films of 2025

Thank you for all your festive movie recommendations, which will keep me busy over the next couple of weeks. I thought I’d add a few more general recommendations to the list, taken from one of the two new journals I’ve been keeping this year. 2025 has been an interesting journaling year for me: I’ve kept a separate gardening notebook for the first time (which has been useful in all sorts of documentary and forward-planning ways) and I’ve also enjoyed recording and making notes about all the films I’ve watched. Turning the pages of my cinematic journal this morning, I can see that so far, in 2025, Tom and I have watched 111 films. This might seem like a lot, but since we replaced our TV with a projector which allows us to have a mini-big-screen experience here at home, we seem to have many more movie nights, particularly during the dark nights of winter. We are also lucky enough to have Scotland’s best small cinema right on our doorstep, where we enjoy many new releases. So, looking back through my journal, here are a few notes about some of the great and not-so-great films I’ve seen this year

2025’s Cinematic Seasons

The journal has reminded me of the many cinematic “seasons” we enjoyed in 2025. There were Gene Hackman and Robert Redford seasons, for obvious reasons, and we also had a season focused on a few “big” films which, for one reason or another, one of us had never seen. My notes for Dirty Dancing, suggest that what I found most interesting about this blockbuster, so beloved of my teenage contemporaries which for some reason I’d avoided until this year, was its “non-judgemental representation of abortion that in retrospect sadly seems quite radical.” As a first-see in 2025, Dirty Dancing surprised me in quite a good way, as did Close Encounters of the Third Kind, with Richard Dreyfus’s happy willingness to abandon everything and sail away with his tuba-tooting extra-terrestrial pals.

2025’s best one liners

My film journal also serves as a useful record of Tom’s memorable cinematic responses (he being much less of a journal-er than I am). While my reviews tend towards the wordy and analytical, Tom has an enviable ability to sum up a film, or the experience of watching it, with an amusing or apposite one-liner. Here are my favourite Tom one-liners from 2025:

The Lost Bus: “The Wages of Fear with 7 year olds in place of the nitroglycerin”

The Return: As Juliet Binoche’s Penelope opened a door to discover a blood-drenched Ulysses (Ralph Fiennes) and a chamber full of slaughtered suitors, Tom turned to me and said, “soz, love, things all got a bit out of hand.” The perfect summary of this film.

2025’s most meh: One Battle After Another

We saw One Battle After Another at the cinema and both of us really disliked it. I’ve often tried (and failed) to get on with Paul Thomas Anderson, but his films generally leave me cold, confused, or irritated. So perhaps it’s just me, but I was all three of these things after One Battle After Another, and I have to say I find the near universal acclaim focused on this film genuinely confounding.The entry in my journal reads: “An old, familiar patriarchal anxiety dream about how men can never be really certain that their progeny is theirs. The first half of the film objectifies and exoticises black female sexuality in a tediously predictable way while the second half is an equally predictable my-two-dads and daughter-in-peril caper. . . “

“. . . De Caprio is self-consciously channelling Arthur Dent while Sean Penn chews up the scenery with maximum ham and cheese. Disfigurement / disability is played for laughs in a particularly unpleasant way, and the whole thing seems completely emptied of political impact despite ostensibly dealing with some of this moment’s key political issues.”

Is it just me? Did you enjoy One Battle After Another?

2025’s best new-to-me old film: Cutter’s Way (1981)

I wrote quite a lot about Cutter’s Way in my journal, which suggests how much it has stayed with me. Here are some extracts: “A highly original post-Vietnam neo-noir, similar in many respects to Night Moves (1975) though I think this is probably the better film. Jeff Bridges plays a drifting, bored, sex-addicted WASP who has escaped the draft while John Heard is his friend who has returned from Vietnam with a disability, PTSD, addiction issues, and (anti) patriotic paranoia. Though the film purportedly focuses on Cutter and Bone’s investigation of a crime in which the latter is implicated, you see nothing of the prime suspect, who is only ever glimpsed in passing until a meeting in the film’s final, extraordinary scenes. Rampant misogyny: all women in the film are disposable sexual objects who inevitably end up dead. But Cutter’s girlfriend, though playing the stereotypical “between men” role, is also someone whose cynicism, alcoholism and disillusion reveals the second-hand effects of wartime trauma upon those who care for those who return. Every character is in a different way hollowed out by their historical moment and the representation of disabled masculinity is interesting and unusual.”

2025’s worst new-to-me old film: When Eight Bells Toll (1971)

My journal reads: “Anthony Hopkins attempts to play an action hero in this awful sub-Bond British “thriller”, but ends up, in his wetsuit, channelling morph instead.”

Best films of 2025

We saw a lot of good films at the cinema this year, my top three being I Swear, Islands, and A Real Pain. My favourite films of the year, however, did not make it to the Campbeltown Picture House and were streamed from our BFI subscription. Here they are.

Number 3: Holy Cow (French title, Vingt Dieux). Dir. Louise Courvoisier

A moving coming of age story about cheese, but without the cheese. My journal notes: “in a cultural landscape where discussions of teenage masculinity have become very negatively charged and overdetermined (per Stephen Grahams Adolescence), I found this candid, unsentimental film highly refreshing. An American production would have had to have had a feel-good ending; a British one would have made the narrative more kooky, with potential attendant struggles with comedic tone. This is very French and makes none of those mistakes: there is no easy resolution and it is not trying too hard to be funny. The scene of a cow giving birth – in which two dramatic crises are occurring entirely independently of one another – is a directorial tour-de-force” Louise Courvoisier, Chapeau!

Number 2: Santosh. Dir. Sandhya Suri.

This superb Hindi-language film, directed by Sandhya Suri, stars the brilliant Shahana Goswami as a widow who inherits her deceased husband’s job as a police officer in rural northern India, and who becomes involved in the investigation of the murder of a Dalit teenage girl. Banned, or rather “indefinitely delayed” from cinematic release in India, this is a film whose combination of documentary realism and noir-ish investigative crime is highly innovative, while its exploration of misogyny, casteism and sectarianism is nuanced and thought-provoking. Most of all, though, Santosh is a gripping thriller about the way in which power can take many different forms. It is available to watch on many streaming services. Do try to see it.

Number 1: Nickel Boys. Dir. RaMell Ross

Nickel Boys was released at the end of 2024/ start of 2025, and perhaps this timing, together with the weird twists and turns of a profoundly weird year, mean that the film has been, on this side of the Atlantic at least, far less well-discussed than it should have been (why on earth are we all still talking about The Salt Path)? Creating any film from Colson Whitehead’s novel would have been quite something, but making this film is an astounding achievement. Set in an abusive reform school in segregation-era Tallahassee, the unique first-person narrative style of Nickel Boys really is its substance too. Here’s why: Hollywood has a history of sidelining black characters in films that purport to deal with America’s black experience (I’m looking at you, Mississippi Burning, with your displacement of racial injustice onto the violated body of a white woman) and Nickel Boys offers a POV poke-in-the-eye to decades of cinematic whitewashing, silence, and racist mis-representation by engaging with black characters from the inside-out rather than the outside-in. Cinematic experiences of all kinds are routinely described as “immersive” but Nickel Boys is unarguably, importantly so: because the viewer experiences the film as Elwood and Turner, there is no opportunity to look away, to deny, or to refuse to feel its truth. That truth really hit home for me, and here’s some of what I said, after watching it back in January, in my journal: “Nickel Boys is never visually exploitative (which some films of this nature can have a tendency towards in their necessary depictions of brutality) nor is it remotely sentimental (there are no easy Shawshank moments here). Despite the grim reality of this narrative and the terrible tragedy at its heart, Nickel Boys manages to celebrate black resilience, hope and human connection in an extraordinarily powerful way. The way that the story is told through perceived material objects and textures that are linked, in the end, to grave site archaeology is utterly jaw-dropping: so moving, so innovative, so well done. Best film of the year so far.” My best film of the year full stop.

What were your best and worst films of 2025? Tell me!