As the credits roll on 2025, we’re left with a slate of movies that will almost certainly be remembered among the decade’s best. From immaculate studio blockbusters from some of our favorite auteurs to handcrafted indie breakouts and intellectually stimulating international titles, it was a rich year for cinephiles willing to look beneath the surface.
There was something for everyone this year, but IndieWire’s annual critics survey sought to find consensus on a diverse collection of movies. 148 critics hailing from six continents participated in the survey, with film writers from IndieWire, The Hollywood Reporter, Filmmaker Magazine, Film Comment, Screen International, Reverse Shot, The Irish Times, Der Spiegel, BBC Culture, The Boston Globe, Vulture, Rolling Stone, The Film Stage, Toronto Star, and many more contributing their thoughts on the year’s best films. The top 50 films included a healthy mix of Oscar frontrunners, box office hits, and the kinds of hidden gems that you’d be forgiven for missing amid all of the other excitement that 2025 brought.
The complete results and more information about the methodology behind the survey can be found here. Keep reading for the survey participants’ favorite films of 2025.
50. “Scarlet”
Image Credit: Sony
Director: Mamoru Hosada
Cast: Mana Ashida, Kôji Yakusho
Read IndieWire’s Review: “Scarlet” amounts to a frustrating waste of animating and directorial skill for the price of an excessively ordinary story. The sheer scale of Hosoda’s success may have softened his storytelling instincts, even if the aesthetics are occasionally remarkable. Having written his past four movies alone, it may be time for Hosoda to consider collaborating once again. And maybe not with Shakespeare.
49. “April”
Image Credit: Metrograph Pictures
Director: Dea Kulumbegashvili
Cast: Ia Sukhitashvili
Read IndieWire’s Review: “April,” which was produced by Luca Guadagnino, is unavoidably confronted by a degree of dead-end despair, but Kulumbegashvili is too earthy and open-hearted an artist to let that ugliness curdle into exploitation. Rather than settling for easy shock, she leverages Nina’s plight into a ferocious tug-of-war between sacrifice and self-obliteration — one set against the emergent warmth of a Georgian spring, which blooms under purple skies left behind by thunder clouds that sweep low over the fields like a threat from heaven. In the shallow focus close-ups that refocus the film’s terror, Sukhitashvili’s face becomes a landscape unto itself, the sunken beauty of her cheekbones hollowed out by years of holding her breath.
48. “Orwell 2 + 2 = 5”
Image Credit: Atlantic Releasing
Director: Raoul Peck
Read IndieWire’s Review: Peck, a Haitian filmmaker whose work has always had a strong political bent, is best known for his 2016 essay film “I Am Not Your Negro,”which uses the unfinished James Baldwin manuscript “Remember This House” as the skeleton for an examination of the deaths of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. “Orwell” plays like a spiritual successor to his Oscar-nominated breakthrough, mixing Orwell’s writings and letters — narrated by “Homeland” star Damian Lewis — with archival photographs, footage from various adaptations of “1984” (including the 1956 version starring Edmund O’Brien as bureaucrat Winston and the version starring John Hurt released on the actual year), footage from other movies ranging from “Oliver Twist” to “Notting Hill,” and modern day news reports to argue how Orwell’s fears of a totalitarian state have already come true.
47. “Familiar Touch”
Image Credit: Sarah Friedland
Director: Sarah Friedland
Cast: Kathleen Chalfant
Read IndieWire’s Review: In “Familiar Touch,” filmmaker Sarah Friedland’s achingly intimate drama, we follow Ruth as she attempts to acclimate to her new life (and where it will eventually take her) over the course of her early days in the home and, specifically, in its memory care unit. Friedland, who also wrote the film‘s script, is not given over to histrionics or blaring displays of emotion, instead asking us to follow Ruth and experience the world through her eyes. The impact is profound.
46. “The Tale of Silyan”
Image Credit: National Geographic
Director: Tamara Kotevska
Read IndieWire’s Review: For this new film, Kotevska leaned into two themes she says are key to her work: migration and environmental change. She found in her subject Nikola, a near-elderly man (certainly at retirement age or very close to it), and his family, a personification of both topics. In their home country of North Macedonia, government policy has allowed for the price of the crops Nikola and his family farm from soil they’ve tilled for generations to go ever lower — to the point that farming is not a sustainable industry any longer. Kotevska turns her camera on agonizing scenes of Nikola and his family all but abandoning their potatoes, along with watermelon and other crops, and leaving them to rot because selling them makes no sense. Suddenly, an entire livelihood, and with it a way of life, has ended. It’s the height of drama, but Kotevska is more interested in quiet observation, elegant compositions, and subtle connections.
45. “The Naked Gun”
Image Credit: Paramount
Director: Akiva Schaffer
Cast: Liam Neeson, Pamela Anderson
Read IndieWire’s Review: And while the prospect of retooling a cop sendup like “The Naked Gun” might seem to smack of the same reactionary conservatism that has spurred the rest of America’s recent comeback stories (e.g., measles, coal mines, the McDonald’s Snack Wrap), Schaffer’s version manages to capture the classic spoof magic without turning back the clock. That’s a delicate tango in the context of an increasingly rare — or all but obsolete — studio movie that exists for no other purpose than to make people laugh, but it’s one this hilarious new take on the old ZAZ masterpiece pulls off with a rose between its teeth.
44. “Peter Hujar’s Day”
Image Credit: Sideshow/Janus Films
Director: Ira Sachs
Cast: Ben Whishaw, Rebecca Hall
Read IndieWire’s Review: Ben Whishaw again proves himself as the brilliant actor we all knew he was, if we were looking closely enough, in Ira Sachs‘ “Peter Hujar’s Day.” The film, set in 1974 New York City, is an intimate two-hander starring just Whishaw and Rebecca Hall as gay photographer Peter Hujar and writer Linda Rosenkrantz, respectively. They gathered, it’s true, on a cold day in December, where Hujar recounts all the events of the previous one, which involved photo opportunities with Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, and a lot of quotidian nothingness. But those small moments of a day grow profound as Peter’s winding monologue wears on. Writer/director Sachs’ extraordinary new movie never breaks from the pair, and at times becomes like a documentary about the greatness of the actors themselves, Mozart possessing the soundtrack as Sachs and cinematographer Alex Ashe take longing, lingering B-roll of the performers.
43. “Come See Me in the Good Light”
Image Credit: Tripod Media/Amplify Pictures
Director: Ryan White
Read IndieWire’s Review: Ahead of the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election, political commentators on both sides of the aisle compared the fraught voting process to a kind of national biopsy. Now, “Come See Me in the Good Light” — a striking and airy documentary about genderqueer poet Andrea Gibson and their harrowing battle with ovarian cancer — is premiering at Sundance 2025against a flurry of new anti-LGBTQ steps recently taken by President Trump.
Director Ryan White delivers this touching look at the fragility of human life at an essential time for queer and trans people in media. White’s atypical portrait of Gibson — reminiscent of something like the tragicomic “50/50” from 2011 — relies on intimate beauty and sharp humor to champion the poet’s art, identity, and partner Megan Falley (also a poet) with optimism and vigor.
42. “Bring Her Back”
Image Credit: A24
Directors: Danny and Michael Philippou
Cast: Billy Barratt, Sally Hawkins, Mischa Heywood, Jonah Wren Phillips
Read IndieWire’s Review: Australian filmmakers Danny and Michael Philippou solidified A24’s signature horror reign with 2022’s twisted and evil-spirits-summoning “Talk to Me,” about a party game gone horrifyingly awry for a group of teen friends. They’ve upped the stakes with a more gruesomely disturbing but seriously, conceptually half-baked new thriller, “Bring Her Back,” in which Sally Hawkins is psychotically good and in an unhinged, manically grieving form we’ve never seen her in.
41. “Souleymane’s Story”
Image Credit: Kino Lorber
Director: Boris Lojkine
Cast: Abou Sangare
Read IndieWire’s Review: Boris Lojkine’s new film “Souleymane’s Story” follows its eponymous immigrant over the course of two days leading up to his asylum interview with OFPRA. A straightforward social realist drama, it invokes the traditions of films like “I, Daniel Blake” and “Tori and Lokita” by illustrating the Sisyphean tasks that vulnerable people can be subjected to while navigating the government bureaucracies that are ostensibly supposed to help them. But it also applies a modern touch to the subgenre by placing the unique challenges posed by the gig economy front and center.
40. “Put Your Soul in Your Hand and Walk”
Image Credit: Water Dreams Productions
Director: Sepideh Farsi
Read IndieWire’s Review: On April 15, 2025, it was announced that “Put Your Soul in Your Hand and Walk” — a series of filmed video conversations between Iranian documentarian Sepideh Farsi and 25-year-old Palestinian photojournalist, Fatma Hassona — would play in the ACID strand of the Cannes FilmFestival. On April 16, as they slept in their home in Gaza City, Fatma, Walaa, Alaa, Yazan, Mohammed, and Muhannad Hassona were killed by an Israeli airstrike. Fatma’s parents were wounded and father Raed died later from his injuries.
39. “Twinless:
Image Credit: Republic Pictures
Director: James Sweeney
Cast: Dylan O’Brien, James Sweeney
Read IndieWire’s Review: It’s hard to write — and direct, produce, and star in — something with a great premise. I’d imagine it’s even harder to junk that premise after 20 pages in favor of committing to a different one altogether. But James Sweeney’s “Twinless” is a film that hinges on the suppleness of the stories we tell about ourselves (among several other things), and this confident, clever, and cuttingly dark comedy almost never misses a chance to indulge in the courage of its convictions, especially when those convictions feel oh so wrong.
38. “La Grazia”
Image Credit: MUBI
Director: Paolo Sorrentino
Cast: Toni Servillo, Anna Ferzetti, Massimo Venturiello
Read IndieWire’s Review: “Bureaucracy is meant to be slow,” the President of Italy (Tony Servillo) explains to a member of his inner circle. “That’s the point: to give people time to reflect.” But how much time is too much, and what good is reflection for a lame duck politician with six months left in his final term and a seemingly clinical inability to make any difficult choices before he leaves office?
So far as we can tell at the start of Paolo Sorrentino’s uncharacteristically sedate and sexless “La Grazia,” which feels like forced Catholic penance for the Neapolitan flesh parade of last year’s poorly received “Parthenope,” reflection is just about the only thing the unnamed President has done for most of the last seven years. A widowed jurist whose even-keeled — or completely dormant — personality convinced the people of Italy that he was the right man to rescue them from an economic crisis of some kind, the President bored the problem into submission pretty fast, and has spent the rest of his residency at the Quirinale staring into the middle distance and thinking about his dead wife, Aurora.
37. “BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions”
Image Credit: Kahlil Joseph
Director: Kahlil Joseph
Read IndieWire’s Review: There are 21 “tracks” in total on the 2025 version of the “BLKNWS” mixtape. They include stream of consciousness sequences focused on Black diasporic culture sourced from YouTube clips, social media posts, memes, archival footage, Black encyclopedia entries, and vignettes of family memoir from Joseph. A fictional, afro-futurist tale of a transatlantic ocean liner called The Nautica makes up several tracks, as well as a historical docudrama about the life and work of the scholar W.E.B. DuBois. This marks the first time Joseph has weaved fictional narrative storytelling into the overall “BLKNWS” project. To reference the influential cultural historian Saidiya Hartman, one of the writers and foundational appearances in the film, this is an act of “critical fabulation” to normalize and imagine the so-called “wayward lives” of figures whose voices are often missing from historical archives.
36. “Die My Love”
Image Credit: MUBI
Director: Lynne Ramsay
Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson
Read IndieWire’s Review: Co-written with Enda Walsh and Alice Birch from a novel by Ariana Harwicz, “Die My Love” is a two-hour cinematic miasma of what it’s like to be in postpartum depression hell and possessed by a sexual appetite that could never possibly be quenched by even someone as hot as Robert Pattinson. As such, it will be a tough sell for even Lawrence’s most ardent fans. The story offers little to hook us onto other than Grace’s constant flailing through psychosis, visually realized by cinematographer Seamus McGarvey with the feeling of a bad dream you wake up from in a heated, unforgiving sweat. The atmosphere of this fugue-state-turned-panic-attack of a film is never not intoxicating. As Grace spins out in a hothouse countryside beset by ever-buzzing flies — inescapable swelter and tall grass abound — you can all but feel the ticks and Lyme disease consuming you.
35. “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl”
Image Credit: A24
Director: Rungano Nyoni
Cast: Susan Chardy, Elizabeth Chisela, Roy Chisha, Blessings Bhamjee
Read IndieWire’s Review: Decades of mediocre Sundance movies — and some very good ones, too — have conditioned us to expect certain things from culturally specific dramas about young people who return home from the big city and find themselves struggling to reconcile modern identity with family tradition. These characters invariably feel at odds with the heritage that forged them, only to discover something vital and profound about the past they were so quick to leave behind. At the end of the story, they return to their fast-paced lives in London or L.A. or wherever with a new sense of self-possession — one that reflects the grace and strength they’ve inherited from the generations who came before them.
Rungano Nyoni’s lucid and incandescently furious “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl” is a stiff middle finger to such wishful thinking. Set in a middle-class Zambian suburb that’s located at a well-trafficked but poorly maintained intersection between global influences and Bemba mores, the “I Am Not a Witch” filmmaker’s second feature tells the story of a Westernized young woman who’s forced to hold her extended family tree together by its roots during a crisis that leaves her wanting to rip the whole thing out of the earth with her bare hands.
34. “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere”
Image Credit: Searchlight Pictures
Director: Scott Cooper
Cast: Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong
Read IndieWire’s Review: “Deliver Me from Nowhere” — that’s what we’re calling it — is a semi-desolate sketch of a biopic about a depressed 32-year-old man who channel surfs across a much better movie on TV one night in the fall of 1981. The man is Bruce Springsteen (a possessed Jeremy Allen White), the movie is Terrence Malick’s “Badlands,” and its story of a Korean War vet who takes his 15-year-old girlfriend on a killing spree across the American heartland gives the wayward rock god a newfound sense of direction that just might save his life.
33. “Pavements”
Image Credit: Utopia
Director: Alex Ross Perrry
Read IndieWire’s Review: The question Alex Ross Perry asked himself before embarking on the mad, four-faced project that is “Pavements” was: “What if Pavement was the most important band of all time?” It’s a fun idea, and Perry’s commitment to the bit cannot be questioned. An off-Broadway jukebox musical named after their breakthrough debut studio album “Slanted and Enchanted,” a fake “Bohemian Rhapsody”-style biopic starring Joe Keery and Jason Schwartzman, a museum exhibition Perry helped devise and that brims with mostly unimportant memorabilia, and an actual documentary all exist in service of “Pavements.” If the assignment in making a film about Pavement was part sincere, part fuck-you, a dash of incoherent anti-establishment thought and a tablespoon of self-indulgence, “Pavements” understands it perfectly. Making a film about the band any other way seems like a complete waste of time.
32. “The Phoenician Scheme”
Image Credit: Focus Features
Director: Wes Anderson
Cast: Benicio del Toro, Mia Threapleton, Michael Cera, Riz Ahmed, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston
Read IndieWire’s Review: If family is the sharpest and most cutting of double-edged swords, few storytellers have ever wielded it with more violent enthusiasm than Wes Anderson, whose movies often start with — and then scab over — the seemingly mortal kind of wound that only a severed relationship can leave behind, and only a carefully mended one can ever hope to fix. In that sense and several others, “The Phoenician Scheme” is the most enthusiastically violent film that Anderson has made thus far.
31. “The Life of Chuck”
Image Credit: Neon
Director: Mike Flanagan
Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Mark Hamill, David Dastmalchian
Read IndieWire’s Review: “The Life of Chuck” is a departure for Mike Flanagan, in the sense that it’s not technically a horror movie. But it is a Stephen King adaptation, which is very much in the “Doctor Sleep” director’s wheelhouse. And it is haunted: By regret, by memories, and by the snuffing out of an entire internal universe when someone dies. If anything, “The Life of Chuck” just peels back the layer of metaphor and gets straight to the wistfulness that underpins all ghost stories.
30. “Wake Up Dead Man”
Image Credit: Netflix
Director: Rian Johnson
Cast: Daniel Craig, Josh O’Connor, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Mila Kunis
Read IndieWire’s Review: Even before Rian Johnson‘s much-anticipated third Knives Out mystery world premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival (as all of Johnson’s wily whodunits have), word was already out that this was a bit darker. After all, it’s right there in the title, “Wake Up Dead Man,”which doesn’t fuss about with the fact that as fun as these capers are, they’re still about murders. And Johnson himself didn’t shy away from that early buzz, telling the crowd assembled at the Princess of Wales Theater on Saturday night that, if “Knives Out” was a more cozy mystery and “Glass Onion” was a bigger, sunnier deconstruction of the genre, “Wake Up Dead Man” was his dip into more Edgar Allan Poe-tinged waters.
It works, and it’s no big mystery why — Johnson knows his form and format, and delivers on it, playing with tone and message but never losing sight of why these stories are so damn entertaining to watch and unravel.
29. “The Shrouds”
Image Credit: Sideshow/Janus Films
Director: David Cronenberg
Cast: Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger
Read IndieWire’s Review: Inspired by the loss of the director’s wife, “The Shrouds” is a grief story as only David Cronenberg would ever think to shoot one: Sardonic, unsentimental, and often so cadaverously stiff that the film itself appears to be suffering from rigor mortis, as if its images died at some point along their brief journey from the projector to the screen. And really, what else would you expect? I suppose it’s possible that the story’s deeply personal context might have spurred Cronenberg to push against the tender sterility of his recent features, or even dare to expose the soft underbelly that’s always been hiding inside his tumorous body of work and its many layers of scary-beautiful new flesh. If so, it almost immediately becomes clear that he had zero interest in accepting that invitation.
28. “Eddington”
Image Credit: A24
Director: Ari Aster
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone, Austin Butler
Read IndieWire’s Review: The first truly modern American Western, or at least the first one that has the nowness required to mention Pop Crave by name, Ari Aster’s “Eddington” is also the first major Hollywood movie that’s been willing to see the COVID pandemic for the hellacious paradigm shift that it was — as the moment when years of technologically engineered polarization tore a forever hole in the social fabric of a country that was already coming apart at the seams.
27. Father Mother Sister Brother
Image Credit: MUBI
Director: Jim Jarmusch
Cast: Adam Driver, Cate Blanchett, Tom Waits, Mayim Bialik
Read IndieWire’s Review: In appearing to give you nothing, Jim Jarmusch‘s almost perversely downplayed trio of short stories “Father Mother Sister Brother” winds up giving you almost everything if you can tap into its cool vibrations.
Packed into the film‘s triptych of globe-spanning episodes about estranged adult children and their late-in-life parents coming together again (at least geographically speaking, when not emotionally) is a profound appeal: If we as children don’t bother to ask our parents questions, meet them halfway, why should they bother with us? If you felt not loved by your parents enough as a child or rejected by them as an adult, maybe that’s because they felt you didn’t need them anymore, and so resumed living their own lives. What if familial damage is too late to repair? Jarmusch would argue it’s not, though with his hushedly sad new movie, he’s not about to coax his characters along the psychoanalytic dotted line from childhood resentment to coughed-up, adult-age catharsis.
26. “Caught by the Tides”
Image Credit: Sideshow/Janus Films
Director: Jia Zhang-ke
Cast: Zhao Tao, Li Zhubin
Read IndieWire’s Review: Tracing the faintest contours of a scripted love story around the scaffolding of some documentary footage that Jia has collected over the course of 22 years, this elusive chimera of a film strains to literalize the delicate relationship between time and memory — a theme that has become increasingly central to the director’s work since the Three Gorges Dam was constructed in 2006 (see: “Still Life”), submerging 13 entire cities and forever displacing the millions of people who once lived in them. Here, even more so than in his sweeping epics “Mountains May Depart” and “Ash Is Purest White,” Jia’s focus is squarely on resilience instead of erosion. How do we maintain a coherent sense of self, let alone love somebody else, in a world so volatile and impermanent that people will sink centuries of history to the bottom of the sea just to make way for tomorrow?
25. “Eephus”
Image Credit: Music Box Films
Director: Carson Lund
Cast: Bill Lee, Keith William Richards, Frederick Wiseman
Read IndieWire’s Review: Carson Lund’s directorial debut shares its name with a slow-moving pitch that has largely been forgotten by modern baseball players — and it’s a fitting title for a film that embraces the leisurely pacing of America’s national pastime. Television executives have spent countless hours in recent years obsessing over how to make baseball games move faster, but many a true devotee will tell you that part of the game’s charm lies in its ability to facilitate socialization. A few seconds between pitches gives the first baseman time to exchange pleasantries with the runner trying to steal second, and spectators can usually find time to buy a hot dog without worrying about missing anything important. “Eephus” is a film that understands this, and the script (which Lund co-wrote with Michael Basta and Nate Fischer), shuffles along with the rhythm of a baseball game. Exposition comes out in brief two-sentence exchanges between pitches and longer asides between innings, allowing audiences to experience the game with the same cadence that the players do.
24. “Misericordia”
Image Credit: Sideshow/Janus Films
Director: Alain Guiraudie
Cast: Félix Kysyl, Catherine Trot, Jean-Baptiste Durand
Read IndieWire’s Review: Alain Guiraudie‘s extraordinary and wonderfully twisted new queer noir, “Misericordia,” begins on a long, snaking, winding drive and ends with a man and a woman, who are unrelated and unmarried, in bed, and a light turned out. The French director of “Stranger by the Lake” and “Staying Vertical” reunites with cinematographer Claire Mathon (“Portrait of a Lady on Fire”) for a bleakly funny tragicomedy about how teenage desires, when left unsublimated, rear their grotesque head into your adulthood.
23. “Resurrection”
Image Credit: Bi Gan
Director: Bi Gan
Read IndieWire’s Review: It feels for long stretches like the fourth film by Chinese experimentalist Bi Gan has been designed to lock us out of our own brains, forcing us to wade through the treacly sludge of bored incomprehension amidst the nagging suspicion that we are not so cineliterate after all.
The film opens in a playful and straightforward manner, before launching into a digressive metatextual sprawl that I cannot in good faith claim to have grasped. In the absence of being able to confidently frame this film, all I can do is describe it and hope for the best.
22. “Weapons”
Image Credit: Warner Bros.
Director: Zach Cregger
Cast: Josh Brolin, Julia Garner, Alden Ehrenreich, Amy Madigan
Read IndieWire’s Review: Zach Cregger’s “Weapons” isn’t a basement movie to nearly the same degree that his 2022 debut “Barbarian” is a basement movie (few things are!), but this sad, sprawling, and fun-as-hell vision of suburban despair takes similar pleasure in leveraging a high-concept premise for “low” genre thrills. Or, what happens in burying a nightmare under the floorboards until the grief and trauma it invariably represents gets subsumed by the full-body shiver of the fact that people were living on top of it the whole time.
21. “The Voice of Hind Rajab”
Image Credit: Kaouther Ben Hania
Director: Kaouther Ben Hania
Cast: Saja Kilani, Motaz Malhees, Amer Hlehel, Clara Khoury
Read IndieWire’s Review: The story of six-year-old Hind Rajab made headlines in January 2024 after the Palestine Red Crescent released audio of her distressed emergency call, made from a service station in Tel al-Hawa in southern Gaza. Even establishment news channels, generally averse to displaying the humanity of individual Palestinians, could not resist this cri de coeur of an innocent in peril. Her sweet, trembling voice, saying, “I’m scared, come and get me,” traveled around the world. She was begging to be rescued from a car full of the fresh corpses, as night and the IDF closed in on her.
For her latest film, Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania has sourced the entire call and treated it with respect, horror, and grief, affording it space to play out in in full without attempts to visualize, animate, or reconstruct what is happening on the ground for Hind. Instead, whenever we hear Hind’s voice, sound waves fill the screen and in the corner: 240129.WAV. On every level, this is the right choice. The words are enough. The fear in her little voice as she explains her situation in bursts tells us everything. Any extra trimmings would land somewhere between glib and sacrilegious.
20. “Bugonia”
Image Credit: Focus Features
Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Cast: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis
Read IndieWire’s Review: Imagine if Michael Haneke’s “Funny Games” were instead about a pair of lone-wolf, conservationist vigilantes trying to save the world instead of two sociopathic twinks wanting to tear it down, and you’ll have some idea of the hyper-contained, rigorously controlled torture chamber that is Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Bugonia.”
Jesse Plemons stars as a galaxy-brained conspiracist beekeeper who’s either severely mentally ill or the only prophet among us, hijacking his cousin (Aidan Delbis) into a scheme to kidnap a big pharma executive (Emma Stone) whom he believes to be a body-snatched alien sent to end the planet.
19. “The Testament of Ann Lee”
Image Credit: Focus Features
Director: Mona Fastvold
Cast: Amanda Seyfried, Thomasin McKenzie, Lewis Pullman, Tim Blake Nelson
Read IndieWire’s Review: Hot on the heels of “The Brutalist,” Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet have returned with another sweeping historical epic about a European iconoclast who comes to America in order to build a new kind of church. Even more excitingly, “The Testament of Ann Lee” — a speculative, feverish, and altogether rapturous biopic about the Mancunian preacher who founded the Shakers and believed herself to be the female incarnation of Christ on Earth — addresses the most glaring problem with last year’s story about the fictional architect László Tóth: It wasn’t a musical.
18. “My Undesirable Friends”
Image Credit: Julia Loktev
Director: Julia Loktev
Read IndieWire’s Review: “Sadism disguised with the lacework of words” is how Anna Nemzer, a talk show journalist with TV Rain, Russia’s last independent news channel, describes Putin’s twisting of phrases in “My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow.” And “being at the right place at the right time — or the wrong place at the wrong time,” is how “The Loneliest Planet” director Julia Loktev has described the circumstances that led to the documentary she’s made about Nemzer’s work. First conceived as a look at the daily lives of reporters who’ve been branded “foreign agents” by their own government, the essence of the project — now a five-part, five-and-a-half-hour epic — was profoundly transformed four months into production, when Russia launched a full-scale invasion against Ukraine.
17. “Sound of Falling”
Image Credit: MUBI
Director: Mascha Schilinski
Cast:Lea Drinda, Hanna Heckt, Lena Urzendowsky, Laeni Geiseler
Read IndieWire’s Review: Unfolding like 100 years of home video footage that were shot by the family ghosts, Mascha Schilinski’s rich and mesmeric “Sound of Falling” glimpses four generation of young women as they live, die, and suffuse their memories into the walls of a rural farmhouse in the north German region of Altmark.
16. “The Mastermind”
Image Credit: MUBI
Director: Kelly Reichardt
Cast: Josh O’Connor, Alana Haim
Read IndieWire’s Review: Shot on film with the grainy warmth that evokes a sleepy 1970 New England municipality as much as it does actual movies from the ‘70s, “The Mastermind” is Reichardt’s version of a heist movie — meaning that the filmmaker hijacks conventions laid by filmmakers like Jean-Pierre Melville and Sidney Lumet for a spin that still retains her patient bent for long, luxuriating takes. Here, Josh O’Connor plays J.B. Mooney (what a name!), an art thief who falls down a hole of his own digging, as a poorly hatched job to rip off a series of Arthur Dove abstract paintings from a fictional Massachusetts museum sends his private and family lives careening out of his grasp.
15. “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”
Image Credit: A24
Director: Mary Bronstein
Cast: Rose Byrne, A$AP Rocky, Conan O’Brien
Read IndieWire’s Review: More realistic by virtue of its pronounced expressionism, Mary Bronstein’s “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” — her first feature since “Yeast” in 2008, and a far cry from the mumblecore naturalism of her debut — is the kind of film in which the things that should be scary are funny, and the things that should be funny are terrifying. The premise itself is every parent’s worst nightmare, but it’s shaped in a way that makes it feel like a cosmic joke. Which is to say that Linda spends much of the movie locked in a close-up so extreme that everything around her, her unnamed young daughter most of all, seems like a tauntingly disembodied echo of her own anxieties.
14. “Frankenstein”
Image Credit: Netflix
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Cast: Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi
Read IndieWire’s Review: Jacob Elordi plays the reanimated, sutured-from-refuse corpse known as Victor Frankenstein’s monster in the most psychologically complex portrayal of the creature since Boris Karloff threw a little girl into a lake. In past versions or retreads, the monster is sometimes the butt of the joke, or simply called Frankenstein (even though that’s his maker’s name) and afforded little emotional window in service of broader paeans to the dangers of playing God and meddling with natural law. Elordi moves with the physically searching quality of a marionette newly detached from its strings. As the creature, he comes to acquire a voice and autonomy and personhood that transcend any kind of nonverbal grunting often assigned to this character.
13. “No Other Choice”
Image Credit: Neon
Director: Park Chan-wook
Cast: Lee Byung-hun, Son Yejin
Read IndieWire’s Review: There are any number of movies about people who try to reinvent themselves in the face of a crisis. There are many fewer movies about people who violently refuse to even consider that idea — people who would rather kill someone else than become someone else. Park Chan-wook’s bleak, brilliant, and mordantly hilarious “No Other Choice” is the exception that proves the rule.
12. “Nouvelle Vague”
Image Credit: Netflix
Director: Richard Linklater
Cast: Guillaume Marbeck, Zoey Deutch
Read IndieWire’s Review: If the best way to criticize a movie, as Cahiers du Cinéma critic Godard once said, is to make one, then director Richard Linklater’s answer to making a tribute to “Breathless” might instead be to not quite criticize but certainly to subvert the tropes of movies about moviemaking. His black-and-white “Nouvelle Vague,” itself a meticulous recreation of a movie made in 1959 with all the celluloid, Academy-ratio crackle and pop, is more New Wave hangout movie than cinema history, with the parade of faces and names inspiring knowing chuckles in the cinephile audience.
11. “Blue Moon”
Image Credit: Sony Pictures Classics
Director: Richard Linklater
Cast: Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Andrew Scott
Read IndieWire’s Review: In Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunrise,” Julie Delpy’s Céline suggests that “If there’s any kind of magic in this world, it must be in the attempt of understanding someone, sharing something.” Thirty years after Céline and Ethan Hawke’s Jesse fell in love, Linklater reunites with Hawke for “Blue Moon,” the long-time collaborators’ latest attempt to find that magic. The film in question seeks to understand Lorenz Hart, the great American lyricist who — alongside composer Richard Rodgers — is responsible for countless classics to be found in the great American songbook. But from the outset, Linklater understands the inherent difficulty that comes with capturing such a singular voice all these decades later.
10. “Sorry, Baby”
Image Credit: A24
Director: Eva Victor
Cast: Eva Victor, Naomi Ackie, Kelly McCormack
Read IndieWire’s Review: Let’s hear it for concise loglines. Consider the first filmfrom Eva Victor, comedian and social media star, who makes an absolutely major debut with her “Sorry, Baby.” Per official press materials and Sundance releases, the film’s synopsis is: “Something bad happened to Agnes. But life goes on… for everyone around her, at least.” Both simple and secretive, hinting at drama and revelations, and promising to root us firmly in Agnes’ world.
That’s certainly all true of “Sorry, Baby,” but no quick hit of words could ever accurately convey the power and potency of Victor’s debut, a darkly funny and enormously tender film that, yes, is about what happens after the worst occurs, but with plenty of room to weave the light next to the dark. Something bad happens to Agnes, but Victor is a wise enough creator to understand that’s only part of the story, because that’s only part of life itself. And while Victor’s film might be rooted specifically in Agnes’ story and the bad thing at its center, in its specificity, there’s still tremendous room for wider recognition and and revelation.
9. “Hamnet”
Image Credit: Focus Features
Director: Chloe Zhao
Cast: Paul Mescal, Jessie Buckley
Read IndieWire’s Review: Adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel of the same name, “Hamnet” is an emotionally pulverizing drama that imagines how the death of William Shakespeare and Anne (or Agnes) Hathaway’s only son might have inspired the creation of his greatest tragedy; think of it as “Shakespeare in Agony.” And yet the violent beauty of this film, which rips your soul out of your chest so completely that its seismic grief almost feels like falling in love or becoming a parent, is that it’s as much about the experience of having a child as it is about the experience of losing one.
8. “Sirât”
Image Credit: Neon
Director: Oliver Laxe
Cast:Sergi López; Bruno Núñez Arjona; Richard Bellamy; Stefania Gadda
Read IndieWire’s Review: Filmmaker Oliver Laxe brings a kind of humbling brilliance to “Sirât,” his inaugural Cannes competition entry, after catching attention in sidebars for his previous films. It’s the kind of film that Cannes attendees from far and wide come to the festival for: sui generis and evading any classification, emanating from a wholly personal vision of cinema while not resisting galvanizing, and sometimes crowd-pleasing, pleasures.
7. “Train Dreams”
Image Credit: Netflix
Director: Clint Bentley
Cast: Joel Edgerton, Kerry Condon
Read IndieWire’s Review: “Train Dreams,” overall, is a lonely movie, with Edgerton in every scene, the most intimate experiences of his later life often residing in dreams — a few characters come in and go like figments of Robert’s imagination, something he is often questioning himself. Kerry Condon plays a forester named Claire with whom Robert has a platonic connection, who becomes a kind of mirror for which to Robert to finally pour out his pent-up grief after an earlier grand-scale tragedy. His years worth of grief are like a clogged gutter that desperately need emptying. Speaking of that, Bentley and team vividly construct a wildfire set piece that feels eerily realistic and threatening right now of all times.
6. “Marty Supreme”
Image Credit: A24
Director: Josh Safdie
Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Odessa A’zion
Read IndieWire’s Review: The ecstatic tension at the heart of the world-beating “Marty Supreme,” in which Chalamet makes one of the most colossal movie performances of the 21st century seem as natural as a lay-up, is that it encourages modern Hollywood’s ultimate striver to sell his heart out, just so it can interrogate why anyone would bother trying so hard. It challenges — and rewards — his outspoken pursuit of greatness by casting him as a character who’s pathologically driven by the same thing.
5. “The Secret Agent”
Image Credit: Neon
Director: Kleber Mendonça Filho
Cast: Wagner Moura
Read IndieWire’s Review: In his 2023 essay film “Pictures of Ghosts,” a haunted cine-memoir that uses Recife’s once-glorious movie palaces as a lens through which to examine — and to mourn — the cultural amnesia of a country so determined to forget itself, Brazilian auteur Kleber Mendonça Filho somewhat counterintuitively observes that “Fiction films are the best documentaries.” If Mendonça had to make a documentary in order to illustrate that idea, the sober but gripping thriller that it inspired him to shoot next proves the point with gusto.
Born from the process of researching “Pictures of Ghosts” (a fact that becomes rewardingly self-evident over the course of its 158-minute runtime), “The Secret Agent” recreates 1977 Recife with even more vivid detail than Mendonça’s documentary was able to restore his childhood vision of the city through archival video and photographs alone. Focused but sprawling, the director’s first true period piece is absolutely teeming with the music, color, and style of the “Brazilian Miracle” that marked the height of the country’s military dictatorship, and yet all of those signifiers — along with most direct evidence of the military dictatorship itself — are sublimated into the movie’s pervasive sense of mischief.
4. “Sentimental Value”
Image Credit: Neon
Director: Joachim Trier
Cast: Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, Anders Danielsen Lie
Read IndieWire’s Review: Overflowing with life from the moment it starts, “Sentimental Value” nevertheless remains laser-focused on building toward an overlap where Nora, Gustav, and his mother might be able to commune with each other as clearly as the shared memories of the house where they all lived at some point in their lives. It’s the same overlap Gustav refers to as “a perfect sync between time and space,” and that Terry Callier sings about in the song that floats above the film’s opening credits. The road there will be rapturously lush with details, but also winding as hell and potholed with the absent mercy that Nora needs to show Gustav — and recognize within him — if they can ever hope to understand each other, or to preserve something more of Gustav’s mother than the pain she left behind.
3. “Sinners”
Image Credit: Warner Bros.
Director: Ryan Coogler
Cast: Michael B. Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, Miles Caton, wunmi mosaku
Read IndieWire’s Review: A bloody, muscular, barrelhouse of a vampire movie that throbs like the neck of a blues guitar on fire, Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” is the first story the “Creed” director has ripped straight from his own guts. And yet, it thrillingly continues his post-“Fruitvale Station” tradition of filtering real and imagined Black histories through the prism of blockbuster entertainment, and in a way that recognizes genre as a living connection between the past and the future, as opposed to seeing it as a necessary evil of funding his art in the present.
2. “It Was Just an Accident”
Image Credit: Neon
Director: Jafar Panahi
Cast: Vahid Mobasser, Ebrahim Azizi, Maryam Afshari, Hadis Pakbaten
Read IndieWire’s Review: From the plot description alone, it’s obvious that “It Was Just an Accident” finds Panahi working in a very different register than he had to while “banned” from making films — a period that saw his long-standing penchant for metafiction become considerably more pronounced, as he was forced to make himself the subject of iPhone/camcorder masterpieces like “This Is Not a Film.” This one still had to be shot in secret in order to skirt government approval, but it takes great pleasure in replacing the self-reflexivity of Panahi’s illegal work with a slightly more formal sense of composition, even if it remains impossible to separate the final product from the personal experience that informed it.
1. “One Battle After Another”
Image Credit: Warner Bros.
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Teyana Taylor, Chase Infiniti
Read IndieWire’s Review: Until his monumental new film, Paul Thomas Anderson had only made a single narrative feature set in the 21st century, and that movie — a love story about a plunger salesman who hoards pudding cups, gets extorted by the owner of a phone sex line, and shares an iconic kiss to the sound of a Shelley Duvall song from 1980 — was less of its time than out of it. After that came an origin story about the birth of American capitalism, two post-war fables about people trying to sow their own visions of the future, a patchouli-scented lament for the lost promise of ’60s counterculture, and a star-crossed romance set against the 1973 oil crisis.
At a certain point, Anderson’s seeming attachment to the past became conspicuous enough that it began to appear as if he might be mystified, scared, and/or bored of the modern world to some degree, and therefore arguably less relevant to it.
Enter: “One Battle After Another,” the power and the mercy of which lies in how it simultaneously functions as both a backboard-shattering windmill dunk on that line of attack and an open-hearted surrender to its merits.