Wednesday, December 24, 2025
Ten Films of 2025
It's time for the annual top-ten list. Below are the ten best films from the 235 feature-length narrative and documentary titles I watched in 2025, regardless of when or whether they were released in the United States.
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Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight (South Africa 2024 | 98 min. | My review)
Through the eyes of a child raised in a broken system, the film shows how the personal and political become inseparable, and how understanding begins when inherited narratives start to crack. "Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight" is not a coming-of-age tale in the traditional sense, it's a confrontation with legacy. Through the narrow lens of a child, it paints a vast canvas of colonialism, displacement, and identity.
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Caught Stealing (USA 2025 | 107 min. | My review)
With its blend of relentless action, bursts of grim humor, and a hero you can't help but root for, "Caught Stealing" is a masterfully crafted thriller that jolts, surprises, and entertains at every turn. Austin Butler electrifies as a washed-up ballplayer dragged into the underworld. This is a sizzling thriller that keeps raising the stakes until the final bite.
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Souleymane's Story (L'histoire de Souleymane | France 2025 | in French | 93 min.)
"Souleymane's Story" moves with a constant pressure, tracing a precarious slice of immigrant life with sharp focus and empathy. Abou Sangare delivers a deeply affecting performance, carrying the film with a natural, almost documentary-like presence that makes Souleymane's exhaustion, hope, and resolve feel lived-in rather than performed. The film's power lies not in melodrama but in accumulation, small daily pressures stacking higher and higher, capturing the grind of survival faced by undocumented immigrants navigating bureaucratic indifference and economic precarity. Timely without being didactic, it's a humane portrait of endurance in a system designed to look away.
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Familiar Touch (USA 2024 | 90 min.)
Kathleen Chalfant delivers a breathtaking performance in "Familiar Touch," a film that transforms the quiet rhythms of assisted living into a deeply human portrait of memory loss and the terrible erosion of self that comes with dementia. Sarah Friedland's direction is subtle yet piercing, allowing Chalfant to embody Ruth with both fragility and dignity, capturing the small gestures and disorientations that make the disease so devastating. What could have been a clinical depiction becomes instead a profoundly empathetic exploration of identity, desire, and care, reminding us that even amid decline there is resilience, humor, and connection. The film's power lies in its ability to make Ruth's journey universal, showing how illness reshapes not only the patient but the bonds of family and caregivers, and in doing so, the film achieves a rare balance of artistry and emotional truth.
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Following his breakout hit "Barbarian" (2022), writer-director Zach Cregger returns with "Weapons," a gripping and ingeniously crafted thriller that surpasses its predecessor in both ambition and execution. Suspenseful, eerie, unexpectedly hilarious, and wildly entertaining, "Weapons" is a bold and exhilarating ride from beginning to end.
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The President's Cake (مملكة القصب | Iraq/Qatar/USA 2025 | in Arabic | 105 min.)
"The President's Cake" is an arresting Iraqi tale that transforms a child's simple errand into a tense allegory of survival. Following nine-year-old Lamia, accompanied by her scene-stealing rooster, as she scrambles to gather scarce ingredients for Saddam Hussein's 50th birthday cake, the film delicately balances innocence and danger, revealing how life under sanctions turns the ordinary into a daily trial. Both mesmerizing and heartbreaking, the story allows the cake to stand as a fragile token for hope under tyranny, while Lamia's journey, part adventure and part ordeal, underscores the resilience of ordinary people living under extraordinary pressure.
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Sirât (Spain/France 2025 | in Spanish/French/English/Arabic | 115 min.)
Set against an unforgiving landscape and shaped by constant forward motion, Spain's Oscar submission "Sirât" thrives on its ability to surprise without losing control. The film repeatedly shifts direction in ways that feel purposeful rather than arbitrary, each turn tightening the narrative and raising the stakes. Its filmmaking is muscular and confident, especially in how it builds tension through rhythm, sound, and narrative escalation instead of exposition. What makes the film so gripping is its refusal to settle into a single mode, pushing onward with nerve and precision as it transforms unpredictability into a driving force rather than a distraction.
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The final and most affecting film in Dag Johan Haugerud's Oslo trilogy, "Dreams" is a deeply felt portrait of first love, self-discovery, and the role of writing in making sense of overwhelming emotions. It won the top prize at this year's Berlin International Film Festival and stands as the most emotionally resonant and fully realized entry in the trilogy. It captures the moment when love first takes shape—raw, consuming, and unforgettable.
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One Battle after Another (USA 2025 | 161 min. | My review)
What if today's political divides worsened into a future of repression, silenced dissent, and mounting violence? Acclaimed writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson takes that chilling premise and shapes it into his most electrifying work yet, "One Battle After Another" Both a fantastic thriller and a grand political fable rooted in timeless human struggles, the film feels piercingly of-the-moment while never losing sight of the intimate family story at its core. It is an electrifying, politically charged epic staring into our fractured future.
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Living the Land (生息之地 | China 2025 | in Chinese | 132 min.)
Chinese director Huo Meng's engrossing "Living the Land" (生息之地 | China 2025 | in Chinese | 132 min.) captures a world on the cusp of change with extraordinary warmth and beauty. Set in rural China in 1991, it tells the story of a ten-year-old boy left behind as his family departs for Shenzhen in southern China, unfolding as both a portrait of tradition and a fond remembrance of a way of life now fading into history. The film's rich, painterly cinematography lingers on landscapes, seasons, and the rituals of everyday existence, creating a sensory experience that feels both deeply affecting and universally nostalgic.
