From One Battle After Another to Den of Thieves 2: Pantera, Sirāt to Pillion, here’s Redmond Bacon and Jared Abbott’s picks for the best films of the year.
10 Best Films 2025
Jared Abbott
Editor-at-large Jared loves movies and lives with Kiki in Berlin.
Cult Classic Twin Cheeks: Who Killed The Homecoming King? Finally Reemerges From Its Camcorder Swamp
Kelly Hughes’ long-unavailable and unique queer outsider artwork Twin Cheeks: Who Killed the Homecoming King? finally makes its way back into the public eye.
18 Holes to Paradise Keeps Things Under Par
The absurdities of the privileged in the face of incoming disaster is smartly dissected in João Nuno Pinto’s Tallinn entry 18 Holes to Paradise.
Peeping Trojans, Slivering Sofas
A sleek German answer to Philip Noyce’s Sliver, Interior uses a sexual taboo to interrogate a world where all we do is watch — and rarely intervene.
Forastera. Teenage Grief Under the Mallorcan Sun.
Lucía Aleñar Iglesias’ promising debut finds a unique angle on coming-of-age and haunted house tropes — marking her as a director to watch.
Between Dreams and Hope. Between Risk and Compromise.
Farnoosh Samadi’s blistering thriller Between Dreams and Hope captures the compromises of a young trans man navigating the difficulties of modern-day Iran.
En el camino Updates the Queer Road Trip Playbook
David Pablos’ riveting Mexican film En El Camino, winner of the Queer Lion, presents a fresh take on the queer road trip movie.
Empty Incel Nonsense
Evi Kalogiropoulou’s deeply disappointing Gorgonà leans so heavily into fascist aesthetics it starts to resemble the very thing it criticises.
Otec Brutally Shows How the Mind Can Rewrite Reality
A father makes a devastating mistake in Tereza Nvotová’s Otec, bleak and hellish depiction of every parent’s worst nightmare.
THAT GIRL
A transgender Macedonian woman radically transforms the lives of a group of tomboys in Kukla’s assured and heartfelt Fantasy — live from Locarno!