- 50 best films of 2025: No 50 to 31
- 50 best films of 2025: No 30 to 21
- 50 best films of 2025: No 20 to 11
10. One Battle After Another
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. A loose variation on Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, the latest from the most acclaimed American director of his generation piles hurtling action on accumulating unease as a nation eats itself alive. Full review
9. Babygirl
Directed by Halina Reijn. Nicole Kidman’s high-powered chief executive risks career and perfect family for a torrid affair with Harris Dickinson’s younger intern in a darkly comic, endlessly provocative thriller about power, identity and kink. Full review
8. Pillion
Directed by Harry Lighton. This tale of a shy young man (Harry Melling) who becomes sexual submissive to a handsome biker (Alexander Skarsgard) proves to be sweeter and funnier than the synopsis suggests. Full review
7. Flow
Directed by Gints Zilbalodis. Wordless, visually spectacular, Oscar-winning animation in which a black cat and a small group of animals – a dog, a capybara, a lemur and a secretary bird – try to survive a disastrous flood, forging unlikely friendships on their adventure towards land. Full review
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6. Nickel Boys
Directed by RaMell Ross. Ross’s decision to use a subjective camera for his adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel about life in a 1960s reform school proves inspired. The sense of enclosure could hardly be more appropriate. Full review
5. On Falling
Directed by Laura Carreira. A young Portuguese woman in Scotland struggles with loneliness, alienation and grinding poverty as she works mind-numbing shifts at a warehouse in a condemnatory portrait of the gig economy. Full review
4. April
Directed by Dea Kulumbegashvili. Cerebral, forbidding Georgian film about an obstetrician who, after facilitating abortions, gets caught up in a legal vortex that threatens her career. Often coldly naturalistic. Often borderline abstract. Full review
3. It Was Just an Accident
Directed by Jafar Panahi. After a minor car crash, an ordinary Iranian man becomes ensnared in an escalating plot of revenge. A tense, unsettling thriller about justice, guilt, authoritarian cruelty and nervy uncertainty. Winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes.
2. Sorry, Baby
Directed by Eva Victor. A literature lecturer contemplates a recent sexual assault in a film that somehow manages to work comedy into an inherently traumatic situation. Every character is conceived with masterful precision. Full review
1. The Brutalist
Directed by Brady Corbet. A Hungarian architect, after surviving the Holocaust, emigrates to the US and strives to build a masterpiece in an appropriately epic, sweeping drama about alienation, trauma, Judaism and the immigrant dream. The film itself – lavish on a modest budget – feels as ambitious as the mad project the protagonist constructs in a Pennsylvanian field. Full review
