Films of the year 2025

The essential films of the year, according to New Statesman staff.

The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt)

The Mastermind is great because it turns the museum-heist genre inside out with wry intelligence. Kelly Reichardt’s 1970s art-theft tale follows an unemployed family man whose bungled attempt to steal four paintings unravels into a melancholic, character-driven study of ambition. Josh O’Connor is riveting as a deluded would-be thief, perfectly embodying the film’s ironic tone. Artier than Ocean’s Eleven, yet no less thrilling to the discerning eye.

A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg)

Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain follows two cousins, David (Eisenberg) and Benji Kaplan (Kieran Culkin), as they set off on a week-long “Holocaust tour” in Poland. Benji and David’s to-and-fro is immediately engaging, and the production is entirely grounded in its settings. The soundtrack, featuring Chopin beautifully performed by Canadian-Israeli pianist Tzvi Erez, asks what we are doing when we visit such places – the ways in which we may be seeking meaning absent from our own lives. Although only Eisenberg’s second film as writer and director, it is already a masterpiece.

The Brutalist (Brady Corbet)

The three hours and 20 minutes of the film – by far the longest on this list – cover the years from 1947 to 1980, tracing the postwar career of an imaginary Jewish-Hungarian refugee architect, László Tóth (Adrien Brody), in America. In the words of our critic: “Here’s an imposing epic of the American Dream, tracing the difficult path of the immigrant and artist under the raw capitalism of this period.”

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Hard Truths (Mike Leigh)

The veteran director Mike Leigh returns with his shortest and most severe film yet. It is a portrait of a deeply unhappy, intolerably aggressive and contemptuous woman in her fifties, Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste). Jean-Baptiste, the first Black British actress to be Oscar-nominated for Secrets & Lies in 1996, is no less committed to her character in Hard Truths. Similarly, Leigh returns in a coda of his classic mode.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Mohammad Rasoulof)

Under the pressure of censorship, Iranian directors have often resorted to oblique modes such as allegory and sketchy autofiction. Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig, however, addresses tyranny and repression directly, showing how they operate within both the family and the state, following the 2022 Women, Life, Freedom protests. Rasoulof was in Evin Prison, watching these events unfold on social media, when the idea for the film took shape. It is a powerful act of recognition and resistance.

April (Dea Kulumbegashvili)

On-screen portraits of abortionists are rare, but Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April does exactly that. The film follows Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), an obstetrician who performs secret abortions in Georgia and finds herself under investigation after a stillborn delivery at the hospital where she works. Although abortions are legal in Georgia up to 12 weeks, they remain socially frowned upon. April is a study of a woman driven by an inner sense of justice and an inescapable feeling of despair.

One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson)

There is a level of silliness to Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel, but beneath it lies a timely statement: one about America’s rightward drift. One Battle After Another is an action film from beginning to end, “relentlessly in motion, a comedy-thriller any viewer might enjoy,” our critic writes. Yet it is also a film seriously concerned with racial politics, examining the demographic mingling in America rooted in slavery – and the attempts by some to deny or undo it.

Pillion (Harry Lighton)

Pillion is the only debut on this year’s list, but it has earned its place. The film adaptation of Adam Mars-Jones’s 2020 novella Box Hill ages the protagonists and places them in a contemporary setting, rather than 1975 London. Colin (Harry Melling) and Ray (Alexander Skarsgård) enter into a sub/dom relationship that lasts a few months. Writer-director Harry Lighton tests the boundaries of queer cinema without a hint of judgement. Pillion is the film Fifty Shades failed to be.

It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi)

Jafar Panahi served seven months in Evin Prison, Iran, for protesting on behalf of other Iranian filmmakers. It is this experience that makes It Was Just an Accident a potent political statement, one that culminated in a new prison sentence received on 2 December. The film is a fully realised drama, almost an open threat to the regime, as it anticipates how, if the Islamic Republic were to fall, there would be both an accounting and a need for forgiveness in whatever version of Iran replaced it.

Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier)

Films about the travails of making films, and novels about the toils of being a novelist, have to be very good to seem worthwhile to those outside the business. Luckily, Sentimental Value is one of those films. Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), an elderly Norwegian film director who has not made a feature in 15 years, unexpectedly returns home after his estranged wife’s funeral. The film could not be more universal, addressing themes of love and loss, understanding and forgiveness across generations, as a man attempts to mend his family through the camera.

[Further reading: Books of the year 2025]

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