My 10 favourite films of the year (and the three worst)

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This has been a fine year for film, but the vintage has a curiously retro flavour; most of 2025’s best new releases smack of something made between 1964 and 2008. Filmmakers in Hollywood and elsewhere plunged en masse back into the past to revive everything the movies have been missing of late: sensuality, sincerity, moral complexity, even good old-fashioned romance. These classic qualities brought a new vitality and daring to our cinemas and sofas – and never were they more in evidence than in my 10 favourite films.

10. Sinners

Ryan Coogler’s Deep South tale of supernatural bloodlust was the highest-grossing entirely original live-action cinema release – i.e. one not based on a book, video game, toy, etc – since Inception in 2010. Whether that strikes you as encouraging or depressing, it’s clear that audiences were thirsty for its particular strain of high-trash excess. Here was a meaty genre plot with stylish period trappings (in which vampires lay siege to a 1930s Mississippi juke joint) shot with intoxicating swagger, and featuring the sort of sweatily entrancing movie-star-as-pin-up performances that many of us feared went extinct in the 1990s.

Where to watch: Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video and Sky Store

9. The Ballad of Wallis Island

In 2007, the comedians Tim Key and Tom Basden wrote and starred in a short film about an eccentric lottery winner who lures his favourite singer out of retirement for a lucrative comeback gig. Eighteen years on, the two expanded it to feature length – with Carey Mulligan as Basden’s now-estranged songwriting partner, whom Key’s becardiganed motormouth Charles also cajoles back into service. It’s wonderful in so many of the ways Noughties British comedy could be, from its winningly peculiar premise to its gorgeously hand-strummed textures, as well as a tender – even soppy – heart.

Where to watch: Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video and Sky Store

8. Warfare

A recurring theme of 2025’s best cinema is moral discombobulation: what a thrill to watch films that not only refuse to tell their audience what they ought to think, but dare to suggest the very notion of right-think may be no more than a consolatory fantasy. Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s blistering dramatisation of a (real) Navy SEAL operation in Iraq in 2006 was pieced together from the testimony of the soldiers involved – and when the squad find themselves thrust into hell, the filmmaking passes no judgment on their imperfect yet very human choices. The fog of war here is hot and choking, and the questions the film raises cling to you like the stench of smoke.

Where to watch: Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video and Sky Store

7. Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy

Hollywood might have all but given up on the romantic comedy 20 years ago, but the grande dame of the Cool Britannia variant came back to remind us all how it should be done. In Michael Morris’s film, Renée Zellweger’s Bridget is now a Hampstead single mum finding her way back to employment and romantic fulfilment: Hugh Grant’s Daniel Cleaver is still on the scene, though only platonically – Leo Woodall’s Gen-Z park keeper and Chiwetel Ejiofor’s flustered schoolteacher are now vying for our heroine’s heart. This was two hours of pure joy, with a script (co-written by Bridget’s creator Helen Fielding) that wittily and movingly acknowledged the passing of time since the form’s Noughties heyday.

Where to watch: Now TV, YouTube and Amazon Prime Video

6. Sentimental Value

In a year in which the movies seemed suddenly re-enthused by the old ways of doing things, this deliciously sophisticated drama from Norway’s Joachim Trier gave the medium its unofficial mascot. Played by Stellan Skarsgard, he’s Gustav Borg – an ageing director who fears that cinema’s glory days are gone, but who nevertheless plunges back into his own turbulent family history to find inspiration for a late-career opus. The ensuing creative journey forces him to patch things up with his estranged actress daughter (Renate Reinsve), as well as navigating a wittily rendered 21st-century media landscape. Coming to UK cinemas on Boxing Day, this is cinema to buoy the soul: warm and nourishing and just so much fun.

Coming to cinemas on Dec 26

5. One Battle After Another

The 10th film from Paul Thomas Anderson was the first in a while from the There Will Be Blood director to take place in the here and now. (Or thereabouts: in that respect, as well as many others, the film defied tidy categorisation.) But from its wily satirical jabs to its jaw-dropping car chases, it moved with the muscular assurance of a New Hollywood classic. Continuing his magnificent mid-career run of freaks and weirdos, Leonardo DiCaprio starred as a crusty Gen-X radical whose teenage daughter (Chase Infiniti) is being hunted by Sean Penn’s vengeful colonel to settle an old score. The resulting cat-and-mouse chase through California’s unglamorous backwaters resembled Dr Strangelove via Vanishing Point via Terminator 2: a movie-buff feast that made two and a half hours pass in the conspiratorial wink of an eye.

Where to watch: Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video and Sky Store

4. 28 Years Later

After a six-year directorial hiatus (and an arguably meandering decade before that), Danny Boyle came roaring back with this heady legacy sequel to an early-career triumph in which Britain succumbed to a rage-filled zombie horde. One generation on, a new vision of England’s bygone age has been raised by human survivors on Lindisfarne, while the undead prowl the mainland’s forests and meadows, observed by an enigmatic doctor (a stellar Ralph Fiennes) who can help young Spike (Alfie Williams) navigate this nightmarish nation he’s inherited. Boyle and returning writer Alex Garland drill down into Britain’s subconscious, from Teletubbies to Jimmy Savile via Shakespeare, Kipling and Blake, with black wit and crazed fearlessness. This was revitalising stuff.

Where to watch: Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video and Sky Store

3. The Brutalist

Brady Corbet’s towering period piece, about a Jewish architect hauling his masterpiece out of the post-war American mud, was a sweeping, old-fashioned immigrant epic shot through with punk indie verve. The actor memorably described by Golden Globes host, Nikki Glaser, as “two-time Holocaust survivor Adrien Brody” deservedly won his second Oscar for portraying László Tóth, whose time in the Nazi extermination camps comes to shape an extraordinary project funded by a wealthy patron (Guy Pearce) with his own legacy to construct. This was a spectacular film about the everlasting tension between art and commerce, and history’s inexorable churn.

Where to watch: Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video and Now TV

2. After the Hunt

No film this year – or perhaps this decade – has better laid bare modern cinema’s moral timidity than this merciless campus thriller from Luca Guadagnino. Starring a frostily sublime Julia Roberts as a Yale philosophy don who becomes embroiled in a he-said-she-said claim of departmental sexual assault, it forced viewers to reckon with the terror of uncertainty, as claim and counterclaim – plus dubious behaviour on both sides – muddied the waters to the point that even bystanders couldn’t escape untainted. Some indignant viewers (and, sad to say, critics) simply didn’t know what to do with it – perhaps not realising Roberts’ insincere, self-serving and increasingly fruitless ethical triangulation mirrored their own. But for those of us who love film that needles and inflames, this was irresistible.

Where to watch: Amazon Prime Video

1. Marty Supreme

Set for a UK release on Boxing Day, the latest film from Josh Safdie, the elder of the two brothers behind Uncut Gems, is cinema as intoxicant – and a heck of a cocktail at that. Imagine a soul-of-America statement piece as grandly mounted as The Godfather or Chinatown, but packed with the mad comic cadenzas of vintage Laurel and Hardy, and you’ve just about got the measure of this madcap period comedy set in 1950s New York, in which Timothée Chalamet’s rascally ping-pong prodigy schemes his way towards the sport’s World Championship in Japan. It wangs back and forth like a manic table tennis rally – its two-and-a-half hours whizz by in what seems like a matter of minutes – while its magnificent supporting cast and fruitcake-rich photography give it an old-fashioned texture that leaves (in a good way) scuffs on your eyes. It’s a new classic that feels like an old one.

Coming to cinemas on Dec 26

Bonus: The three worst films of 2025

Honey Don’t!

The dissolution of the Coen brothers’ film-making partnership in 2018 was, at the time, the cause of much sadness. Had we known then what younger sibling Ethan Coen would go on to make, however, there might have been rioting in the streets. This cataclysmically unfunny, unsexy, un-thrilling noir throwback, starring Margaret Qualley as a lesbian private eye, was the creation of Coen and his spouse, Tricia Cooke – and while it styled itself as a wanton romp in the Russ Meyer mode, it had the faintly tragic air of two self-styled Cool Parents desperately trying to be down with the kids. Even Aubrey Plaza couldn’t save it.

Where to watch: YouTube, Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV

Tron: Ares

Its mispronounceable title might have been good for some Viz-level chuckles, but this second attempted revival of Disney’s vintage sci-fi franchise was otherwise about as much use to anyone as a floppy disk. Fresh from gigaflop Morbius, that albatross of the contemporary blockbuster scene, Jared Leto played Ares himself: a digital super-soldier who bounds into the real world via an enormous 3D printer, then saves it from the evil military tech conglomerate that built him. Leto, who boarded the project eight years ago as star and producer, appears to have shamelessly turned the whole $200m venture into a personal ego bath, though his pensive philosopher-samurai turned out to be the most annoying sci-fi hero in eons.

Christmas Karma

Everything you don’t want to see from British cinema could be found in abundance in Gurinder Chadha’s modern musical spin on Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Truly, this monstrosity had it all: sub-Hollyoaks acting, awkward extras, terrible lip-sync, cloyingly worthy social history lessons – to say nothing of the stunt casting of internationally marketable celebrities (Eva Longoria, Billy Porter… Boy George?) around whose availability and public images the script had apparently been haphazardly rejigged. The result was a sort of audiovisual Instant Scrooge Spray: just five minutes would be enough to put you off all things festive for years.

Where to watch: in cinemas now

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