10: Little Trouble Girls (Dir; Urska Djukic)

The most ‘out of nowhere’ entry on this list kicks off the top 10, a simply sublime coming-of-age tale that rejects all the easy answers usually given by its genre stablemates in favour of something much bolder and less comfortingly affirming, as teenage urges battle religious commitment in a story that marks the first time Slovenian cinema has really been put on the map for me.

9: Sentimental Value (Dir; Joachim Trier)

The follow-up to The Worst Person in the World was pretty much everything you could hope for in the next Joachim Trier effort. A sparklingly funny, sharply written, phenomenally acted, and quietly devastating look at both the limits and the healing powers of art, this tale of a family of artists and their memory-haunted home was a beautiful meander towards a deeply moving destination from a filmmaker who knows how to completely capture his audience.

8: One Battle After Another (Dir; Paul Thomas Anderson)

The fact that 8th place (out of the 117 films I saw this year) feels surprisingly low to me to rank the latest from PTA is more a reflection on the consistently staggering output of the most reliably brilliant current auteur in America than any failing on One Battle After Another‘s part. This isn’t *quite* Anderson at his peak, but it’s still goddamn brilliant, the best use of a nine-figure budget since Dune 2 and packed with a lot of the year’s best characters and most quotable lines. The fact that a Paul Thomas Anderson film has managed to become part of the cultural zeitgeist outside of just film nerds is a miracle worth celebrating, as is whatever location scouting wizardry involved in finding *that* stretch of road for the finale.

7: Is This Thing On (Dir; Bradley Cooper)

If you’d told me at the start of the year that I’d end up liking the ‘John Bishop life story’ movie more than the new PTA, that would have sounded legitimately insane to me, but such is the power of the concentrated dose of pure charm that Bradley Cooper packs into his midlife crisis/stand-up romcom. Every moment in the company of these characters is a pure delight, with some of the funniest and most honest cinematic conversations of the year happening in what feels like every other scene here all the way to an unashamedly joyous ending, with Will Arnett just killing it in the best big-screen role he’s ever been given.

6: Weapons (Dir; Zach Cregger)

Though there might have been a few better overall packages at the movies this year, I don’t think there’s a single better or more cathartic single five-second *moment* than when Weapons‘s terrorised little boy Alex snaps that twig to bring those final 10 minutes roaring to life. It’s the most pump-your-fist perfect punchline to a horror comedy that has spent the last couple of hours terrifying and mystifying you. Zach Cregger’s second feature is a colossal step up into the horror big leagues that, unlike so many of its ambitious but stumbling peers, sets up a tantalising high-concept premise that actually builds to an ending that is even better than the film around it, unleashing grisly-yet-hilarious pint-sized vengeance on the year’s second-best villain.

5: Pillion (Dir; Harry Lighton)

The best romcom of the year was also the best debut film of the year, Harry Lighton’s dom/sub gay biker romance exactly the kind of provocative and funny yet warm and sweet shot in the arm that the British indie film scene is always in dire need of. With Harry Melling and Alexander Skarsgard each giving career-best performances, Pillion is impossible to not fall in love with, never interested in cheap subversions of its genre even as it dives deep into a subculture that will be completely alien to most audiences. This is a romcom through and through, as funny and romantic as the genre gets, even as one of the couple sleeps on the floor and spends his birthday having an outdoor orgy on portable trestle tables.

4: Sound of Falling (Dir; Mascha Schilinski)

The first in the triptych of severe films about female trauma and loneliness that make up my fourth, third, and second places, Sound of Falling is the severe-est of the three, a wrenchingly sad and furiously angry memento mori of a film about all the different deaths a young woman must endure as she passes through life. Across four distinct eras of a family farmhouse, Sound of Falling gave us the year’s most affecting set design and a lot of its best cinematography and sound work too. Viscerally upsetting, Schilinski’s ridiculously confident second feature makes the always risky choice of humourless self-importance and yet completely earns it with a jagged examination of how society has failed women for over a century.

3: The Testament of Ann Lee (Dir; Mona Fastvold)

A simply ingenious match of form and theme, Mona Fastvold’s return behind the camera after co-writing The Brutalist with husband Brady Corbet (who himself co-writes here) is a musical possessed of rare power. Every technical choice here is the perfect mirror of the journey of Ann Lee and the Shakers, from the breathy, pounding songs (bolstered by another world-class score from Daniel Blumberg) to the way Fastvold starts to fill her frames with more and more light as the faith finds its home. It takes what could be an alienating story of 18th Century religious hysteria told with shonky Mancunian accents and makes it radically, revolutionarily modern and immersive, the pure empathy of Fastvold’s approach emotionally overwhelming by the end.

2: Die My Love (Dir; Lynne Ramsay)

And the best performance of the year goes to…Jennifer Lawrence. In Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love, she is a force of nature; terrifying, tragic, horrible, seductive, captivating. It’s the high water mark of an already impressive career, completely matching Ramsay’s trademark impressionistic approach, all feeling made flesh without regard for conventional narrative or ‘likeable’ characters. It’s the kind of film and acting that gets called ‘fearless’, an overused term that I have to admit really comes into its own here with Die My Love‘s beautiful yet hateful characters, stunningly bizarre cinematography, and a story that refuses to tell you how literally to take it. Every wait for a Lynne Ramsay film is a long one, and every wait is more than worth it; this is, in the best possible way, animalistic filmmaking.

1: Marty Supreme (Dir; Josh Safdie)

Number one and, to be honest, it’s not even close. Marty Supreme is my runaway film of the year, the most relentlessly entertaining time you could possibly have at the cinema in 2025 and the movie that further cements Josh Safdie as the filmmaking voice of his generation and Timothee Chalamet as *the* star of 2020s Hollywood (just look at the spectacular way he’s been promoting this if you’re still not convinced). Every element that made Uncut Gems a masterpiece is here again, working in perfect concert again. Head-spinning New York chaos with every character in a room firing off crashingly loud yet flawlessly written dialogue? Check. A truly generational star performance anchoring it all? Check. Scuzzy yet beautiful cinematography? Check. The single best score of the year? Check. And an ending that’ll knock your socks off and send you stumbling back out into the world with a dazed smile on your face? Check that too. It’s supreme.