{"id":197701,"date":"2025-12-18T04:19:41","date_gmt":"2025-12-18T04:19:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/197701\/"},"modified":"2025-12-18T04:19:41","modified_gmt":"2025-12-18T04:19:41","slug":"50-best-movies-of-2025-critics-survey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/197701\/","title":{"rendered":"50 Best Movies of 2025: Critics Survey"},"content":{"rendered":"

As the credits roll on 2025, we\u2019re left with a slate of movies<\/a> that will almost certainly be remembered among the decade\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

There was something for everyone this year, but IndieWire\u2019s 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\u2019s best films. The top 50 films included a healthy mix of Oscar frontrunners<\/a>, box office hits, and the kinds of hidden gems that you\u2019d be forgiven for missing amid all of the other excitement that 2025 brought.<\/p>\n

The complete results and more information about the methodology behind the survey can be found here<\/a>. Keep reading for the survey participants\u2019 favorite films of 2025.<\/p>\n

\t50. \u201cScarlet\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Sony\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Mamoru Hosada<\/p>\n

Cast: Mana Ashida, K\u00f4ji Yakusho<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> \u201cScarlet\u201d amounts to a frustrating waste of animating and directorial skill for the price of an excessively ordinary story. The sheer scale of Hosoda\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\t49. \u201cApril\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Metrograph Pictures\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Dea Kulumbegashvili<\/p>\n

Cast: Ia Sukhitashvili<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> \u201cApril,\u201d 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\u2019s plight into a ferocious tug-of-war between sacrifice and self-obliteration \u2014 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\u2019s terror, Sukhitashvili\u2019s face becomes a landscape unto itself, the sunken beauty of her cheekbones hollowed out by years of holding her breath.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\t48. \u201cOrwell 2 + 2 = 5\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Atlantic Releasing\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Raoul Peck<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> Peck, a Haitian filmmaker whose work has always had a strong political bent, is best known for his 2016 essay film \u201cI Am Not Your Negro,\u201dwhich uses the unfinished James Baldwin manuscript \u201cRemember This House\u201d as the skeleton for an examination of the deaths of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. \u201cOrwell\u201d plays like a spiritual successor to his Oscar-nominated breakthrough, mixing Orwell\u2019s writings and letters \u2014 narrated by \u201cHomeland\u201d star Damian Lewis \u2014 with archival photographs, footage from various adaptations of \u201c1984\u201d (including the 1956 version starring Edmund O\u2019Brien as bureaucrat Winston and the version starring John Hurt released on the actual year), footage from other movies ranging from \u201cOliver Twist\u201d to \u201cNotting Hill,\u201d and modern day news reports to argue how Orwell\u2019s fears of a totalitarian state have already come true.<\/p>\n

\t47. \u201cFamiliar Touch\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Sarah Friedland\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Sarah Friedland<\/p>\n

Cast: Kathleen Chalfant<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> In \u201cFamiliar Touch,\u201d filmmaker Sarah Friedland\u2019s 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\u2018s 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.<\/p>\n

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\t46. \u201cThe Tale of Silyan\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: National Geographic\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Tamara Kotevska<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> 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\u2019ve tilled for generations to go ever lower \u2014\u00a0to 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\u2019s the height of drama, but Kotevska is more interested in quiet observation, elegant compositions, and subtle connections.<\/p>\n

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\t45. \u201cThe Naked Gun\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Paramount\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Akiva Schaffer<\/p>\n

Cast: Liam Neeson, Pamela Anderson<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> And while the prospect of retooling a cop sendup like \u201cThe Naked Gun\u201d might seem to smack of the same reactionary conservatism that has spurred the rest of America\u2019s recent comeback stories (e.g., measles, coal mines, the McDonald\u2019s Snack Wrap), Schaffer\u2019s version manages to capture the classic spoof magic without turning back the clock. That\u2019s a delicate tango in the context of an increasingly rare \u2014 or all but obsolete \u2014 studio movie that exists for no other purpose than to make people laugh, but it\u2019s one this hilarious new take on the old ZAZ masterpiece pulls off with a rose between its teeth.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t44. \u201cPeter Hujar\u2019s Day\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Sideshow\/Janus Films\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Ira Sachs<\/p>\n

Cast: Ben Whishaw, Rebecca Hall<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> Ben Whishaw again proves himself as the brilliant actor we all knew he was, if we were looking closely enough, in Ira Sachs\u2018 \u201cPeter Hujar\u2019s Day.\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019s winding monologue wears on. Writer\/director Sachs\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

\t43. \u201cCome See Me in the Good Light\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Tripod Media\/Amplify Pictures\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Ryan White<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> 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, \u201cCome See Me in the Good Light\u201d \u2014 a striking and airy documentary about genderqueer poet Andrea Gibson and their harrowing battle with ovarian cancer \u2014 is premiering at Sundance 2025against a flurry of new anti-LGBTQ steps recently taken by President Trump.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s atypical portrait of Gibson \u2014\u00a0reminiscent of something like the tragicomic \u201c50\/50\u201d from 2011 \u2014\u00a0relies on intimate beauty and sharp humor to champion the poet\u2019s art, identity, and partner Megan Falley (also a poet) with optimism and vigor.<\/p>\n

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\t42. \u201cBring Her Back\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: A24\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Directors: Danny and Michael Philippou<\/p>\n

Cast: Billy Barratt, Sally Hawkins, Mischa Heywood, Jonah Wren Phillips<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> Australian filmmakers Danny and Michael Philippou solidified A24\u2019s signature horror reign with 2022\u2019s twisted and evil-spirits-summoning \u201cTalk to Me,\u201d about a party game gone horrifyingly awry for a group of teen friends. They\u2019ve upped the stakes with a more gruesomely disturbing but seriously, conceptually half-baked new thriller, \u201cBring Her Back,\u201d in which Sally Hawkins is psychotically good and in an unhinged, manically grieving form we\u2019ve never seen her in.<\/p>\n

\t41. \u201cSouleymane\u2019s Story\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Kino Lorber\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Boris Lojkine<\/p>\n

Cast: Abou Sangare<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> Boris Lojkine\u2019s new film \u201cSouleymane\u2019s Story\u201d 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 \u201cI, Daniel Blake\u201d and \u201cTori and Lokita\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\t40. \u201cPut Your Soul in Your Hand and Walk\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Water Dreams Productions\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Sepideh Farsi<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> On April 15, 2025, it was announced that \u201cPut Your Soul in Your Hand and Walk\u201d \u2014 a series of filmed video conversations between Iranian documentarian Sepideh Farsi and 25-year-old Palestinian photojournalist, Fatma Hassona \u2014 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\u2019s parents were wounded and father Raed died later from his injuries.<\/p>\n

\t39. \u201cTwinless:<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Republic Pictures\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: James Sweeney<\/p>\n

Cast: Dylan O\u2019Brien, James Sweeney<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> It\u2019s hard to write \u2014 and direct, produce, and star in \u2014 something with a great premise. I\u2019d imagine it\u2019s even harder to junk that premise after 20 pages in favor of committing to a different one altogether. But James Sweeney\u2019s \u201cTwinless\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\t38. \u201cLa Grazia\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: MUBI\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Paolo Sorrentino<\/p>\n

Cast: Toni Servillo, Anna Ferzetti, Massimo Venturiello<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> \u201cBureaucracy is meant to be slow,\u201d the President of Italy (Tony Servillo) explains to a member of his inner circle. \u201cThat\u2019s the point: to give people time to reflect.\u201d 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?\u00a0<\/p>\n

So far as we can tell at the start of Paolo Sorrentino\u2019s uncharacteristically sedate and sexless \u201cLa Grazia,\u201d which feels like forced Catholic penance for the Neapolitan flesh parade of last year\u2019s poorly received \u201cParthenope,\u201d 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 \u2014\u00a0or completely dormant \u2014\u00a0personality 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\t37. \u201cBLKNWS: Terms & Conditions\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Kahlil Joseph\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Kahlil Joseph<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> There are 21 \u201ctracks\u201d in total on the 2025 version of the \u201cBLKNWS\u201d 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 \u201cBLKNWS\u201d project. To reference the influential cultural historian Saidiya Hartman, one of the writers and foundational appearances in the film, this is an act of \u201ccritical fabulation\u201d to normalize and imagine the so-called \u201cwayward lives\u201d of figures whose voices are often missing from historical archives.<\/p>\n

\t36. \u201cDie My Love\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: MUBI\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Lynne Ramsay<\/p>\n

Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> Co-written with Enda Walsh and Alice Birch from a novel by Ariana Harwicz, \u201cDie My Love\u201d is a two-hour cinematic miasma of what it\u2019s 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\u2019s most ardent fans. The story offers little to hook us onto other than Grace\u2019s 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 \u2014 inescapable swelter and tall grass abound \u2014 you can all but feel the ticks and Lyme disease consuming you.<\/p>\n

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\t35. \u201cOn Becoming a Guinea Fowl\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: A24\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Rungano Nyoni<\/p>\n

Cast: Susan Chardy, Elizabeth Chisela, Roy Chisha, Blessings Bhamjee<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> Decades of mediocre Sundance movies \u2014 and some very good ones, too \u2014 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 \u2014 one that reflects the grace and strength they\u2019ve inherited from the generations who came before them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Rungano Nyoni\u2019s lucid and incandescently furious \u201cOn Becoming a Guinea Fowl\u201d is a stiff middle finger to such wishful thinking. Set in a middle-class Zambian suburb that\u2019s located at a well-trafficked but poorly maintained intersection between global influences and Bemba mores, the \u201cI Am Not a Witch\u201d filmmaker\u2019s second feature tells the story of a Westernized young woman who\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\t34. \u201cSpringsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Searchlight Pictures\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Scott Cooper<\/p>\n

Cast: Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> \u201cDeliver Me from Nowhere\u201d \u2014 that\u2019s what we\u2019re calling it \u2014 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\u2019s \u201cBadlands,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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\t33. \u201cPavements\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Utopia\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Alex Ross Perrry<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> The question Alex Ross Perry asked himself before embarking on the mad, four-faced project that is \u201cPavements\u201d was: \u201cWhat if Pavement was the most important band of all time?\u201d It\u2019s a fun idea, and Perry\u2019s commitment to the bit cannot be questioned. An off-Broadway jukebox musical named after their breakthrough debut studio album \u201cSlanted and Enchanted,\u201d a fake \u201cBohemian Rhapsody\u201d-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 \u201cPavements.\u201d 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, \u201cPavements\u201d understands it perfectly. Making a film about the band any other way seems like a complete waste of time.<\/p>\n

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\t32. \u201cThe Phoenician Scheme\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Focus Features\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Wes Anderson<\/p>\n

Cast: Benicio del Toro, Mia Threapleton, Michael Cera, Riz Ahmed, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> 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 \u2014 and then scab over \u2014 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, \u201cThe Phoenician Scheme\u201d is the most enthusiastically violent film that Anderson has made thus far.<\/p>\n

\t31. \u201cThe Life of Chuck\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Neon\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Mike Flanagan<\/p>\n

Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Mark Hamill, David Dastmalchian<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> \u201cThe Life of Chuck\u201d is a departure for Mike Flanagan, in the sense that it\u2019s not technically a horror movie. But it is a Stephen King adaptation, which is very much in the \u201cDoctor Sleep\u201d director\u2019s wheelhouse. And it is haunted: By regret, by memories, and by the snuffing out of an entire internal universe when someone dies. If anything, \u201cThe Life of Chuck\u201d just peels back the layer of metaphor and gets straight to the wistfulness that underpins all ghost stories.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\t30. \u201cWake Up Dead Man\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Netflix\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Rian Johnson<\/p>\n

Cast: Daniel Craig, Josh O\u2019Connor, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Mila Kunis<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> Even before Rian Johnson\u2018s much-anticipated third Knives Out mystery world premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival (as all of Johnson\u2019s wily whodunits have), word was already out that this was a bit darker. After all, it\u2019s right there in the title, \u201cWake Up Dead Man,\u201dwhich doesn\u2019t fuss about with the fact that as fun as these capers are, they\u2019re still about murders. And Johnson himself didn\u2019t shy away from that early buzz, telling the crowd assembled at the Princess of Wales Theater on Saturday night that, if \u201cKnives Out\u201d was a more cozy mystery and \u201cGlass Onion\u201d was a bigger, sunnier deconstruction of the genre, \u201cWake Up Dead Man\u201d was his dip into more Edgar Allan Poe-tinged waters.<\/p>\n

It works, and it\u2019s no big mystery why \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

\t29. \u201cThe Shrouds\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Sideshow\/Janus Films\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: David Cronenberg<\/p>\n

Cast: Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> Inspired by the loss of the director\u2019s wife, \u201cThe Shrouds\u201d 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\u2019s possible that the story\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\t28. \u201cEddington\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: A24\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Ari Aster<\/p>\n

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone, Austin Butler<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> 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\u2019s \u201cEddington\u201d is also the first major Hollywood movie that\u2019s been willing to see the COVID pandemic for the hellacious paradigm shift that it was \u2014 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\t27. Father Mother Sister Brother<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: MUBI\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Jim Jarmusch<\/p>\n

Cast: Adam Driver, Cate Blanchett, Tom Waits, Mayim Bialik<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> In appearing to give you nothing, Jim Jarmusch\u2018s almost perversely downplayed trio of short stories \u201cFather Mother Sister Brother\u201d winds up giving you almost everything if you can tap into its cool vibrations.<\/p>\n

Packed into the film\u2018s 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\u2019t 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\u2019s because they felt you didn\u2019t need them anymore, and so resumed living their own lives. What if familial damage is too late to repair? Jarmusch would argue it\u2019s not, though with his hushedly sad new movie, he\u2019s not about to coax his characters along the psychoanalytic dotted line from childhood resentment to coughed-up, adult-age catharsis.<\/p>\n

\t26. \u201cCaught by the Tides\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Sideshow\/Janus Films\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Jia Zhang-ke<\/p>\n

Cast: Zhao Tao, Li Zhubin<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> 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 \u2014 a theme that has become increasingly central to the director\u2019s work since the Three Gorges Dam was constructed in 2006 (see: \u201cStill Life\u201d), 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 \u201cMountains May Depart\u201d and \u201cAsh Is Purest White,\u201d Jia\u2019s 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?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t25. \u201cEephus\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Music Box Films\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Carson Lund<\/p>\n

Cast: Bill Lee, Keith William Richards, Frederick Wiseman<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a>\u00a0Carson Lund\u2019s directorial debut shares its name with a slow-moving pitch that has largely been forgotten by modern baseball players \u2014 and it\u2019s a fitting title for a film that embraces the leisurely pacing of America\u2019s 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\u2019s 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. \u201cEephus\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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\t24. \u201cMisericordia\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Sideshow\/Janus Films\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Alain Guiraudie<\/p>\n

Cast: F\u00e9lix Kysyl, Catherine Trot, Jean-Baptiste Durand<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> Alain Guiraudie\u2018s extraordinary and wonderfully twisted new queer noir, \u201cMisericordia,\u201d 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 \u201cStranger by the Lake\u201d and \u201cStaying Vertical\u201d reunites with cinematographer Claire Mathon (\u201cPortrait of a Lady on Fire\u201d) for a bleakly funny tragicomedy about how teenage desires, when left unsublimated, rear their grotesque head into your adulthood.<\/p>\n

\t23. \u201cResurrection\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Bi Gan\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Bi Gan<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\t22. \u201cWeapons\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Warner Bros.\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Zach Cregger<\/p>\n

Cast: Josh Brolin, Julia Garner, Alden Ehrenreich, Amy Madigan<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> Zach Cregger\u2019s \u201cWeapons\u201d isn\u2019t a basement movie to nearly the same degree that his 2022 debut \u201cBarbarian\u201d 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 \u201clow\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\t21. \u201cThe Voice of Hind Rajab\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Kaouther Ben Hania\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Kaouther Ben Hania<\/p>\n

Cast: Saja Kilani, Motaz Malhees, Amer Hlehel, Clara Khoury<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> 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, \u201cI\u2019m scared, come and get me,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t20. \u201cBugonia\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Focus Features\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos<\/p>\n

Cast: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> Imagine if Michael Haneke\u2019s \u201cFunny Games\u201d 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\u2019ll have some idea of the hyper-contained, rigorously controlled torture chamber that is Yorgos Lanthimos\u2019 \u201cBugonia.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jesse Plemons stars as a galaxy-brained conspiracist beekeeper who\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\t19. \u201cThe Testament of Ann Lee\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Focus Features\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Mona Fastvold<\/p>\n

Cast: Amanda Seyfried, Thomasin McKenzie, Lewis Pullman, Tim Blake Nelson<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> Hot on the heels of \u201cThe Brutalist,\u201d 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, \u201cThe Testament of Ann Lee\u201d \u2014 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 \u2014 addresses the most glaring problem with last year\u2019s story about the fictional architect L\u00e1szl\u00f3 T\u00f3th: It wasn\u2019t a musical.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t18. \u201cMy Undesirable Friends\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Julia Loktev\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Julia Loktev<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> \u201cSadism disguised with the lacework of words\u201d is how Anna Nemzer, a talk show journalist with TV Rain, Russia\u2019s last independent news channel, describes Putin\u2019s twisting of phrases in \u201cMy Undesirable Friends: Part I \u2014 Last Air in Moscow.\u201d And \u201cbeing at the right place at the right time \u2014 or the wrong place at the wrong time,\u201d is how \u201cThe Loneliest Planet\u201d director Julia Loktev has described the circumstances that led to the documentary she\u2019s made about Nemzer\u2019s work. First conceived as a look at the daily lives of reporters who\u2019ve been branded \u201cforeign agents\u201d by their own government, the essence of the project \u2014\u00a0now a five-part, five-and-a-half-hour epic \u2014\u00a0was profoundly transformed four months into production, when Russia launched a full-scale invasion against Ukraine.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\t17. \u201cSound of Falling\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: MUBI\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Mascha Schilinski<\/p>\n

Cast:Lea Drinda, Hanna Heckt, Lena Urzendowsky, Laeni Geiseler<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> Unfolding like 100 years of home video footage that were shot by the family ghosts, Mascha Schilinski\u2019s rich and mesmeric \u201cSound of Falling\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t16. \u201cThe Mastermind\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: MUBI\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Kelly Reichardt<\/p>\n

Cast: Josh O\u2019Connor, Alana Haim<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> Shot on film with the grainy warmth that evokes a sleepy 1970 New England municipality as much as it does actual movies from the \u201870s, \u201cThe Mastermind\u201d is Reichardt\u2019s version of a heist movie \u2014 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\u2019Connor 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.<\/p>\n

\t15. \u201cIf I Had Legs I\u2019d Kick You\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: A24\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Mary Bronstein<\/p>\n

Cast: Rose Byrne, A$AP Rocky, Conan O\u2019Brien<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> More realistic by virtue of its pronounced expressionism, Mary Bronstein\u2019s \u201cIf I Had Legs I\u2019d Kick You\u201d \u2014\u00a0her first feature since \u201cYeast\u201d in 2008, and a far cry from the mumblecore naturalism of her debut \u2014\u00a0is 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\u2019s worst nightmare, but it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\t14. \u201cFrankenstein\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Netflix\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Guillermo del Toro<\/p>\n

Cast: Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> Jacob Elordi plays the reanimated, sutured-from-refuse corpse known as Victor Frankenstein\u2019s 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\u2019s his maker\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\t13. \u201cNo Other Choice\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Neon\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Park Chan-wook<\/p>\n

Cast: Lee Byung-hun, Son Yejin<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> 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 \u2014 people who would rather kill someone else than become someone else. Park Chan-wook\u2019s bleak, brilliant, and mordantly hilarious \u201cNo Other Choice\u201d is the exception that proves the rule.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t12. \u201cNouvelle Vague\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Netflix\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Richard Linklater<\/p>\n

Cast: Guillaume Marbeck, Zoey Deutch<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> If the best way to criticize a movie, as Cahiers du Cin\u00e9ma critic Godard once said, is to make one, then director Richard Linklater\u2019s answer to making a tribute to \u201cBreathless\u201d might instead be to not quite criticize but certainly to subvert the tropes of movies about moviemaking. His black-and-white \u201cNouvelle Vague,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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\t11. \u201cBlue Moon\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Sony Pictures Classics\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Richard Linklater<\/p>\n

Cast: Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Andrew Scott<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> In Richard Linklater\u2019s \u201cBefore Sunrise,\u201d Julie Delpy\u2019s C\u00e9line suggests that \u201cIf there\u2019s any kind of magic in this world, it must be in the attempt of understanding someone, sharing something.\u201d Thirty years after C\u00e9line and Ethan Hawke\u2019s Jesse fell in love, Linklater reunites with Hawke for \u201cBlue Moon,\u201d the long-time collaborators\u2019 latest attempt to find that magic. The film in question seeks to understand Lorenz Hart, the great American lyricist who \u2014 alongside composer Richard Rodgers \u2014 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t10. \u201cSorry, Baby\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: A24\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Eva Victor<\/p>\n

Cast: Eva Victor, Naomi Ackie, Kelly McCormack<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> Let\u2019s hear it for concise loglines. Consider the first filmfrom Eva Victor, comedian and social media star, who makes an absolutely major debut with her \u201cSorry, Baby.\u201d Per official press materials and Sundance releases, the film\u2019s synopsis is: \u201cSomething bad happened to Agnes. But life goes on\u2026 for everyone around her, at least.\u201d Both simple and secretive, hinting at drama and revelations, and promising to root us firmly in Agnes\u2019 world.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s certainly all true of \u201cSorry, Baby,\u201d but no quick hit of words could ever accurately convey the power and potency of Victor\u2019s 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\u2019s only part of the story, because that\u2019s only part of life itself. And while Victor\u2019s film might be rooted specifically in Agnes\u2019 story and the bad thing at its center, in its specificity, there\u2019s still tremendous room for wider recognition and and revelation.<\/p>\n

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\t9. \u201cHamnet\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Focus Features\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Chloe Zhao<\/p>\n

Cast: Paul Mescal, Jessie Buckley<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> Adapted from Maggie O\u2019Farrell\u2019s 2020 novel of the same name, \u201cHamnet\u201d is an emotionally pulverizing drama that imagines how the death of William Shakespeare and Anne (or Agnes) Hathaway\u2019s only son might have inspired the creation of his greatest tragedy; think of it as \u201cShakespeare in Agony.\u201d 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\u2019s as much about the experience of having a child as it is about the experience of losing one.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t8. \u201cSir\u00e2t\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Neon\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Oliver Laxe<\/p>\n

Cast:Sergi L\u00f3pez; Bruno N\u00fa\u00f1ez Arjona; Richard Bellamy; Stefania Gadda<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> Filmmaker Oliver Laxe brings a kind of humbling brilliance to \u201cSir\u00e2t,\u201d his inaugural Cannes competition entry, after catching attention in sidebars for his previous films. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\t7. \u201cTrain Dreams\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Netflix\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Clint Bentley<\/p>\n

Cast: Joel Edgerton, Kerry Condon<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> \u201cTrain Dreams,\u201d overall, is a lonely movie, with Edgerton in every scene, the most intimate experiences of his later life often residing in dreams \u2014 a few characters come in and go like figments of Robert\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\t6. \u201cMarty Supreme\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: A24\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Josh Safdie<\/p>\n

Cast: Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Odessa A\u2019zion<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> The ecstatic tension at the heart of the world-beating \u201cMarty Supreme,\u201d 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\u2019s ultimate striver to sell his heart out, just so it can interrogate why anyone would bother trying so hard. It challenges \u2014\u00a0and rewards \u2014 his outspoken pursuit of greatness by casting him as a character who\u2019s pathologically driven by the same thing.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t5. \u201cThe Secret Agent\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Neon\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Kleber Mendon\u00e7a Filho<\/p>\n

Cast: Wagner Moura<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review<\/a>: In his 2023 essay film \u201cPictures of Ghosts,\u201d a haunted cine-memoir that uses Recife\u2019s once-glorious movie palaces as a lens through which to examine \u2014\u00a0and to mourn \u2014 the cultural amnesia of a country so determined to forget itself, Brazilian auteur Kleber Mendon\u00e7a Filho somewhat counterintuitively observes that \u201cFiction films are the best documentaries.\u201d If Mendon\u00e7a 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Born from the process of researching \u201cPictures of Ghosts\u201d (a fact that becomes rewardingly self-evident over the course of its 158-minute runtime), \u201cThe Secret Agent\u201d recreates 1977 Recife with even more vivid detail than Mendon\u00e7a\u2019s documentary was able to restore his childhood vision of the city through archival video and photographs alone. Focused but sprawling, the director\u2019s first true period piece is absolutely teeming with the music, color, and style of the \u201cBrazilian Miracle\u201d that marked the height of the country\u2019s military dictatorship, and yet all of those signifiers \u2014 along with most direct evidence of the military dictatorship itself \u2014 are sublimated into the movie\u2019s pervasive sense of mischief.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\t4. \u201cSentimental Value\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Neon\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Joachim Trier<\/p>\n

Cast: Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsg\u00e5rd, Anders Danielsen Lie<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> Overflowing with life from the moment it starts, \u201cSentimental Value\u201d 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\u2019s the same overlap Gustav refers to as \u201ca perfect sync between time and space,\u201d and that Terry Callier sings about in the song that floats above the film\u2019s 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 \u2014 and recognize within him \u2014\u00a0if they can ever hope to understand each other, or to preserve something more of Gustav\u2019s mother than the pain she left behind.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t3. \u201cSinners\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Warner Bros.\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Ryan Coogler<\/p>\n

Cast: Michael B. Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, Miles Caton, wunmi mosaku<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> A bloody, muscular, barrelhouse of a vampire movie that throbs like the neck of a blues guitar on fire, Ryan Coogler\u2019s \u201cSinners\u201d is the first story the \u201cCreed\u201d director has ripped straight from his own guts. And yet, it thrillingly continues his post-\u201cFruitvale Station\u201d tradition of filtering real and imagined Black histories through the prism of blockbuster entertainment,\u00a0and 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.<\/p>\n

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\t2. \u201cIt Was Just an Accident\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Neon\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Jafar Panahi<\/p>\n

Cast: Vahid Mobasser, Ebrahim Azizi, Maryam Afshari, Hadis Pakbaten<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> From the plot description alone, it\u2019s obvious that \u201cIt Was Just an Accident\u201d finds Panahi working in a very different register than he had to while \u201cbanned\u201d from making films \u2014 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 \u201cThis Is Not a Film.\u201d 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\u2019s 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.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t1. \u201cOne Battle After Another\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Warner Bros.\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson<\/p>\n

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Teyana Taylor, Chase Infiniti<\/p>\n

Read IndieWire\u2019s Review:<\/a> Until his monumental new film, Paul Thomas Anderson had only made a single narrative feature set in the 21st century, and that movie \u2014 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 \u2014\u00a0was 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 \u201960s counterculture, and a star-crossed romance set against the 1973 oil crisis.<\/p>\n

At a certain point, Anderson\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Enter: \u201cOne Battle After Another,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As the credits roll on 2025, we\u2019re left with a slate of movies that will almost certainly be…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":197702,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[93,61,60,270],"class_list":["post-197701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197701"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197701\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/197702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}