2025: The Year the Movies Got Interesting Again
2025 was a very good year for cinema — partly because of what didn’t happen.
There was an almost complete absence of traditional mega-blockbusters. The biggest film of the year was, improbably, The Minecraft Movie. With the usual franchise machinery stalled, space opened up for smaller, stranger, more ambitious films — both in cinemas and on streaming platforms.
The result was one of the most interesting years for movies in a long time.
What follows are my favourite films of 2025, in no particular order — and what they might tell us about the moment we’re living through.
The Best Films of the Year
Palestine 36
An emotionally gripping and formally assured piece of filmmaking, Palestine 36 manages the rare trick of portraying the internal fractures within both Palestinian society and the British imperial administration in the run-up to the Arab Revolt, while still giving us characters we can believe in and care about.
The motif of the Ottoman handgun passed between children is perfect. The major weakness is the complete omission of the Jewish perspective, and Sam Riley does chew the scenery as a pro-Zionist officer. But even with those flaws, it’s an extraordinary film.
28 Years Later
I accidentally wandered onto the set while this was filming on Lindisfarne, and the North East setting proves essential to its power.
Some cinema-goers were shocked to discover this isn’t really a zombie film at all. It’s a metaphor for post-Brexit Britain: isolated, feral, and slowly forgetting what civilisation looked like. A mother-and-son road movie, a meditation on life and death, and a journey into the dark heart of ancient Albion.
The final scene — featuring parkour Jimmy Saviles — divided audiences. It worked for me. Alongside the survival of the Sycamore Gap tree, it reminds us this is a Britain whose timeline diverged from ours decades ago.
I Swear
A feel-good film, but only after a lot of feel-bad.
Based on the life of John Davidson and the 1989 documentary John’s Not Mad, it charts life before and after a Tourette’s diagnosis with remarkable sensitivity. Robert Aramayo gives an extraordinary performance, supported by a brilliant cast including Maxine Peake.
Warm, humane, and earned.
One Battle After Another
For many, the film of the year — and with good reason.
Leonardo DiCaprio plays an ageing 60s radical, permanently stoned and locked out of his own passwords. Sean Penn is an ageing reactionary desperate to be accepted into some shadowy right-wing conspiracy. It would have been an Oscar juggernaut if not for its subject matter.
It slightly overreaches in its ambition to be a capital-C Classic, but it’s still a monster of a film, and probably the best ever Thomas Pynchon adaptation.
Tornado
Tim Roth and Jack Lowden lead a band of brigands in late-18th-century Scotland who cross paths with two Japanese circus performers.
Swords are drawn. Blood is shed. Gold is stolen.
I loved it.
Bugonia
Yorgos Lanthimos reunites with Emma Stone, this time alongside Jesse Plemons.
Two conspiracy theorists kidnap a corporate CEO, convinced she’s an alien from Andromeda plotting to wipe out humanity by killing all the honeybees. Stone’s CEO denies the bee genocide, but does admit to killing the dinosaurs.
A sharp, funny, unsettling commentary on how paranoid fringe fantasies are now imposed on the rest of us, whether we consent or not.
HIM
Jordan Peele’s latest horror didn’t get glowing reviews, but I thought it was superb.
A rising football star is invited to train at an isolated compound run by a legendary quarterback, only to discover a cult-like world of obsession, sacrifice and horror. Think Suspiria, but with American football instead of ballet, and a bonkers, bloody finale.
Sport, Horror and Dictators
There were several sport-horror hybrids this year — including The Long Walk, a brutal Stephen King adaptation, and a fun but shallow remake of The Running Man.
Sport is spectacle. Dictators love spectacle. It’s no coincidence that these films flourished in an America being reshaped by Trump. Authoritarian politics relies on violence, or at least the constant threat of it, to keep populations quiescent.
Sports-horror feels like the cinema catching up with that reality. If only for those more innocent times when Trump was limited to the Rumbelows Cup Semi Final draw:
Thrillers Are Back
Another welcome trend was the return of tight, mid-budget thrillers.
September 5, which covers the 1972 Munich massacre from the perspective of the ABC newsroom, is a standout. Journalists argue about ethics while realising they have a camera crew inside the athletes’ village as Black September take hostages.
Studios once made these films routinely. James Coburn and Lee Marvin built careers on them. Then franchises and superheroes crowded them out.
Now they’re back: Black Bag, The Amateur, Relay. Even Kathryn Bigelow’s House of Dynamite — flawed by its Rashomon structure and acronym overload — shows how hungry audiences are for intelligent adult cinema again. The Order – in which the US far right fight the Jude Law, and the Jude Law won.
Monsters, Fantasy and Reality
The last 20 years have been a golden age for sci-fi, fantasy and horror, and 2025 continued that trend.
I always assumed this was down to technology and a new generation of writers. But after a week photographing the Sitges Festival of Cinema Fantàstic, I realised something else is going on.
We live in a world where many people no longer distinguish between reality and fantasy — and actively want the rest of us to accept their paranoid delusions as fact. Those of us raised on horror and sci-fi tend to have a better grasp of where fantasy ends and reality begins.
That irony feels important.
Vampires, Frankensteins and Wolves
Three major classic horror adaptations landed this year.
Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu is beautiful but toothless. Bill Skarsgård’s vampire is neither sexy, scary nor cool — just odd. Without a compelling monster, it never quite bites.
Luc Besson’s Dracula reframes the story as a doomed romance. It’s ravishing, and the love story works, though the gargoyles do not. I got to photograph Besson and Zoe Bleu at Sitges, which was a real privilege.
Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is the triumph: gorgeous, humane, terrifying, with a compelling monster and a believable love story. The best of the bunch by far.
And judging by Sitges, we’re about to be buried under wolfman movies.
Superheroes, Immigration and MAGA Rage
The two biggest superhero films of the year were Superman and Fantastic Four. Both were fun — which made me wonder why superhero movies stopped being fun in the first place.
Their optimism felt oddly subversive in an America that has lost touch with its own values.
Superman, after all, is an undocumented asylum seeker who arrives in the US as an unaccompanied child and makes his name fighting fascists. He was created by the sons of Jewish immigrants fleeing pogroms — a New Deal fantasy of decency and solidarity.
That history is deeply inconvenient for MAGA America, which is why it was quietly downplayed. Even so, the US right still denounced the film as “woke”.
Captain America 4 enraged them too — the first film with a Black Captain America. The movie itself is messy, but its box office success suggests something else: mainstream America does not live in the same cultural universe as MAGA.
The reason is brutally simple. The people with disposable income — the people advertisers want — are educated, urban, socially liberal and often diverse. Studios make films for them, not for conspiracy-soaked reactionaries.
Even Superman is now “too woke” for a country run by wannabe super-villains.
A Better Year Than We Deserved
There were plenty of bad films — dumbed-down sludge where characters explain the plot to each other in case the audience isn’t paying attention. Electric State cost Netflix $350m and was unwatchable. The Gorge was so bad I had to watch it twice to be sure. Predator Badlands wasn’t just a bad movie, the entire concept of the movie from start to finish was shit. Ice Cube’s War of the Worlds was by far the worst. No plane journey is long enough to watch this. WOTW is an brilliant story, the death of HMS Thunderchild protecting small boats strung out across the channel is brilliant, foretelling both Dunkirk, and the current migrant crisis. Get the twist – it’s not a virus that destroys the aliens. its a computer virus. Fucking radical dude.
But 2025 still felt like a turning point.
Cinema became weird again. Political again. Adult again. Genre films carried the industry while franchises stalled. Optimism returned in unexpected places.
If movies reflect the world we live in — and the one we fear — then 2025 suggests that imagination, complexity and hope are not quite dead yet.
And in a year like this, that feels like something worth celebrating.