The ultimate films of 2025 by genre

Audiences continued to defy the critics in 2025, with two widely panned films – “A Minecraft Movie” and the live-action remake of “Lilo & Stitch” – dominating the box office. Here are some of the films the critics did like, a few of which were also commercial hits.

Drama

Based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about two Black boys who meet at a brutal reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida, RaMell Ross’ “Nickel Boys” is a “miracle” of a movie, said Little White Lies. Shot entirely from the points of view of its two protagonists, it is ambitious, innovative, complex – and completely riveting.

In “A Real Pain”, two ill-matched Jewish Americans travel to Poland to honour their late grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, said Empire. By turns “funny, solemn” and anguished, the film features superb performances from its writer-director Jesse Eisenberg, as the strait-laced one, and Kieran Culkin as his cousin, a loudmouthed but vulnerable wastrel.

“Seven years in the making and three-and-a-half hours in the watching (including a 15-minute intermission)”, “The Brutalist” stars Adrien Brody as a Hungarian-Jewish architect who flees Europe in 1947 to chase the American dream, said The Times. With shades of “Citizen Kane” and Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo”, it is a beautifully shot, “savagely” well-acted film of “immense ideas”.

Biopic

James Mangold’s “easy-watching” Bob Dylan biopic, “A Complete Unknown”, covers four years in the musician’s life, from his arrival in New York in 1961, aged 19, to the festival where he betrayed his folkie friends by turning electric. It may not please purists, said The New York Times, but Timothée Chalamet captures Dylan well – even if he never looks or sounds quite as cool as Dylan once did – and the film doesn’t make the mistake of trying to make its subject seem likeable, or knowable.

“I Swear”, about the life of the Scottish Tourette’s campaigner John Davidson, is a “lovable underdog” tale of a familiar sort, said Empire. But you forgive its occasional clichés, because it is beautifully acted, genuinely moving, illuminating – and “very, very funny”.

Thriller

In “Sinners”, Michael B. Jordan plays a dual role as twins – former Al Capone-era gangsters who open a blues bar in 1930s Mississippi, in defiance of the Ku Klux Klan, only to be beset by vampires. A bold genre mash-up, the film is not perfect, said The Times, but it is so audacious, and so assured, “it is impossible not to be moved”.

In “September 5”, the terrorist attack on the 1972 Munich Olympics is told from the point of view of the ABC journalists and crew covering the events, said The Observer. Largely filmed with handheld cameras, and making use of original news footage, it is “nail-chewing, edge-of-the-seat stuff”.

“Black Bag”, from the ever-busy Steven Soderbergh, is tremendous fun, said Empire – think “Ocean’s 11”, with spies instead of robbers. Cool and confident, with a punchy script, it stars Michael Fassbender as a counter-intelligence officer who is given a list of suspected traitors within the agency – and finds that his own wife and colleague (Cate Blanchett) is on it.

Like “‘Point Break’ on crystal meth”, “The Surfer” features a gonzo performance from Nicolas Cage as a late-middle-aged man who returns to his childhood home in Australia, only to fall foul of an aggressive gang of local surfers. This “sun-scorched psychodrama” is wildly overblown, said The Times – and highly entertaining.

“Islands” is a far slower burn, but sizzling all the same, said London’s The Standard. Set in the Canary Islands, this Hitchcock-influenced arthouse piece stars Sam Riley as a perpetually hungover tennis coach who is drawn into something sinister when an English family arrives at the resort hotel where he works.

The low-budget neo-noir thriller “Gazer” stars Ariella Mastroianni (who also co-wrote) as a woman with a condition that means she can’t grasp time. It occasionally loses focus, said the Financial Times, but is generally taut, tense and “propulsive”, and is brilliantly acted.

Indie

Eva Victor’s “bracingly funny, tender” debut feature “Sorry, Baby” is about a young academic named Agnes coming to terms with a sexual assault she experienced as a student, said Empire. It’s a familiar theme, post-#MeToo, but this film is more sophisticated than some. Agnes (Victor) has been affected by what she calls the “bad thing”, but she has kept going, and it has not overwhelmed her life.

In the subtle coming-of-age drama “Good One”, Lily Collias plays Sam, a teenager who ends up on a hiking trip with her divorced father and his friend. Not much happens, said Sight and Sound, but an event round the campfire reverberates through the last act – and will, you suspect, profoundly affect Sam’s life.

“The Mastermind”, by Kelly Reichardt, is a heist movie with a difference. Set in Massachusetts in the early 1970s, and starring Josh O’Connor as a failing middle-class dad, it gets the robbery out of the way early, then focuses on the plan’s slow unravelling.

Comedy

Some films acclaimed as their director’s masterpiece are an eat-your-vegetables slog, said the BBC; but not Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another”. A comedy-action-thriller about a retired left-wing revolutionary (Leonardo DiCaprio) called back into the fray, it is wildly entertaining.

On a less ambitious scale is “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy”. In this fourth outing, Bridget (Renée Zellweger) is a widowed mother of two, ready to start dating again. Billed as a final chapter, the film is short on laughs and its romantic arc fails to convince, said Sight and Sound – but fans loved it, and many wept.

For non-stop laughs, try “The Naked Gun”, a reboot of the spoof classics, said the LA Times. Liam Neeson puts on his best gravelly voice to play Jack Drebin, the son of Leslie Nielsen’s Frank; Pamela Anderson has fun as his femme fatale; and Danny Huston is the Musk-like villain. It’s a complete riot.

Finally, a mention for “The Ballad of Wallis Island”, a funny, touching British film about a devoted fan trying to reunite his favourite folk duo.

Documentary

“Apocalypse in the Tropics” looks at the forces that helped propel the “populist strongman” Jair Bolsonaro to power in Brazil, said the FT. It explains that evangelical Christians now account for 30% of the population (up from 5% only a few decades ago), and depicts right-wing televangelists as “puppet masters” with an alarming degree of clout.

“Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story” is an engaging portrait of the late novelist, said Variety, from her humble roots in Co. Clare, in the 1930s, through a difficult marriage, to literary acclaim in Swinging London – and beyond. Containing O’Brien’s own reflections, delivered shortly before her death, aged 93, it is a “fitting tribute” to a writer who lived her long life to the full.

Stitched together from police bodycam footage, Geeta Gandbhir’s “The Perfect Neighbor” examines the events leading up to the shooting of a Black mother of four in Florida by her unstable neighbour – an elderly white woman who’d repeatedly called the police to complain about local children.

Foreign language

A drama about cheese? You don’t get much more French than that, said The Guardian. The tale of a teenage boy from a struggling family of comté-makers in the Jura region, “Holy Cow” is “a social-realist drama”, with a non-professional cast, that is warm, funny and fundamentally optimistic.

Less so is Walter Salles’ “beautiful, gutting” film “I’m Still Here”, said The New York Times. It tells the true story of Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres), an activist and mother of five who lived a blissful life in Rio, until her politician husband was taken away during Brazil’s military dictatorship in 1971, and never seen again.

Shot in secret, Mohammad Rasoulof’s “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” is a “rumblingly tense parable-thriller” about a family in Tehran, said The Daily Telegraph. The father’s job, as a judge for the Revolutionary Court, gives them a good life, but anti-government protests are brewing; and when a brutal police crackdown follows, the children see that their father is part of the problem.

Animation

Made in Latvia, Oscar-winning “Flow” is about various animals trying to cross a flooded landscape. None of them can talk (this is not “Madagascar”), and with no humans around – only the traces of their presence – there is no dialogue, said The Daily Telegraph. Yet you never feel the need for even a line of exposition in this “wondrous”, mysterious, family-friendly animation.

For a more conventional kids’ film, try “The Bad Guys 2”, said The Guardian, which reunites the cuddly animal criminals for one last heist. It is snappier and funnier than the original, and contains a “sweet message about friendship”.

When film historians look at the important films of the 2020s, it will be “KPop Demon Hunters” they home in on, said The Times. This kitsch musical-horror crossover follows a female K-pop trio who fight ghouls in their spare time, but it’s really about the pressures that affect an entire digital-native generation. A massive Netflix hit, it is giddy and glorious and has great songs.