of the rotting foundation. Lawrence’s turn is sure to be one discussed through to the remainder of the year and beyond, but more than a showcase for awards-pleading, the work on display here is nothing short of entirely and necessarily blunt.
6. Resurrection
To label the cinema of Bi Gan as “dreamlike” might just be the understatement of the millennium; the notion of somnambulant illusion as the gateway to unlocking the true self has occupied all his films to a degree, in terms of both subject matter and aesthetic. “Resurrection,” then, may just be Bi’s crowning achievement, a towering display of ambitious craft linking together loose ideas into a whole that appears like an entirely necessary step in our understanding of the evolution of the entire medium of cinema itself.
Stitched together by the sort of tenuous linkages entirely fitting of a film operating on “dream logic,” “Resurrection” certainly asks quite a bit of viewers seeking stringent analysis of every element at play. For those willing to succumb to the majesty of Bi’s mad vision, however, the film offers an aesthetic trip through the void of timelessness that casts all doubts towards the detail of its intentions to the side. Featuring the requisite Bi Gan long take that trumps all others in the balance of scale and pacing, “Resurrection” signals yet another step forward in a filmic journey that will surely shake the medium in the decades to come.
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5. The Mastermind
Typically occupied with the deconstruction of genre conventions as a means of feminist reclamation, Kelly Reichardt, with “The Mastermind,” continues this journey to entirely new ends that remain tethered to her career-long fascination with a nation on the downturn. A heist film as eventful as your average stroll through the park, Reichardt’s exploration of American capitalism as an ouroboros that complains about its own taste finds startling power in the gradual unravelling of that relaxed tone. In Reichardt’s world—in our world—we are all victims of our own short-sighted ambitions.
Wrapped in the warmth of her usual hushed visual and auditory command, “The Mastermind” fits snugly into Reichardt’s oeuvre while standing tall (as tall as leading man Josh O’Connor, at least) as a distinct layer in the onion that is the director’s view of a nation in shambles. The story of a man who loses himself in the allure of his own greed, “The Mastermind” never loses its own way in the sea of its endlessly cozy style, but rather underscores the acidity of that greed as a corrupting force that poisons the well beyond the point of no return before anyone even realizes that the water tastes funny.
4. Sirât
The sort of film that seeps beneath your skin and rattles your bones to the rhythm of a stripped-down bass beat, Óliver Laxe’s “Sirât” observes a cataclysmic world conflict from the margins, relegated to the perspectives of those who couldn’t care less because it’s all, in the end, the same rot infecting the world. Many films claim to be “about” music, but “Sirât” demonstrates such a thorough understanding of the bare-bones intuition at the core of its own rave-ready tunes, a reality made all the more affecting by the fact that the particular sensation intuited here is one of stifling dread and the inevitable crumbling of the will to live.
Equipped with little more than some wayward souls, those propulsive soundwaves and the vastness of the Moroccan desert filled with their echoes, Laxe crafts a vision of an ending world made numb by its own truths; it’s in these moments, then, that those wandering souls seek to find their own truth in what remains of their lives. In a film marked by those existential horrors of what’s left behind, “Sirât” itself leaves behind a burning sensation that latches itself to your inner essence, hoping to awaken that primal urge to move your body even when there’s nowhere left to go.
3. It Was Just An Accident
Jafar Panahi has spent pretty much the entirety of his career creating films as staunch political statements challenging the repressive practices of the Iranian regime; through all of these projects, though, the underlying moralism at their core has never dragged the quality of the films themselves down to mere didacticism, absent of storytelling merit. With “It Was Just An Accident,” Panahi continues this journey with possibly his most viscerally penetrating examination of what the specter of an abusive state can do to its people even when they appear to be freed from the absolute worst of its tendencies.
Perhaps “It Was Just An Accident” achieves this feeling precisely because the clutches of that regime continue to hold sway over every aspect of the local population’s lives, leaving little room to breathe a sigh of relief when the talons of oppression remain firmly wrapped around one’s throat. In his usual sense of stylistic restraint, Panahi discovers within his casually breathless long takes a firm understanding of how the righteousness we all believe to be a fundamental piece of our souls can wither away so quickly when the opportunity arises to carry out a potentially misplaced sense of justice.
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2. Urchin
Short of sprouting a pair of wings and soaring across the Western hemisphere, it might be safe to say that there’s little actor (and now writer-director) Harris Dickinson can’t do. With his scathingly empathetic directorial debut “Urchin,” Dickinson solidifies his position as one of the UK’s most promising and crucial rising talents, especially with regards to his perceptive understanding and depiction of a nation that turns its back on those who need its self-professed guidance most of all.
In “Urchin,” Frank Dillane embodies the naked realities of modern-day homelessness without an ounce of self-congratulation or self-pity, instead anchoring his performance with a respect for the character that such a character is gravely lacking in himself. From there, Dickinson, channeling his own past experiences as a volunteer in homelessness outreach programs, asks us to understand—if not necessarily sympathize with—the choices of a man whose only prerogative is to keep surviving until tomorrow. Sure to remain one of the best debut movies of 2025, “Urchin” signals the arrival of a new voice stemming from a familiar face—one whose chosen subject matter is treated with far more grace and urgency than most directors manage to achieve across their entire filmographies.
1. Sinners
From pretty much the beginning, Ryan Coogler has been a name pegged for directorial superstardom; his fresh Oakland perspective on an increasingly stale filmmaking scene has only ever been complemented by his undying enthusiasm for the art form he’s claimed as his own from such a young age. “Sinners” may not be Coogler’s best movie, but it’s certainly the culmination of all that cultural acumen and fervent artistic ambition, distilled into a horror period-piece that argues more for his value as an urgently needed storyteller than 100 exalting articles ever could.
Featuring twice as many Michael B. Jordans as your average Coogler feature (already a recipe for a guaranteed hit), “Sinners” exerts its importance as a piece of America, just as boisterous in its beauty as it is a layered unfurling of the nation’s ugliest tendencies. For Coogler, rhythm isn’t just a guiding force; it’s an unwavering piece of his DNA sequence, and in becoming a showcase for his own personal appreciation for music as a building block of his nation’s culture, “Sinners” manages to translate that hard-coded enthusiasm onto every last one of us. (Shout out to Coogler’s old college roommate, some guy named Ludwig.) Simply put, “Sinners” is precisely the sort of film that reminds you of the value of sitting in that dark room and letting the sound waves rock you all the way through to your bone marrow.
