Now that we’re down to the final weeks of the year—and what a long and addled year it has been—the best movies of 2025 have mostly come into focus: a textured mix of festival favorites, underseen indies, box-office triumphs, and sneaky sleeper hits. How many have you seen—and which are you adding to your watchlist now, before the 2026 Oscar race kicks into high gear?
Armand
There was no doubt in my mind, heading into Armand, that Renate Reinsve was going to deliver: She was enchanting as a restless millennial in Joachim Trier’s wry and exquisite 2021 film The Worst Person in the World. In the Scandi drama Armand, the debut film by writer-director Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel—the grandson of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann, though there are more flashes of Gaspar Noé here—we meet Reinsve as Elisabeth, a mother summoned to her young son Armand’s primary school.
In the dark, ominous classroom setting, as she hears the accusations that he sexually abused another child, Elisabeth descends into a fit of incredulous, bitter laughter. And she keeps going—it lasts five painful minutes. Each giggle hits like a shovel, excavating new levels of horror, knocking at the walls we put up around uncomfortable truths and societal values. An interrogation evolves into an emotional spiral that’s hard to look away from.
At first slow and elongated, then at grotesque, breakneck turns, Tøndel presents an intense psycho-drama, with slashes of surrealism and a striking, geometric visual language. He offers no easy answers, only the tools to keep digging into the murk of our own humanity long after the film ends. —Anna Cafolla
Black Bag
Nothing revolutionary here: Just another swift and stylish Steven Soderbergh movie. (They’re piling up, these late-era Soderbergh films, at the satisfying rate of about one a year.) Black Bag is nominally an espionage film, and the plot follows some familiar find-the-mole beats, but really, this is the portrait of a marriage, a depiction of two supremely glamorous and powerful London spies—that would be Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett—who turn their surveillance skills on the other. Matrimonial loyalty, bloodless professional efficiency, and the trappings of extremely quiet luxury combine for a diverting, twisty 90 minutes. Plus, there’s a bonkers cast of supporting players: Marisa Abela, Regé-Jean Page, and Tom Burke among them. —Taylor Antrim
Blue Moon
The filmmaker Richard Linklater, never less than prolific, had two new films out this fall. First was Blue Moon, a witty, piercing study of creative decline, focused on the Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke) holding court at Sardi’s on the opening night of Oklahoma!—a musical he did not write. That would be the triumph of his erstwhile songwriting partner Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott) with a new rival: Oscar Hammerstein II (Simon Delaney). Hawke has never been better–electric with jealousy and pride—as he blusters, drinks, and flirts with Yale student Elizabeth Weiland, played by Margaret Qualley. He’s a genius with his light going out. —T.A.
Bring Her Back
The young Australian filmmakers Danny and Michael Philippou have followed up their 2022 hit Talk to Me with another excellent horror film, in quite a different mood—more mournful, more anguished, more serious. This is a story of two orphaned Australian teenagers who move into an isolated house with a foster mother, Laura (Sally Hawkins), who is grieving the loss of her young daughter and harboring a ghoulish plan to bring her back to life. The younger visiting orphan is mostly blind (and played by the vision-impaired actress Sora Wong) and stridently independent. Her brother (Billy Barratt, who is a tousle-haired wonder) is vulnerable and traumatized and not able to do more than keep a wary eye on Laura. There’s another boy in the house: Laura’s young son, Ollie, who says not a word and stalks around, shirtless, like a zombie. Hawkins is the revelation here, a diminutive, hippy-dippy monster. Reimagining the brightly beaming star of the Paddington movies as a suburban psychopath is a world-class act of counter-intuitive casting. —T.A.
Bring Them Down
The ascent of the hyper-versatile actor Christopher Abbott continues apace with Bring Them Down, a mordantly tense, near-nihilist Irish revenge drama (director Christopher Andrews’s feature debut) in which Abbott transforms into a bearded, burdened, rural Irish sheep farmer named Michael who speaks fluent Gaelic and cares for his sick father (Colm Meaney), a shipwrecked patriarch living out his days in the family’s filthy kitchen. When a dispute over two dead rams pits Michael against his striving neighbor Gary (Paul Ready) and his son Jack (Barry Keoghan, incandescent as always), Michael must decide how to settle the accounts and how much blood to spill. Not an uplifting movie but a potent one, with Abbott a highly watchable figure of ambivalence, longing, and regret. —T.A.
Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight
Alexandra Fuller’s celebrated 2001 memoir about growing up as a white child in Rhodesia as it gained its independence and became Zimbabwe gets a finely detailed adaptation in Embeth Davidtz’s debut directing effort. Where Fuller’s book spans two decades, this film limits itself to a few months in 1980 in the life of eight-year-old Bobo (Lexi Venter, incredible).
What’s remarkable about this light-footed film is its impressionistic, childlike vision of an African country on the verge of violence. Placing one’s sympathies in a story where the white farmers carry automatic weapons and Black militants watch them from the bush is not easy, and Davidtz’s tone is bravely matter-of-fact. Her camera focuses closely on the dirt and casual disarray of Bobo’s life on the Rhodesian farm; we see the bugs, the snakes, the chickens, and the submachine guns all at once. When Robert Mugabe wins the election, the Fuller family must make the painful decision to flee—a tragic moment in Bobo’s life and in that of her mother, Nicola, played by Davidtz as a woman beset by alcoholism and grief. —T.A.
Eephus
You don’t have to be a follower of baseball or sports in any sense to appreciate cinematographer and critic Carson Lund’s very funny, absorbing directorial debut, which tracks a single game over the course of a single fall Sunday in small-town Massachusetts—the final face-off between two amateur teams of mostly middle-age men before the field is paved over. It’s difficult to exactly capture the appeal of the film (which debuted at Cannes’s Directors’ Fortnight); some call it a hang movie, others will say it’s a vibe. But part of it is certainly the mix of idle patter and imaginative insults between men who’ve spent a lot of time (maybe too much time) together, exhibiting a specific kind of New England masculinity; evocative sound design that wafts in and out of conversations; glimpses of their lives outside the park, from which the game is a refuge; and keenly observed details at every angle, from the field to the dugout and the sparse sidelines. Looming over everything is the unyielding passage of time, from the quickly dwindling daylight to the players’ creaking knees. —Lisa Wong Macabasco
F1: The Movie
OK, this movie doesn’t need the kind of boost my colleagues are offering for their indie arthouse faves. (I liked Oh, Hi! and Sorry, Baby, too—really, I did!) But I do think it warrants a slot on this list: It’s well-made summer entertainment, and sometimes you just want the mind-numbing pulsations of a supercharged engine when it’s approximately 1,000 degrees outside. Sitting in the theater, the sound system was so loud I was convinced my seat was vibrating, and it was perfect. The plot isn’t much more than some tied-together tropes: rogue enfant terrible turned middle-aged burnout (Brad Pitt, grizzled and gorgeous at the same time) comes roaring back to save the day. There’s a ladyfriend (sorry, a “technical director” for the racing team, played by Kerry Condon) who invents a secret squiggly mechanical appendage that makes the cars go much faster than they otherwise would, and then it’s off to the races. Vroom! I was fully along for the ride. —Chloe Schama
La Grazia
Paolo Sorrentino’s lovely, melancholic new film, La Grazia, about an aging president of Italy nearing the end of his term in office, and facing the difficult choice of whether to sign controversial new legislation, casts a spell of elegance. It stars Toni Servillo, a frequent Sorrentino muse, as Mariano, the president, and his performance is a thing to wonder at. Servillo is controlled and full of self-confidence, even as doubts about his competency and legacy swirl. Wonderfully, the aging president discovers a love of electro-pop and rap and there are several surreal sequences of presidential pomp underscored by electronic squalls and beats. There’s also a mischievous pope applying pressure and a diva-ish old female friend who won’t divulge an old secret. It ends in a delightful way, with Mariano unburdening himself to (of all places) Vogue Italia. We love to see it. —T.A.
Hamnet
In some ways, the less shouted from the rooftops about Hamnet, the better. Yet what cannot be overstated about Chloé Zhao’s intensely moving latest—adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel of the same name, about the tragic circumstances that led to the writing of Hamlet—is the richness of the performances from Jessie Buckley (very much the actress to beat this awards season), Paul Mescal, and young Jacobi Jupe. Top to toe, it’s glorious work. —Marley Marius
The History of Sound
A beautiful, patiently told love story directed by Oliver Hermanus, The History of Sound stars Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor as a pair of early 20th-century music students who fall in love over the course of a folk-song research project that has them hiking through rural Maine. The movie is a quiet—and some might say polite—romance between the two men, full of deflections and things unsaid, but I found it ravishing and overwhelming in its accumulating feeling. The best thing of all are the performances of early American folk songs that the two men record on cumbersome equipment. One of the best films of the year. —T.A.
Revisit our conversation with Josh O’Connor and Paul Mescal on The Run-Through:
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
Rose Byrne is a frightening revelation in this spiraling, hyper-anxious-making story of a mother going through a nervous breakdown. Writer-director Mary Bronstein’s Montauk-set film is not always an easy one to sit through, placing the viewer at claustrophobic proximity to Byrne’s Linda, a therapist with a young daughter with a mysterious eating disorder, who is struggling to retain her grip. While Linda’s husband is out of town, a catastrophic leak in her home forces Linda and her daughter to take refuge in a hotel. The film burrows into Linda’s anxiety during this period: that the house will never get fixed, that her daughter (whom we barely see; the camera remains resolutely on Byrne) won’t gain back critical weight, that she was never meant to be a mother in the first place. Linda lashes out at everyone, a bottomless pit of emotional need, and takes refuge in drugs and alcohol. The casting is incredible: Byrne is incandescent with pain and anger; Conan O’Brien plays her drolly deadpan therapist and colleague; and A$AP Rocky is her amiable neighbor and drug enabler at the hotel. —T.A.
Revisit our conversation with Rose Byrne on The Run-Through:
It Was Just an Accident
The winner of this year’s Palme d’Or, Iranian dissident Jafar Panahi’s first film since his imprisonment for “propaganda against the system” and subsequent release was shot in secret and takes inspiration from his own incarceration. But unlike The Seed of the Sacred Fig, the special jury prize winner from last year’s Cannes, directed by Panahi’s friend and fellow inmate Mohammad Rasoulof, this isn’t a straight-forward indictment of the system. Instead, it’s part surreal comedy, part revenge thriller, following a sweet-natured mechanic (Vahid Mobasseri) who, completely by chance, encounters a man (Ebrahim Azizi) whom he takes for the one who tortured him during his recent, politically motivated imprisonment. Cue a slapdash kidnapping and a quest to verify his identity prior to burying him alive, which brings together a rag-tag gang—a bookshop owner, a photographer, her ex, and a bride-to-be—all of whom suffered at the same man’s hands and have their own notions of justice. It features some truly hilarious set pieces (one involving security guards who have card machines with which to take bribes; another involving the surprise birth of a baby) before building to a heart-wrenching conclusion which lays bare the brutal crimes of the state. It’s as rip-roaringly entertaining as it is blisteringly urgent. —Radhika Seth
Julie Keeps Quiet
The first feature from Belgian filmmaker Leonardo Van Dijl, Julie Keeps Quiet is a sports movie set at an elite tennis academy, where a star junior tennis player has committed suicide and her coach, Jeremy, has been suspended. No one seems to know what happened, or if Jeremy is culpable in some way, and intense scrutiny falls on Jeremy’s latest protégée, 15-year-old Julie. Julie is played by Tessa Van den Broeck, a newcomer to acting and an accomplished junior tennis player, and the choice is a marvel. Onscreen, Van den Broeck trains like the athlete she is, hits a ground stroke like the tennis player she is, and refuses to answer questions about Jeremy with the authentic resilience of an actual teenager. And this is, quite bravely, what the movie is interested in—the choice of a victim not to speak out, and the ripples of unease this causes among both well-meaning adults and Julie’s peers. A discomfiting movie, but also a hauntingly beautiful one. —T.A.
Lurker
The predatory aspects of 21st-century fandom get a brilliant treatment in Lurker, a creepy, gripping debut from filmmaker Alex Russell. The object of obsession here is pop star Oliver (played convincingly by Archie Madekwe), a young UK-to-LA transplant who surrounds himself with an entourage of childhood friends, his manager, and a documentarian as his music career starts to take off. Into his tight circle comes Matthew (Théodore Pellerin), a store clerk turned amateur filmmaker whom Oliver decides, fleetingly, is cool. Matthew has secrets—he lives with his mom and reveres Oliver’s music—but he convinces Oliver he’s a neophyte, and a striving creative like him, and a mutual bond is forged. Matthew will inevitably be cast out of Oliver’s circle–Oliver is fickle and insecure and sets his cohort against each other. The way Matthew manipulates his way back inside, and reveals his bottomless need for attention and connection, is what makes this movie so riveting and disquieting. —T.A.
Marty Supreme
Just when I began to suspect that almost none of the awards-season hopefuls were living up to their promise, Marty Supreme showed up to serve a raw, riotous American success story for the ages. Timothée Chalamet plays a braggadocious, fast-talking 1950s New York hustler on a mission to prove he’s the world’s best Ping-Pong player. Anyone familiar with Good Time (2017) and Uncut Gems (2019) (which director Josh Safdie made with his brother Benny) knows that saying obstacles abound from that premise would be an understatement, and here the action ricochets from the Lower East Side to London, Tokyo, and beyond. Chalamet’s bravura performance vibrates with frantic energy and charisma, switching between youthful innocence and obsessive ambition while masterfully balancing humor, tension, and pathos. Gwyneth Paltrow, playing a silver-screen grande dame hoping to make a comeback, steals every scene she’s in, and the balletic Ping-Pong sequences are riveting. The 1980s New Wave soundtrack and glistening score by Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never) enhance the sugar highs—and the unease. This is ambitious, manic, unpredictable, exhilarating cinema; see it on the biggest screen you can. —L.W.M.
Revisit our conversation with Gwyneth Paltrow on The Run-Through:
The Mastermind
We’re seeing Josh O’Connor go from strength to strength in 2025, and now in Kelly Reichardt’s facetiously titled latest, he does some of his finest work as the bumbling JB Mooney, an unemployed husband and father adrift in early-’70s suburban Massachusetts. He orchestrates a clumsy plan to steal a batch of lesser-known paintings from the local museum, and the film focuses on the fallout, with the Watergate scandal unfolding in the background and underscoring the all-too-sadly-relatable milieu of disillusionment and delusion. Reichardt, ever a master of muted storytelling, keeps the film teetering between dry humor and devastating pathos, while the production design revels in the textures of the 1970s. —L.W.M.
Materialists
Bring back rom-coms seems to be the brave thesis statement anchoring Celine Song’s sophomore feature. Starring Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal, and Chris Evans—three beautiful people who are simply very fun to watch onscreen—Materialists is a satisfying, extremely watchable entry that reinvigorates a genre that has largely been relegated to streaming-only clichés. With the exception of a confounding subplot—it’s 2025, Song seems to say; it’s not all butterfly and rainbows here—this is a sly, delightful watch. Come for a trio of swoony movie stars—Evans being the standout here (one forgets how good an actor he can be)—and stay for wonderful supporting turns by Zoë Winters and Louisa Jacobson. Plus those great, insightful monologues: Pascal’s Henry breaking down how, despite the success he’s achieved, his inability to find love makes him feel like a failure, puts into sharp focus just how great Song is at depicting modern romance (or the lack thereof). —José Criales-Unzueta
Revisit our conversation with Celine Song on The Run-Through:
Nouvelle Vague
In Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, Jean-Luc Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) is finally taking his stab at feature filmmaking at 28 after grinding away as a critic at Cahiers du Cinéma. Worried that he’s already “missed the wave”—friends like Claude Chabrol, Éric Rohmer, and François Truffaut have found success as directors—he sets out not merely to make a movie, but to create a new filmic language. The result is 1960’s Breathless, starring the gamine Jean Seberg (played by a very likable, pixie-cut Zoë Deutch), fresh from Bonjour Tristesse, and the slightly dopey, sweetly boyish Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin). Recreating all of this in silvery black and white, Linklater is in an appealingly film nerd register here, celebrating the scrappy, bullish creativity of an auteur’s auteur. —M.M.
Oh, Hi!
Iris (Molly Gordon) and Isaac’s (Logan Lerman) first weekend away as a couple feels too good to be true: they swim in the lake, dance in the moonlight, and experiment with some light BDSM. Still, when Isaac tells her that he’s not looking for a relationship right now, Iris’s world is rocked. (He told his mom about her and cooked her scallops, after all!) Fueled by heartbreak and whiskey, Iris decides that maybe he should just stay in his handcuffs while she tries to change his mind. Chaos, as you can imagine, ensues. In addition to Gordon and Lerman’s palpable chemistry, the film features delightful supporting performances from Geraldine Viswanathan, John Reynolds, and David Cross, who keep the tone buoyant. Something of a lighthearted Misery for the new generation, Oh, Hi! is for anyone who’s ever been in an ill-fated situationship—or been been victimized by a man with an avoidant attachment style. —Hannah Jackson
One Battle After Another
There’s Leonardo DiCaprio doing his best Big Lebowski, Sean Penn giving it his unhinged all, and Teyana Taylor letting rip, but throughout Paul Thomas Anderson’s gonzo revolutionary epic, its heart and soul is newcomer Chase Infiniti, whom you may remember as Jake Gyllenhaal and Ruth Negga’s perceptive daughter in Apple TV+’s Presumed Innocent. In its first chapter, OBAA is a romp without a clear center of gravity, but in its second, as soon as she appears, we care deeply for this street-smart teen trying desperately to evade the far-right militia hunting her. Watchful, razor-sharp, and surprisingly steely, her transformation from schoolgirl to hardened insurgent is both rousing and devastating. A star is born moment if I ever saw one. —R.S.
One of Them Days
There are too many comedies that just kind of float mindlessly along, devoid of any real stakes, but One of Them Days is most definitely not one of them. In the film, Keke Palmer’s Dreux and SZA’s Alyssa demonstrate what it looks like when an actual, fleshed-out, relatable female friendship is tested by the all-too-common circumstances of capitalism, and they manage to make you laugh (hard) along the way. —Emma Specter
The Phoenician Scheme
Some might call this a minor-key entry in the symphonic oeuvre of filmmaker Wes Anderson. I found The Phoenician Scheme to be one of his most elegant and elegiac films–intricate, droll, and sophisticated. Its power rests in Benicio del Toro as the shady international businessman Anatole Korda, a sly, seductive operator who is trying to firm up his many enterprises and bequeath them to his daughter, Liesl, played marvelously by Mia Threapleton. The plot is convoluted, hectic, and crowded with deadpan supporting players who keep things amusing, and the scenework—framed like portraiture—is stunning. Family ties have always been Anderson’s route to feeling and the relationship between father and daughter brims with unstated (and all the more powerful) emotion. —T.A.
A Preparation for the Next Life
An adaptation of Atticus Lish’s extraordinary 2014 novel by the filmmaker Bing Liu (Minding the Gap), A Preparation for the Next Life strikes deep: It’s a small film about an uneasy romance between two young people living a precarious existence in New York City. One is Aishe (played by the amazing newcomer Sebiye Behtiyar), an undocumented Uyghur immigrant with a determination and discipline to work and survive, and the other is Skinner (Fred Hechinger), a troubled army veteran inclined in the opposite direction. He wants to live hard and self-destruct—and he loves the gym, which is a place of heated connection. Every scene has a seductive naturalism and the movie offers moments of staggering, offhand beauty (a drunken sequence for Skinner soundtracked by an old Modest Mouse song is one of my year’s cinematic highlights). The couple can’t last, and when Skinner’s darkness overwhelms him, Aishe—heartbroken—can only try to stand clear. —T.A.
The Quiet Ones
What if Michael Mann made a Danish heist film? That was my extremely satisfied reaction to this stylish crime movie, based on a real caper that took place in 2008, during the height of Europe’s financial crisis. Our hero is Kasper (Gustav Giese), an extravagantly tattooed boxer and young father, who falls in with a gang of thieves to pull off a major score, targeting millions. This second feature from filmmaker Frederik Louis Hviid is well-paced, tense, lovely to look at, and threaded through with a mournful realism. —T.A.
Rebuilding
Writer-director Max Walker-Silverman’s second feature, Rebuilding, is a small-scale film with an overwhelming effect—a beautiful, excruciatingly moving story about a Colorado ranch owner named Dusty, played by Josh O’Connor, who loses his property to wildfire. Rebuilding is about the aftermath of disaster, as Dusty fumbles for a sense of himself without his cattle, his ranch, his home, and lives in a FEMA-provided trailer, working on a highway crew. Should he be a full-time father now? His ex-wife, Ruby (Meghann Fahy), and young daughter, Callie-Rose (Lily LaTorre), live nearby, and Callie-Rose yearns in her own cautious way for a connection. O’Connor carries the movie with gentle, earthbound affect—he’s never been so good. And the humaneness of the film–its consideration for all its characters, especially Dusty’s mobile-home neighbors, also made homeless by fire—wraps you with a sense of hard-won hope. —T.A.
Revisit our conversation with Meghann Fahy on The Run-Through:
Sentimental Value
Norwegian arthouse favorite Joachim Trier’s follow-up to his transcendent millennial coming-of-age saga, The Worst Person in the World (with Renate Reinsve and Anders Danielsen Lie in tow yet again), is both an intimate character study of two sisters and their domineering filmmaker father, and a decades-spanning account of their family history, rooted in the cavernous, cracking-at-the-foundations Oslo home they’ve long occupied. It is also, easily, the best film of the year so far, nimbly balancing humor and heft, and delivering an ending which reduced me to a weeping puddle. Watch it for the razor-sharp, expertly modulated script and the sensational performances, including from Stellan Skarsgård, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, and Elle Fanning, and look out for it in the 2026 awards race. —R.S.
Revisit our conversation with Renate Reinsve on The Run-Through:
Sinners
Every year since the pandemic, there’s been that one movie that has critics and audiences insisting that movies are back. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is 2025’s entry. It’s perhaps a surprising one on paper, given its genre (horror) and period backdrop—and the fact that it’s an original story as opposed to a franchise, sequel, or revival. But here is also where its strengths lie. Sinners is haunting, entertaining, and equal parts terrifying and enthralling. It has both the kinds of scenes that go endlessly viral and the kinds of deep cuts and historical references that will send you down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. All this to say, Sinners has it all, including Michael B. Jordan playing brothers—and a satisfying post-credits scene. A film that’s written like an indie but treated like a blockbuster? Cinema is back. —J.C.U.
Sorry, Baby
It doesn’t feel like an overstatement to call Sorry, Baby miraculous. Eva Victor’s breathtaking debut follows a graduate student (and later professor), Agnes, who is picking up the pieces of her life after a sexual assault. Victor—who wrote, directed, and stars in the film—emerges as a generational talent who tackles delicate subject matter with poise and humor. (Not only an empathic examination of trauma, Sorry, Baby is also deeply funny in the way that it prods at the absurdities of reporting sexual assault.) Underscoring Victor’s airtight writing is a stable of winning performances from Naomi Ackie (who plays Agnes’s best friend, Lydie) and Lucas Hedges (as her neighbor Gavin), plus a touching cameo from John Carroll Lynch. Sorry, Baby captures so many big feelings that it feels like your soul is going to burst out of your body when you watch it. Whatever Eva Victor does next, I’m on board. —H.J.
Revisit our conversation with Eva Victor on The Run-Through:
Sound of Falling
Director Mascha Schilinski has crafted something mesmeric and ethereal with Sound of Falling—about four generations of young women inhabiting a rural German farmhouse across a century—one for people who just adore filmmaking. The film follows a non-linear, prismatic arc, delicately weaving together stylistic techniques that bring Ingmar Bergman and David Lynch to mind, with surrealist strokes of Maya Deren and touches of Michael Haneke’s White Ribbon. It’s kaleidoscopic in its story of women oppressed, degraded, and dismissed by the dominating culture of their time. While phantoms of female anxiety, emotion, and pain proliferate across each timeline, Alma, Erika, Angelika, and Lenka articulate their own budding coming-of-age achingly, exquisitely. How do you stitch your sense of self together in a world that’s intent on your coming undone? It is dark and unflinching but never austere, buoyed by an incredible score by Anna Kühlein and sound design by Claudio Demel. I found Lena Urzendowsky as Angelika, caught between the abuse of her uncle and the tender pursuit of her cousin, completely captivating. —A.C.
The Testament of Ann Lee
Oscar nominee Amanda Seyfried’s barnstorming work in Mona Fastvold’s mind-boggling 18th-century cult musical isn’t without its flaws—the Mancunian accent is, er, questionable and a couple of her songs inadvertently drift into Disney Princess territory. But, having said all that, I found its sheer power and commitment impossible to resist. As the titular founding leader of the Shakers, the Christian sect who expressed their devotion through wild, ecstatic movement, she is a force of nature—a woman who rises to greatness through endless, visceral suffering and out of the most unlikely circumstances. As you’ll already know if you’ve seen the likes of Mamma Mia! and Les Misérables, she’s a bonafide triple threat, but the almost demonic passion of her dancing and the sweeping, screaming force of her voice are things I hadn’t anticipated. This is a rip-your-heart-out-and-slam-it-on-the-table performance which demands to be seen on the biggest screen possible. —R.S.
Train Dreams
The source material for Train Dreams—a lovely, grief-stricken portrait of early 20th-century northwestern American logging country by filmmaker Clint Bentley—is a novella by the late Denis Johnson. One of Johnson’s prettier, later, off-hand works, the book has made for a stunningly beautiful movie with another brilliant performance by the chameleonic Australian actor Joel Edgerton. He’s as good here as I’ve ever seen him (which is saying a lot) as Robert Grainier, a loner and hard worker who falls in love with Gladys (Felicity Jones) and makes a life for himself and their young daughter in a log cabin in Idaho. When tragedy strikes, the film shifts into a chronicle of endurance, of solitude and grief. If that all sounds…slow, the cinematography and the sheer expressive power of Edgerton’s craggy face carry you through the film’s gentler moments. It ends with a powerful sense of how the sheer weight of time can bring a measure of grace. —T.A.
Universal Language
Set in a liminal space where snow-blanketed Winnipeg meets Tehran, this absurdist comedy by Canadian filmmaker Matthew Rankin (The Twentieth Century) follows the loosely intersecting lives of several characters, each on their own odyssey of sorts: Two schoolchildren try to emancipate money frozen in a puddle of ice; a guide leads a tour of banal Winnipeg sights, which includes a drab parking structure and an abandoned suitcase on a bench; and Matthew (played by Rankin) returns home after many years away. Don’t preoccupy yourself too much with the plot; just enjoy the deadpan humor, excellent visual gags (like the Tim Hortons sign in Farsi), and surreal images (like the turkey dealer with large studio headshots of turkeys on the wall). Heightening the strangeness is the fact that it’s shot in the style of Iranian meta cinema (think Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi), and the mostly Iranian cast speaks Farsi mixed with some French, as Rankin does himself. By turns comic and beguiling, the dreamlike film, which premiered at Cannes’s Directors’ Fortnight and made the Oscar shortlist for best international film, is ultimately about human connection transcending borders and language. —L.W.M.
Urchin
Harris Dickinson, recently of Babygirl fame, steps behind the camera for this highly impressive feature directorial debut: the tale of Mike (a compelling, dishevelled Frank Dillane), a homeless Londoner battling to get through each day. Along the way, he encounters indifferent passersby, good samaritans, and troubled fellow drifters, secures and loses jobs, falls in love, finds friends, and spirals in and out of addiction. Tonally, it’s a total masterclass, which fully humanizes our hero without ever recoiling from his darker impulses, and eschews easy answers in favor of a satisfying, knotty complexity. It’s also gorgeously shot, confirming Dickinson—who has a long history of collaborating with boundary-pushing filmmakers like Eliza Hittman, Xavier Dolan, Joanna Hogg, and Ruben Östlund—as a cinephile worthy of their company. There are some big swings which tip into head-scratching territory, including an ending that doesn’t really work, but as first films go, it’s startlingly assured stuff. Extra points, too, for the film’s brilliant use of the Atomic Kitten classic “Whole Again,” which you’re guaranteed to be crooning as you exit the cinema. —R.S.
The Voice of Hind Rajab
In Kaouther Ben Hania’s breathless and heart-wrenching retelling of the true story of Hind Rajab, a six-year-old who was trapped in a car under fire in Gaza City in 2024, Hind’s real voice is carefully inserted into a partly dramatized narrative set inside the Palestine Red Crescent Society’s emergency call center, where volunteers stayed on the line with the child for hours as they tried to arrange a rescue mission. Motaz Malhees and Saja Kilani, in particular, are exceptional as the two employees who are with Hind the longest, and the startling restraint Ben Hania displays—showing us live maps on the team’s screens instead of a recreation of debris-filled streets; voices on phones rather than additional supporting characters—keeps you gripped throughout without tipping into full-blown melodrama. Then comes a more documentary-style ending, featuring Hind’s mother, real footage of the wreckage Hind lay in as she awaited aid, and clips of the little girl in happier times, frolicking on the beach—a sequence that left everyone around me weeping. If enough people see this film, it’s one that could actually change the world. —R.S.
Warfare
Warfare confirmed for me that novelist-turned-filmmaker Alex Garland is writing and directing the most interesting, uncompromising genre movies of anyone in Hollywood. This one, which Garland wrote with former Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza, is an exercise in strict realism, a depiction of a deadly battle in Iraq with meticulous staging and the action proceeding in real time. Some amusement was had in the Vogue offices about all the internet boyfriends cast in this movie: Joseph Quinn, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Will Poulter, Kit Connor, Finn Bennett, Taylor John Smith, Cosmo Jarvis, Adain Bradley, and Charles Melton. But these young men are military fodder, not matinee idols—and the pain and suffering they experience are hellishly real. Warfare is the opposite of an escapist action film—an extremely tense and sobering document about the realities of modern war. —T.A.
