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Much of the late-2025 discourse surrounding top 10 lists and awards was all rooted in \u201cOne Battle After Another<\/a>\u201d this, and \u201cSinners<\/a>\u201d and \u201cSentimental Value<\/a>\u201d that. In other words, the same roll call of films again and again that \u2014 regardless of their brilliance or inclusion on your own list \u2014 becomes numbing and starts to make the eyes glaze over.\u00a0<\/p>\n While we\u2019re not out here advocating for contrarianism for contrarianism\u2019s sake \u2014 a great movie is a great movie \u2014 we at IndieWire want to draw your attention to a number of underseen indie films that flew under radars otherwise attuned to the frequency of the same cluster of movies. Our criteria was that these films could\u2019ve come from previous festivals but had to have received U.S. distribution in 2025 (remember \u201cA Little Prayer\u201d from Sundance 2023?). Other films, like Harris Dickinson\u2019s directorial debut \u201cUrchin,\u201d seem high-profile enough to exclude the film from this list, but the fact remains that few people saw it, and it hasn\u2019t made much of a dent in the awards season.\u00a0<\/p>\n The start of 2026 doesn\u2019t inspire much confidence in terms of fresh material. We still have two and a half months of the film awards season to get through, up until the Oscars, and January is typically the cruelest month for new studio or indie releases (i.e., a give-us-your-worst dumping ground). Ahead of the new year, check out 25 great indie movies that went underseen and underappreciated this past year.<\/p>\n You can also check out IndieWire\u2019s top 25 movies of 2025 here<\/a>, and IndieWire\u2019s roundup of 53 filmmakers sharing their top films lists here<\/a>.<\/p>\n \t\u201cThe Balconettes\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t From IndieWire\u2019s review by David Ehrlich<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s hard to remember the last time a director prominently displayed their own vagina onscreen.\u00a0Statistically speaking<\/a>, most of them wouldn\u2019t be able to do it if they tried. But\u00a0No\u00e9mie Merlant<\/a>\u00a0has never shied away from an opportunity to redefine how female bodies are depicted on\u00a0film<\/a>, and \u2018The Portrait of a Lady on Fire\u2019 star\u2019s recent pivot behind the camera has only emboldened her efforts to reject the male gaze by inviting her characters to reclaim its oppressive hyper-sexualization on their own terms.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cNeedless to say, she\u2019s happy to lead by example in her poisoned but delicious midnight snack of a second feature. Playing \u00c9lise, a C-list starlet who\u2019s recently been cast as\u00a0Marilyn Monroe<\/a>\u00a0in a TV movie (only to steal her boyfriend\u2019s car and flee the set in a panic), Merlant crashes into \u2018The Balconettes<\/a>\u2018 dolled up to look like a cheap synonym for male desire. It\u2019s a costume that \u00c9lise will strip away over the course of the physically uninhibited and formally unbound rape-revenge horror-comedy that follows, until \u2014\u00a0at her lowest moment \u2014 the actress\u2019 pursuit of an abortion leads her to the world\u2019s most apathetic gynecologist, who instructs \u00c9lise to place her feet in the stirrups and point her body towards the audience as she waits and waits and waits to be examined.\u201d<\/p>\n \t\u201cThe Baltimorons\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t From IndieWire\u2019s review by Christian Zilko<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u201cIf you find yourself feeling down on your luck this holiday season, it might be time to ask yourself a simple question. Do you really need\u00a0all\u00a032 of your teeth? Couldn\u2019t you spare one or two in exchange for a potential lifetime of happiness?<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s more or less the takeaway from \u2018The Baltimorons<\/a>,\u2019 though\u00a0Jay Duplass\u2019 bittersweet holiday romance<\/a>\u00a0takes a few detours on its way there. Co-writer and star Michael Strassner gives himself a tailor-made breakout role as Cliff, a sad sack Baltimore native who can\u2019t properly celebrate his six-month sobriety milestone because he\u2019s mourning an unsuccessful suicide attempt and his depressing (and in all likelihood, depressingly common) improv-comic-to-mortgage-broker career path. His struggles with addiction clearly took a toll on his fianc\u00e9 Brittany (Olivia Luccardi), and their relationship has evolved into something more resembling a caregiver and patient than a romantic partnership (with all the resentment that accompanies that, of course). And these days, she seems more concerned about him relapsing into comedy than having a drink.\u201d<\/p>\n \t\u201cBoys Go to Jupiter\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t From IndieWire\u2019s review by Christian Zilko<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u201cPerhaps the secret to\u00a0making a great coming-of-age movie in 2025<\/a>\u00a0is making everything look like it\u2019s happening in a mobile game. As early adolescence becomes an increasingly online experience \u2014 sure, kids still play sports and go outside, but the kind of unsupervised exploration captured in films like \u2018Stand by Me\u2019 is now far more likely to happen in open world games than on bikes without a parent in sight \u2014 it helps to meet dejected youngsters on their own hyper-colorful, overstimulating level.<\/p>\n \u201cNot that Julian Glander\u2019s delightful debut feature \u2018Boys Go to Jupiter<\/a>\u2018\u00a0ever acknowledges its digital sheen. The 3D animator, who branches out into filmmaking after a career spent making graphics for everyone from The New York Times to The New Yorker and short films for Adult Swim, immerses us in a world that appears to be constructed out of virtual Play-Doh, with candy-colored blobs forming a whimsical backdrop for characters with endearingly simple faces who run around discussing hot dog philosophy, magical sentient lemons, and whether the defective golf balls from a local miniature golf course are actually eggs.\u201d<\/p>\n \t\u201cCactus Pears\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t From IndieWire\u2019s review by Ritesh Mehta<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u201cA queer Marathi language romantic drama with the mottled, lingering emotional punctuation if not always the verbal pithiness of a haiku, Rohan Parashuram Kanawade\u2019s narrative feature debut \u2018Sabar Bonda<\/a>\u2018 (\u2018Cactus Pears\u2019) brings to earth its gay protagonist\u2019s existential limbo by resorting to a perennially reliable inciting incident: the death of the patriarch, followed by a period of culturally specific mourning.\u201d<\/p>\n \t\u201cDiciannove\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t From IndieWire\u2019s review by Kate Erbland<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u201cFirst-time feature filmmaker Giovanni Tortorici throws a lot at the screen in his \u201cDiciannove<\/a>\u201c: animated sequences, jump cuts galore, Dutch angles to spare, zippy zoom-ins, freeze frames, the whole lot of it, a showy way to tout his prodigious skills, most of them unnervingly funny and a touch out of place.\u00a0That trick, however, is one of many ways Tortorici keeps his audience off-kilter while spinning a coming-of-age tale that feels all too familiar until,\u00a0wham! (points to the filmmaker for avoiding comic book-styled action words), \u2018Diciannove\u2019 and its inscrutable protagonist finally snap into place. And while that particular \u2018place\u2019 is much darker than this sly, slippery\u00a0film<\/a>\u00a0initially lets on, it ultimately proves to be far more thrilling.\u201d<\/p>\n \t\u201cDreams (Sex Love)\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t From IndieWire\u2019s review by Harrison Richlin<\/a>:<\/p>\n The \u201cconflict of parsing the interior elements of the human experience is what\u2019s at the crux of Dag Johan Haugerud\u2019s\u00a0Golden Bear-winning drama<\/a>, \u2018Dreams (Sex Love).\u2019 Serving both as a living portrait and past reflection of teenage sexual awakening, Haugerud utilizes various storytelling tools to draw viewers in, from extensive voiceover narration detailing the thoughts and feelings of the film\u2019s central character, Johanne (Ella \u00d8verbye), and a symphonic score by Anna Berg that elevates our sense of her emotional journey to poetic imagery that amplifies how one dream can influence the dreams of others. In truth, one of the deep studies Haugerud seems to explore in his work is how dreams aren\u2019t just held while one is sleeping, but as a function of our daily lives.\u201d<\/p>\n \t\u201cDrowning Dry\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t From IndieWire\u2019s review by Ryan Lattanzio<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u201cA family tragedy is examined from all sides, sifted through, considered, in Laurynas Barei\u0161a\u2019s skillfully directed and wounding \u2018Drowning Dry<\/a>.\u2019 The title comes from an expression meaning that just enough water has entered your lungs to arrest your breathing, but it\u2019s not enough to kill you. With a\u00a0Michael Haneke<\/a>-esque impassive glaze and a\u00a0Ruben \u00d6stlund<\/a>-level satire of manners and emotional stuntedness in adults, the\u00a0film<\/a>\u00a0acquires a quiet power as it plays out all possible permutations of a swimming accident that may or may not have ruined the lives of at least two families. It\u2019s one of those movies where the ground is ever shifting beneath you, as Barei\u0161a replays scenes you thought you understood and recontextualizes them to suggest you perhaps never did.\u201d<\/p>\n \t\u201cEast of Wall\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t From IndieWire\u2019s review by Harrison Richlin<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u201cFrom Vittorio di Sica\u2019s \u2018Bicycle Thieves\u2019 to the films of the Safdies and Sean Baker, using non-professional actors has long been a tool filmmakers have employed to add a note of authenticity to their work. And yet, with \u2018East of Wall<\/a>,\u2019 writer\/director\u00a0Kate Beecroft<\/a>\u00a0elevates this concept to greater heights,\u00a0crafting a feature docu-fiction<\/a>\u00a0debut that is cinematically and narratively rich, but also takes care to reflect the deeper reality at the heart of its story.\u201d<\/p>\n \t\u201cDracula\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t From IndieWire\u2019s review by David Ehrlich<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s fitting that the first good movie to meaningfully incorporate AI into its aesthetic should be about an undead bloodsucker that feeds on humanity in order to seem alive. And yet, for a three-hour\u00a0film<\/a>\u00a0that opens with a chorus of computer-generated Vlad the Impalers staring into camera and demanding that we suck their cocks,\u00a0Radu Jude<\/a>\u2019s gleefully stupid \u2018Dracula<\/a>\u2018 proves much too expansive \u2014 and much too invested in the centuries of barbarism that paved the way toward Silicon Valley \u2014\u00a0to be misunderstood as a simple rebuke against the grotesqueries of algorithmic image-making.\u201d<\/p>\n \t\u201cHappyend\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t From IndieWire\u2019s review by David Ehrlich<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u201cSet at a strictly monitored Japanese high school at some point in the near future,\u00a0Neo Sora\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0\u2018Happyend<\/a>\u2018 might be a low-key drama about a group of friends as they steel themselves (and each other) against tomorrow in the weeks before they graduate and scatter to the winds. Yet this coming-of-age story \u2014\u00a0however pensive and hushed the rest of it might be \u2014\u00a0begins with an ominous blast of text that wouldn\u2019t be out of place at the start of a violent sci-fi epic like Katsuhiro Otomo\u2019s \u2018Akira.\u2019 \u2018Weather buildings creak louder,\u2019 read the words on the screen. \u2018The systems that define people are crumbling in Tokyo. Something big is about to change.’\u201d<\/p>\n \t\u201cThe Ice Tower\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t From IndieWire\u2019s review by Ryan Lattanzio<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u201cGorgeous and glacial in equally frosty measure, Lucile Had\u017eihalilovi\u0107\u2019s \u2018The Ice Tower\u2019 is all art-film-only vibes, a wintry 1970s fairy tale about a screen actress who casts a potentially dangerous spell. It\u2019s anchored by an actress,\u00a0Marion Cotillard<\/a>, who has one of the great faces, and a classical sophistication with a glamorous, out-of-reach noirish beauty that pairs wonderfully with a creature cut out of Hans Christian Andersen: amorous, elusive, but wounded.\u201d<\/p>\n \t\u201cInvention\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t From IndieWire\u2019s review by Josh Slater-Williams<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u201c\u2019Invention\u2019 fictionalizes the immediate aftermath of [star\/co-writer Callie] Hernandez\u2019s own father\u2019s death, which happened in the fall of 2021 \u2013 one line alluding to Covid skepticism suggests a similar date for the film\u2019s narrative. Hernandez\u2019s dad, an alternative health doctor, made several TV appearances in the 90s through to as late as 2020, with VHS recordings of these broadcasts making their way into \u201cInvention\u201d from the very start. Hernandez stars as a woman \u2013 amusingly named Carrie Fernandez \u2013 coping with the death of her estranged inventor father, who\u2019s only ever glimpsed through the aforementioned archive footage.\u201d<\/p>\n \t\u201cA Little Prayer\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t \u201cJunebug\u201d screenwriter and \u201cAbundant Acreage Available\u201d writer\/director Angus MacLachlan returned to Sundance \u2014 nearly three years ago in 2023! \u2014 for another low-simmer character study grounded in faith and family with \u201cA Little Prayer.\u201d Facing a tough acquisitions market overall, this critics\u2019 favorite starring David Strathairn and an Independent Spirit Award-nominated Jane Levy did not reach theaters until fall 2025, and it deserved a louder release. Ever capable of summoning an entire inner life within a compact running time, Strathairn stars as a Vietnam veteran trying to protect his daughter-in-law (Levy) from his son\u2019s (Will Pullen) affair. MacLachlan brings his intimate sensibilities as a playwright back to the screen here, and he\u2019s been rigorously campaigning for the film this fall on his own; it ended up with two Independent Spirit Award nominations, including one for MacLachlan, Best Screenplay. \u2014RL<\/p>\n \t\u201cOn Becoming a Guinea Fowl\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t From IndieWire\u2019s review by David Ehrlich<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u201cDecades of mediocre\u00a0Sundance<\/a>\u00a0movies \u2014\u00a0and\u00a0some very good ones<\/a>, 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\u00a0one that reflects the grace and strength they\u2019ve inherited from the generations who came before them.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cRungano Nyoni\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0lucid and incandescently furious \u2018On Becoming a Guinea Fowl\u2019 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 \u2018I Am Not a Witch\u2019 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.\u201d<\/p>\n \t\u201cPavements\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t From IndieWire\u2019s review by Adam Solomons<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u201cThe question\u00a0Alex Ross Perry<\/a>\u00a0asked himself before embarking on the mad, four-faced project that is \u2018Pavements\u2019 was: \u2018What if Pavement was the most important band of all time?\u2019 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 \u2018Slanted and Enchanted,\u2019 a fake \u2018Bohemian Rhapsody\u2019-style biopic starring\u00a0Joe Keery<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Jason Schwartzman<\/a>, a museum exhibition Perry helped devise and that brims with mostly unimportant memorabilia,\u00a0and\u00a0an actual documentary all exist in service of \u2018Pavements.\u2019 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, \u2018Pavements\u2019 understands it perfectly. Making a film about the band any other way seems like a complete waste of time.\u201d<\/p>\n \t\u201cReflection in a Dead Diamond\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t \u201cIf\u00a0\u2018Tenet<\/a>\u2018\u00a0was some kind of definitive arabesque on the spy movie, it would make a fine double bill at a classy cinematheque with \u2018Reflection in a Dead Diamond<\/a>,\u2019 which has just premiered in competition at the Berlinale. Co-directed by the artsy genre specialists H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Cattet and Bruno Forzani, the film shuffles a myriad of spy thriller trademarks, like a particularly deft croupier, whereas \u2018Tenet\u2019 would arrange them like tidy, brutalist blocks that could be recombined at will. If these Nolan cross-references are pushing it, Cattet and Forzani indeed show themselves as up to date with newer manifestations of this sub-genre (although thankfully not with \u2018Kingsman\u2019): its first shot of waves violently crashing a pearlescent beach is nearly identical to the opening imagery of \u2018Inception.’\u201d<\/p>\n \t\u201cSanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t Identical twin brothers and stop-motion animators Stephen and Timothy Quay bring their dreamlike, transhistorical, hybrid visual style to an adaptation of a 1937 novel by Bruno Schulz. The brothers are best known for the 2005 feature \u201cThe Piano Tuner of Earthquakes\u201d and the 1986 short \u201cStreet of Crocodiles.\u201d In \u201cSanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass,\u201d stop-motion puppetry and live-action follow a man named Josef, looking for his dying father. He discovers within the sanatorium a labyrinth in which time moves at its own pace compared to the rest of the world, and where his father\u2019s death has not yet occurred. Seven chapters bend time and dimensions, fantasy and reality, for this ghostly, hypnotic dream of a film that premiered at Venice last year but played Film Forum in 2025. \u2014RL<\/p>\n \t\u201cSouleymane\u2019s Story\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t From IndieWire\u2019s review by Christian Zilko<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u201cEverybody that Souleymane (Abou Sangare) encounters has an angle. The Guinean immigrant is nothing if not a hustler, zipping through the streets of Paris on his bicycle making food deliveries at all hours of the night in order to scrape together the funds to buy some asylum papers to present to OFPRA (the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons). But while he has surrounded himself with a community of African immigrants who are theoretically willing to guide him through the process, everybody\u2019s service comes with a price. And the services themselves are nothing to brag about.\u201d<\/p>\n \t\u201cStranger Eyes\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t From IndieWire\u2019s review by Sophie Monks Kaufman<\/a>: <\/p>\n \u201cWhat it means to see and be seen within an era of mass surveillance is the slippery subject of Yeo Siew Hua\u2019s \u2018Stranger Eyes<\/a>\u2018 \u2014 the first\u00a0film<\/a>\u00a0from Singapore to compete for the Golden Lion in Venice Film Festival\u2019s 81-year history. What begins as a crime thriller ends as a transfixing meditation on our personal need for recognition and the difficulty of finding this for ourselves or providing that for others.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe film begins with a man poring over video footage of a family picnic, looking for clues to the whereabouts of his kidnapped baby. The film ends with him standing outside an apartment looking up at the unit where he no longer belongs. How he moves from dealing with loss to being the lost one is chronicled using an elliptical visual language that takes its cue from security footage tapes. In theory, this provides almost total coverage, yet it does so without ever closing in on its human subjects in all their existential mystery and misery.\u201d<\/p>\n \t\u201cSunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake)\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t From IndieWire\u2019s review by David Ehrlich<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u201cThe great frustration with\u00a0anthology<\/a>\u00a0films \u2014 and the reason I sink a little deeper into my seat every time I sit down to watch a new one \u2014 is that even the best of them tend to be wildly uneven, the whole seldom greater than the sum of a few select parts. Enter:\u00a0Sierra Falconer\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0light and languid \u2018Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake),\u2019 a collection of wistfully effervescent vignettes that resists the usual highs and lows of its format by drawing a gentle power from the stillness of the water that runs through it.\u201d<\/p>\n \t\u201cSwamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t From IndieWire\u2019s review by Christian Zilko<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u201cIn Isaac Gale and Ryan Olson\u2019s new documentary, Swamp Dogg\u2019s life of achievements takes a backseat to a more pressing matter: getting his pool painted. In an unspecified location in the San Fernando Valley, Swamp Dogg lives in a suburban enclave of creativity. His house is filled with loving freeloaders, primarily musician friends like Guitar Shorty, who asked to crash with him at one point or another and ended up staying for decades. The house is a hotbed for jam sessions and barbecues, but Swamp Dogg thinks it\u2019s missing one thing. He wants a picture of himself riding a rodent painted on the bottom of his pool so that it can be seen from the sky.<\/p>\n \t\u201cThe Things You Kill\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t From IndieWire\u2019s review by Ryan Lattanzio<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u201cThe existential apocalypse of a Turkish literature professor gets an oblique and chilling study in \u2018The Things You Kill<\/a>.\u2019 On its surface, this disquieting diptych about male anxiety has the feel of, say, an Asghar Farhadi movie, a moral dilemma urging forth a thriller plot. But that\u2019s precisely the sort of bait-and-switch Iranian writer\/director Alireza Khatami is operating on here, until his tense and nightmarish film starts to resemble more something like David Lynch\u2019s \u201cLost Highway\u201d as directed by Abbas Kiarostami. Khatami (\u2018Terrestrial Verses<\/a>\u2018), who lives in Canada, relocated the setting from Iran to Turkey to evade censorship in his native country \u2014 a censorship of patriarchal violence that the film itself also rings upon like a warning bell of a bleak future.\u201d<\/p>\n \t\u201cTo a Land Unknown\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t From IndieWire\u2019s review by Sophie Monks Kaufman<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u201cThe film\u00a0opens with a quote from the celebrated Palestinian scholar, Edward Said<\/a>: \u2018In a way, it\u2019s a sort of fate of Palestinians not to end up where they started, but somewhere unexpected and far away.\u2019\u00a0These words have been cutting since the moment they were first spoken years ago, but released into the world now during the horrific genocide in Gaza, they have an extra, desperate bite, as another generation is forced to seek displacement as the only alternative to violent death.\u00a0Premiering at Cannes in this climate<\/a>, Fleifel\u2019s portrait of two individual characters asks questions that cannot be confined to the screen. Where do you belong after you have been driven from your homeland? When your existence is criminalized, how can the laws of so-called civil society apply?\u201d<\/p>\n \t\u201cUrchin\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t From IndieWire\u2019s review by David Ehrlich<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u2018\u201dBabygirl\u2019 star\u00a0Harris Dickinson<\/a>\u00a0is a little too young, a little too handsome, and a little too hot right now for critics to pretend as if his directorial debut exists in a vacuum, and yet the raw and raggedy \u2018Urchin\u2019 \u2014 which would command our attention regardless of who made it \u2014 is only a few seconds old before it\u2019s locked into the thrall of a different actor altogether.\u201d<\/p>\n \t\u201cViet and Nam\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t From IndieWire\u2019s review by David Opie<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u201cFlying a little under the radar in Un Certain Regard is a Vietnamese film that has been banned in Vietnam before even receiving its world premiere at Cannes. The second feature \u2014 excluding a credit in an anthology \u2014 by writer\/director Truong Minh Quy (\u2018The Tree House\u2019), \u2018Viet and Nam\u2019 is a queer romance that has proved controversial back home not for its characters, but reportedly for its portrayal of\u00a0\u2018a gloomy, deadlocked, and negative view<\/a>\u2018\u00a0about the country and its citizens, according to an official letter from Vietnam\u2019s Cinema Department.<\/p>\n \u201cWhile far from the cheeriest of movies, this is a curious fate for a sensitive, transfixing drama that further showcases the talents of one of Vietnam\u2019s most exciting modern filmmakers. The film is seemingly set in 2001, as someone references watching the news that morning and seeing a plane hitting a skyscraper in New York. But among the cited influences on the feature\u2019s inception is an\u00a0incident from 2019<\/a>, when 39 Vietnamese migrants were found dead in a refrigerated truck in Essex, England. Emigration through trafficking is lined up for one of the film\u2019s leads, though an ominous, abstract prologue sets a doom-laden tone for the eventual trip not going to plan.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Much of the late-2025 discourse surrounding top 10 lists and awards was all rooted in \u201cOne Battle After…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":383718,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[166274,88,2695],"class_list":["post-383717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-best-of-2025","tag-entertainment","tag-film"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=383717"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383717\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/383718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=383717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=383717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=383717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"'The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/The-Balconettes.jpg\")
\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: The Forge\u00a0\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n![\"'The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/THE-BALTIMORONS-Still-1.jpg\")
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