Listener’s best movies of 2025

Listener reviewers Sarah Watt and Russell Baillie name their top 10 films of the year, with a guide to where you can find them.

ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER

Time for radical action

Looked at from some angles, director Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest might be seen as just another of his
California shaggy dog stories. His previous, mostly brilliantly weird Golden State films have included Boogie Nights (about porn), Magnolia (death), There Will Be Blood (oil), The Master (not all California but Scientology), Licorice Pizza (Hollywood, The Valley), and Inherent Vice (you name it). Like that last one, One Battle After Another (extremist politics and parenthood) is based on a Thomas Pynchon novel, an act that might seem like chainsaw sculpturing of a Dali painting. Inherent Vice was a big swing and a miss, One Battle – a very loose treatment of Pynchon’s Vineland from 1990, is a home run. With Leonardo DiCaprio out front in the loosest, funniest performance of his career as a former radical forced out of hiding, and a vanity-free Sean Penn as his neo-Nazi nemesis, One Battle is a hilarious, madcap, unflagging, high-action, original with a father-daughter relationship at its heart. And despite taking a story of Vineland’s 1960s radicals in the Reagan years, Anderson has made one of the great movies of the Trump era. One that also wins the prize for the most motion-sickness-inducing car chase of the year.

See it: VOD

Now watch: There Will Be Blood (2007)

The Ballad of Wallis Island

THE BALLAD OF WALLIS ISLAND

Finger-picking good

It might not have been the biggest folk music movie of recent times – that was a Bob Dylan movie starring whatshisname – but wry music-comedy The Ballad of Wallis Island was certainly the funniest and sweetest. The film’s co-writer, British sitcom regular Tom Basden, played one half of separated fictional singing duo McGwyer Mortimer – with Carey Mulligan the other – who are hired by an obsessive, harmless hermit fan for a reunion gig before a very select audience on his island. Quite special.

See it: VOD

Now watch: A Complete Unknown (2024, Disney+)

Black Bag

BLACK BAG

Spy vs Spy

American director Steven Soderbergh headed to London for a smart, twisty espionage thriller, delivering a very British mole hunt that felt like a classic Cold War yarn. Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender play a powerhouse couple of spies in a marriage with as much passion as distrust, and had fun with a snarky script that delivered the schadenfreude of watching morally bankrupt characters slowly unravel as everyone becomes a suspect.

See it: Netflix

Now watch: The Lives of Others (2006)

Eddington

EDDINGTON

American idiots

This satirical black comedy, set in a New Mexico town in the early days of Covid, showed yet again that Joaquin Phoenix (playing a sheriff turned mayoral candidate) is a giant talent, and director Ari Aster has more in him than just head-trauma-obsessed horror films. As a dissection of the current horrors of American life, the performances, which also included Pedro Pascal and Emma Stone, and a propulsive narrative made Eddington hilarious and gripping.

See it on: VOD

Now watch: Civil War (2024)

FAMILIAR TOUCH

Cloud with a silver lining

Less harrowing than other films in the “getting old isn’t for sissies” genre, this directorial debut by Sarah Friedland captivated with its stunning central performance by octogenarian stage actress Kathleen Chalfant as Ruth, a self-contained woman settling into an assisted-living facility. Eschewing the topic’s usual heartache associated with memory loss, the script allowed for glimmers of warmth and unlikely connection in portraying the onset of dementia as a journey with occasional moments of sunshine.

See it: In cinemas

Frankenstein

FRANKENSTEIN

Fine addition to his body of work

Having created a few monsters in his past, director Guillermo del Toro got his chance to stitch together his own version of Mary Shelley’s seminal creation. He opted for a traditional, old-school approach, one centred on a desperately sympathetic creature played by Jacob Elordi and brought to life by Oscar Isaac’s Victor Frankenstein. It was an exhilarating take on the much-filmed story, but what a pity that del Toro’s made-for-the-big-screen vision was barely shown in cinemas before heading to Netflix.

See it: Netflix

Now watch: The Bride! Directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, due in cinemas in March.

Pike River

PIKE RIVER

The fight to make things right

Director Robert Sarkies tackled the sprawling story about the aftermath of the 2010 mining disaster with the restraint and authenticity he’s showed in previous dramatisations of NZ tragedies. With Fiona Samuels’ deft script and the performances of Robyn Malcolm and Melanie Lynskey as Sonya Rockhouse and Anna Osborne, Pike River was an affecting depiction of those who lost men in the mine. It was also a telling drama about how NZ has let negligent employers kill their workers and face no meaningful punishment.

See it: In cinemas.

Now watch: Out of the Blue (2006)

THE SEED OF THE SACRED FIG

Family ties

Another excoriating Oscar-nominated portrait of human rights abuses heaped upon ordinary citizens, the Tehran-set Seed of the Sacred Fig left audiences silent and sobered by its scenes of government brutality. When law-abiding Iman is promoted to investigating judge of the Revolutionary Court, the values he is meant to uphold clash with the activist sympathies of his teenage daughters, with the whole family drawn into unforeseen tragedy.

See it: Currently unavailable in NZ.

Now watch: Hit The Road (2021)

SINNERS

From dusk til dawn, Southern style

Michael B Jordan was sublime in both lead roles as entrepreneurial twins intent on bringing the joy of the juke joint from 1930s Chicago to their Mississippi hometown in director Ryan Coogler’s (Creed) exhilarating examination of race and retribution. With a soundtrack to literally die for, this bloody, music-infused horror movie broke the rules and the mould.

See it: VOD

Now watch: The Beguiled (2017)

28 years Later

28 YEARS LATER

Back to bite you

Just as he did with the Trainspotting sequel, Danny Boyle returned to his zombie franchise with new purpose ‒ a story of how British survivors have been fending off the apocalypse since 2002’s 28 Days Later. When young Spike broke out of their coastal island quarantine to find a cure for his sick mother, his zombie-hunter dad (Aaron Johnson) was forced to follow. Their quasi-spiritual encounter on the mainland with Ralph Fiennes’ extraordinary doctor turned a monster movie into something unexpectedly moving and profound.

See it: VOD

Now watch: Trainspotting 2 (2017)

VOD stands for video demand, meaning the film is available on Aro Vision, Neon Rentals, Prime Video, Apple TV, or YouTube.

Three standout local docos

Prime Minister

WHILE GREATER MINDS have ponder our honours system elsewhere in the holiday edition of magazine, an observation: there is already an alternative life-achievement honour – the five-star documentary feature. Three such top-ranked docs about our great and good were released in cinemas this year after premieres at the NZ International Film Festival.

The most prominent, of course, was Prime Minister, a riveting movie that was a fly-on-the-wall study of Jacinda Ardern’s rise and self-induced fall as PM. It had some audiences crying as if it was Whale Rider all over again. After all, it, too, was the tale of a young woman plucked from obscurity to lead the tribe, even if some elders didn’t think she was up for the task, but who then dealt heroically with giant problems that kept washing up on our shores.

And while the doco, one largely powered by the home-movie footage of husband Clarke Gayford, shouldn’t be mistaken for a piece of political journalism, it still captured a period in history vividly from a unique, centre-of-the-storm angle.

Another study of a great dame also impressed Listener reviewers. The House Within’s examination of Dame Fiona Kidman by director Joshua Prendeville traversed the Wellington writer’s life by letting her do the storytelling in her own raw, honest and funny way.

Life in One Chord

Likewise, in Life in One Chord, director Margaret Gordon captured the many voices – snotty punk, sneering singer, brutally frank memoirist – of veteran musician Shayne Carter, offering a captivating film that brought to life many of the pages in his terrific autobiography Dead People I Have Known.

Prime Minister proved popular – it’s been seen by more than 50,000 in New Zealand and has given Ardern’s international profile a second boost after the release of her bestselling autobiography. She was on The Graham Norton Show promoting its UK release in mid-December, following its November release in Australia.

But if you were a Kiwi living in either place who fled the country after the confines of Covid and the economic aftermath – as Ardern did herself – you might wonder if seeing it would be the thing to put you off ever coming home.

Funnily enough, the local cinema year ends with a terrific doco Not Only Fredd Dagg But Also John Clarke, about a Kiwi who fled our shores and never returned. – Russell Baillie

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