Featured Review

Team MM’s Favourite Films Of 2025

Published

3 months ago

Dec 31, 2025

Saint Ryan Coogler feeling sinful as he offered us two Michael B Jordan’s for the price of one. James Cameron treating us to a villainous sorceress, that made us want to retitle a Kylie Minogue banger to ‘Varang Varang’. Leonardo Dicaprio roared for revolution, as he hit the long and winding road with one Paul Thomas Anderson and Danny Boyle returned to an iconic horror franchise, that felt like he was only gone 28 minutes rather than years. Safe to say, 2025 brought the fire. Less battle, more One List After Another. Here’s some of the Movie Marker team’s favourites of the past 12 months…

*Sticking to 2025 UK release dates*

Darryl Griffiths

1 – Plainclothes (Carmen Emmi)

A searing 1990’s set thriller that deep dives into identity, entrapment and the constant surveillance of our own feelings, as we splice together distorted fragments of our edited down lives like a grainy VHS tape, reinforcing those moral grey areas of ourselves we so often needlessly operate within as queer people. Perhaps a warning shot in a climate that is showing signs of regression in how we’re policed and protected. Carmen Emmi (literally) smashes the glass and rings the alarm, almost spurring us on to be very public in this immaculate directorial debut, that draws out stunning performances from Russell Tovey and Tom Blyth, with their on-screen chemistry leaving you holding your breath.

2 – Sorry, Baby (Eva Victor)

3 – I Swear (Kirk Jones)

4 – One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson)

5 – Pillion (Harry Lighton)

6 – Sinners (Ryan Coogler)

7 – Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie)

8 – Flow (Gints Zilbalodis)

9 – Last Swim (Sasha Nathwani)

10 – Urchin (Harris Dickinson)

Chris Connor

1 – One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson)

One Battle After Another was a change in direction for Paul Thomas Anderson, but proved he could handle high-octane action and spectacle as well as character-driven, more intimate films like The Master or There Will Be Blood. As an amalgamation of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, it did the almost impossible task of bringing the cult novel to life. For a 2 ½ hour epic, the pacing flew by, and Anderson found a perfect balance between stoner comedy humour and deeply moving drama interspersed with hair-raising tension. Leonardo DiCaprio showed an ability to seamlessly shift between the different moods while Chase Infiniti delivered one of the year’s most impressive breakout performances, more than holding her own against screen titans like Benicio Del Toro and Sean Penn. If it does end up taking the Best Picture crown in 2026, it will be well deserved.

2 – Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie)

3 – Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier)

4 – The Brutalist (Brady Corbet)

5 – Flow (Gints Zilbalodis)

6 – The Ballad of Wallis Island (James Griffiths)

7 – Sinners (Ryan Coogler)

8 – Late Shift (Petra Biondina Volpe)

9 – Left Handed Girl (Shih-Ching Tsou)

10 – Train Dreams (Clint Bentley)

Rehna Azim

1 – Frankenstein (Guillermo Del Toro)

Bold, epic, visionary filmmaking from Del Toro that makes a well known, old story fresh and new. The big cinema screen was made for this kind of big cinematic work.

*in no particular order*

Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale (Simon Curtis)

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (Rian Johnson)

Roofman (Derek Cianfrance)

Wicked: For Good (Jon M Chu)

Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier)

Latoya Austin

1 – Sinners (Ryan Coogler)

Sinners took us all by surprise with its originality! Its seamless blend of history, drama, supernatural blues music and a stellar cast definitely had me hooked from the outset. I watched Sinners four times in the cinema, learning something new on each occasion due to its symbolism. Its intoxicating, pulsating, passionate blues enthused soundtrack will have you stomping your feet and that multi-generational technical masterpiece of a pivotal scene will wow audiences for years. A superb, timeless film that’s one of Ryan Coogler’s best and delivers a captivating performance from Michael B. Jordan and the entire cast with its brilliance!

2 – Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross)

3 – Hard Truths (Mike Leigh)

4 – Souleymane’s Story (Boris Lojkine)

5 – It Was Just An Accident (Jafar Panahi)

6 – The Long Walk (Francis Lawrence)

7 – Hedda (Nia DaCosta)

8 – One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson)

9 – Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie)

10 – Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy (Michael Morris)

Connor May

1 – Avatar: Fire And Ash (James Cameron)

Empathy in the face of adversity, familial bonds guiding and saving us from the wicked. A supremely spectacular audiovisual spectacle in harmony with a guiding humanist light. Avatar: Fire And Ash is eternal cinema.

2 – Nosferatu (Robert Eggers)

3 – After The Hunt (Luca Guadagnino)

4 – Dying (Matthias Glasner)

5- Pillion (Harry Lighton)

6 – Die My Love (Lynne Ramsay)

7 – One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson)

8 – Baby Invasion (Harmony Korine)

9 – Train Dreams (Clint Bentley)

10 – Black Bag (Steven Soderbergh)

Martin Richmond

1 – Sinners (Ryan Coogler)

Ryan Coogler’s magnum opus, an exhilarating blend of genres, a joyous celebration of the power of music, and an exhilarating vampire movie spliced into one. This is what happens when studios give filmmakers free rein to craft something truly special.

2 – Frankenstein (Guillermo Del Toro)

3 – We Live In Time (John Crowley)

4 – Fantastic Four: The First Steps (Matt Shakman)

5 – Weapons (Zach Cregger)

6 – Flow (Gints Zilbalodis)

7 – Predator: Badlands (Dan Trachtenberg)

8 – The Long Walk (Francis Lawrence)

9 – I Swear (Kirk Jones)

10 – Nosferatu (Robert Eggers)

Jordan King

1 – 28 Years Later (Danny Boyle)

Has there been anything quite so purely exhilarating in cinema this year than watching the result of a 55-year-old and 68-year-old man reuniting to make an excoriating, scorched Earth screed against “the good old days”, against Brexit, against the rise of the far right, against those who want things to “just be how they used to be”, against anti-intellectualists and anti-progressivists and against punch-pulling, both-sidesing centrism? I think not. Here we have a film that begins with children literally being told to avert their eyes from the horrors at their door and fixate on the screen until that static panel is splattered with their blood, and a film that ends with a child of that screen — an orphan raised by the box — enacting a hero fantasy based on a lie sold to him at a formative age by a complicit media. At a moment where the world at large seems to have gotten oh so quiet when it comes to addressing the elephants in the room, Boyle and Garland deliver a defiant shout right in the whole herd’s faces. Roll on The Bone Temple!

2 – Sinners (Ryan Coogler)

3 – Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier)

4 – One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson)

5 – Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (Rian Johnson)

6 – Weapons (Zach Cregger)

7 – Flow (Gints Zilbalodis)

8 – The Ballad Of Wallis Island (James Griffiths)

9 – Frankenstein (Guillermo Del Toro)

10 – Bring Her Back (Michael And Danny Philippou)

Dimitri Kraus

1 – Avatar: Fire And Ash (James Cameron)

There’s something quite dreamlike about Fire and Ash, James Cameron’s third—and finest—Avatar film. It is almost too overwhelming for words: from its meticulously composed imagery to its undeniable emotional intelligence, this is an earnest examination of grief, multiculturalism and faith by way of a classical epic. A film that dares you to ask “What is real?” only to reply with “Everything”, while its ostensibly alien characters show more humanity than any other performer on screen this year. In many ways, the crowning achievement of sensory digital cinema.