Facing the Bitter Truth: The Best Films of 2025

Mittwoch, 31. Dezember 2025

The Best Films of 2025

It happened again: in the 18th year of my annual round-up of my favourite films of the year, the list has grown even further, due to an absolutely unkillable darling just missing the original cut of 20. Here they are, then, my top 25 films of 2025 – a somewhat haphazardly ranked cross section of the best, most memorable titles that premiered in the German-speaking part of Switzerland between 1 January and 31 December 2025 theatrically (not including festival exclusives), on VOD, and on the various streaming platforms.

Anyone curious why their favourites didn't make it onto the list should head over to my Letterboxd profile, which contains nutshell reviews of everything I watched this year, as well as my author pages at Filmbulletin and Maximum Cinema, which contain even more writing of mine on the cinema of 2025. As ever, this selection is less a definitive pronouncement than an attempt at a curated watchlist for those asking what I would recommend from the year's sizeable movie catalogue.

The Top Twenty-Five

25
28 Years Later
directed by Danny Boyle
(United Kingdom/United States, 2025)

Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later (2002), a post-apocalyptic horror film about the outbreak of a zombie virus in the United Kingdom, is still one of the starkest, most grimly prescient genre films made about the course of British history in the 21st century. More than two decades on, 28 Years Later reunites Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland to pick through the cultural detritus of what has unfolded since – the Iraq War, the 7/7 bombings, multiple Tory governments, Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic – and what they come up with is one of the thorniest offerings of its kind in recent memory. Set in the north-east of England, where a boy (Alfie Williams) braves the zombie-infested landscape to get his sick mother (Jodie Comer) to a reclusive doctor (Ralph Fiennes), the film bucks the burgeoning legacy-sequel trend of delivering referential (and reverential) fan service and instead questions the horror-movie premise of its own series: as communicated through Ralph Fiennes' disarmingly gentle mirror image of Heart of Darkness' Kurtz, 28 Years Later entertains the possibility that the Infected roaming Boyle's Great Britain are as much an expansion of the living matter populating the British Isles as the Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, Norwegians, and Normans who preceded them. The British Empire was shaped by war, conquest, and re-conquest; and if it's the Infected who break that cycle, why not hear them out? And this fresh, genuinely radical reassessment of the source material is matched beat for beat by Boyle, Garland, and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle fully leaning into garishly stylised digital expressionism, replacing the harsh DV aesthetics of 28 Days Later with iPhones, drones, oversaturated colour schemes, and hellish night-vision imagery to underscore how thematically and artistically relevant these zombies continue to be. 28 Years Later is available on Apple TV, Netflix, blue TV, Sunrise TV, Rakuten TV, and DVD and Blu-ray.

24
Hundreds of Beavers
directed by Mike Cheslik
(United States, 2022)

The Looney Tunes spirit is alive and well, at least as long as there are films like Hundreds of Beavers. The low-budget brainchild of director Mike Cheslik and co-writer Ryland Tews, this uproariously funny black-and-white oddity about a down-on-his-luck fur trapper in 19th-century North America going to war with an army of unexpectedly crafty beavers (played by people wearing anthropomorphic beaver-mascot costumes) is a relentless conveyor belt of silent-era-style slapstick comedy adapted for the age of crafting games à la Minecraft and Animal Crossing. From classic pratfalls to cartoonish holes opening up in greenscreened ice sheets to the discovery of the rodent space programme, Hundreds of Beavers keeps upping the comedic ante, its wildly escalating scope seemingly pushing it further and further towards overwhelming its modest means, only for Cheslik's filmmaking to become even more ingeniously creative at rising to the challenge instead. That the film casually proves correct the theory that the only way to do cinematic justice to American history is to stage it as farce is the cherry on top. Hundreds of Beavers is available on Apple TV, DVD and Blu-ray.

23
We Believe You
directed by Charlotte Devillers and Arnaud Dufeys
(On vous croit, Belgium, 2025)

Courtroom dramas, especially the ones produced in recent years, run on the uncertain relationship between truth and framing, between the "objective" facts of an event and the way said event is being framed in a legal setting. From Saint Omer (2022) to Anatomy of a Fall (2023) to Juror #2 (2024), the subgenre is hyper-aware of reality's potential for being manipulated. There is still room to cinematically escalate the idea, however, as evidenced by the striking We Believe You, directed by Belgian duo Charlotte Devillers and Arnaud Dufeys. The massively pared-down 78-minute chronicle of a custody hearing, starring a cast of professional actors mixed in with actual lawyers, makes literal the notion that the legal process is effectively a series of competing dramatic narratives, each striving to evoke a particular mental image that will tip the scales of justice in its favour: Devillers and Dufeys dedicate the bulk of the runtime to five deeply compelling monologues, shot mostly in unadorned close-ups, which put to the test the viewer's capacity for – or their willingness to – being emotionally manipulated by the rivalling interpretations of the case at hand. In the process, We Believe You lays out the troubling extent to which the social contract is based on people being able to tell a good story and manages, not least through Myriem Akheddiou's fantastic lead performance as both speaker and listener, to explore the patriarchal attitudes and assumptions that are inscribed in the law's desire for clean narratives. We Believe You is currently playing in Swiss cinemas.

22
The Colors Within
directed by Naoko Yamada
(きみの色, Kimi no Iro, Japan, 2024)

Stop me if you think you've heard this one before: a girl who sees people as colours, a guitar-playing cool kid, and a reticent music equipment collector form a band. No, this isn't the start to a corny joke but the set-up to Japanese animator Naoko Yamada's latest coming-of-age tale about outsiders taking their first steps towards learning how to live with what makes them different – and thus into a more independent, more fulfilled future. The Colors Within is a tender and lovingly designed film about the fragile beauty of transitory moments – the feeling of being the first to wake up from a sleepover, the joy of doing something forbidden before one is inevitably caught, the ineffable sense of home certain songs manage to evoke, the general experience of being a teenager – and the art of accepting their ephemerality. It's also invigorating to see Yamada build on her previous films, doubling down on the emphasis on seemingly incidental details, the idiosyncratic editing patterns, and the copious use of negative space seen in A Silent Voice (2016) and Liz and the Blue Bird (2018), whilst returning to the rich colours and textures that made her earlier work so engaging to look at. Maybe the most heartening thing about The Colors Within, in keeping with its poignant embrace of inconstancy, is that it suggests an accomplished artist who couldn't be further away from growing complacent, who – even though she is firmly ensconced in Japan's studio animation scene – hasn't lost the ability or the desire to further hone her craft. The Colors Within is available on Apple TV, Rakuten TV, DVD, and Blu-ray.

21
Youth (Homecoming)
directed by Wang Bing
(青春：归, Qīngchūn: Gui, China/France/Luxembourg/Netherlands, 2024)

At 152 minutes, Youth (Homecoming) is, by some distance, the shortest entry into Wang Bing's monumental documentary trilogy on the young textile workers of Zhili – but it's also the one with the broadest scope. Whereas Youth (Spring) (2023) and Youth (Hard Times) (2024) – both terrific films in their own right – are mostly confined to the depressing cookie-cutter streets, dorms, and workshops of Zhili, Homecoming diversifies its locations, tightens its cast of characters, and thus opens up the trilogy in thoroughly exciting ways. Not only do the extended forays into the ever-rotating protagonists' private lives, as they travel home to their families for the New Year's break, serve as a potent and instructive contrast to the endless drudgery of textile work and the constant struggle of getting employers to hold up their end of the bargain; they also complicate Wang's generational portraiture. While Zhili keeps the titular youth trapped in a perennial adolescence, Homecoming's excursions into different parts of China reveal hitherto unseen aspects of the overall arrangement, observing the distinct ways in which workers are also immersed in the hierarchical structures of extended families and village communities. But even as Wang's objects of study are taking tentative steps towards emancipation by getting married and looking to secure to a degree of financial independence, even their loftiest ambitions ultimately lead them back to their sewing machines, their hopes for the future inextricably bound up with the prospect of taking on a senior role in a workshop. By the end of the trilogy, viewers will have spent almost ten hours amongst the workers of Zhili – and, thanks in no small part to the mesmerising Homecoming and its laying bare of the cycles its principal characters are trapped in, they will have seen Wang's critique of the Chinese system morph into an even more fundamental interrogation of the very nature of work. Youth (Homecoming) is currently not available for streaming or on physical media.

20
One Battle After Another
directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
(United States, 2025)

It was a Thomas Pynchon novel that spawned what's maybe Paul Thomas Anderson's best film to date – 2014's Inherent Vice – so it's hardly surprising that Anderson's second stab at adapting one of Pynchon's "unfilmable" works has yielded strong results too. Loosely inspired by Vineland, Pynchon's post-Reagan postmortem of the American far-left, One Battle After Another combines a sprawling political crime thriller with a tender family drama and a shaggy-dog numbskull comedy, starring the phenomenal Leonardo DiCaprio as an out-of-commission radical being sucked back into the daily grind of antifascist revolution after Sean Penn's right-wing nutjob military officer sets his sights on his teenage daughter (Chase Infiniti). Anderson may have less to say about American politics past and present than the subject matter might suggest, but he more than makes up for this by delivering one of his most elaborate, most propulsive, most straightforwardly entertaining films yet. One Battle After Another cannily integrates Pynchon's deadpan weirdness into Anderson's own predilection for stories about flawed people trying to survive the frightening and fundamentally stupid absurdity of contemporary American life and culture, ending up with a film that is gripping and hilarious in equal measure, moving things along at an impressively brisk pace – never more so than during the second act, which is effectively just one long chase sequence – whilst weaving in out of the various intersecting storylines, yet still finding plenty of moments to wind down and get lost on a more or less incidental tangent. Not many American filmmakers can – or are ever given the funds to – paint such an ambitious piece of cinematic storytelling on such an expansive canvas, and Anderson takes full advantage of the opportunity. One Battle After Another is currently playing in Swiss cinemas, it is available on Apple TV, blue TV, and Rakuten TV, and it will be released on DVD and Blu-ray on 22 January. (Read my full review.)

19
Kontinental '25
directed by Radu Jude
(Romania/Brazil/Switzerland/United Kingdom/Luxembourg, 2025)

Hyperliterate Romanian provocateur Radu Jude, of Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021) and Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023) fame – turned something of a creative corner in 2025, with his Dracula replacing the more focused critiques of late capitalism of his most recent works with a wildly uneven anthology on vampirism, folklore, and AI-generated art. Before that, however, Jude made Kontinental '25, a shaggy comedy-drama that productively splits the difference between Dracula's disregard for narrative structure and his better works' vulgar-erudite, reference-heavy commentary. Sort of an irreverent love-hate letter to the Transylvanian city of Cluj, it tells the story of a bailiff (Eszter Tompa) and her crisis of faith after her actions inadvertently lead to the suicide of a homeless ex-athlete (Gabriel Spahiu). As her attempts to find solace and redemption – with her cynical co-workers, her disengaged family, her superficially liberal friend (Oana Mardare), her priest (Șerban Pavlu), in the arms of a former student of hers (Adonis Tanța) – Jude cycles through all the societal mechanisms that allow the well-off to rationalise and abstract into nothingness the human suffering their comforts are built on. The film's cynicism about the state of the world – and, more specifically, a Romania that continues to sell off parts of itself in the vain hope that this is the way to fulfil the promises of European integration – might rub some the wrong way; but in the face of resurgent fascism in Europe and elsewhere, and considering the very real atrocities taking place both locally and globally, in full view of virtually everyone, maybe such cynicism is warranted. Kontinental '25 is currently playing in Swiss cinemas. (Read my full review.)

18
Red Rooms
directed by Pascal Plante
(Les Chambres rouges, Canada, 2023)

There aren't a lot of contemporary films and filmmakers who warrant being compared to David Cronenberg, Canada's veteran master of body horror – though not for the want of trying: plenty of them invite the comparison more or less openly, and most of them get tripped up by the false assumption that the appeal of Cronenberg begins and ends with the imaginatively grotesque treatments he submits his characters' bodies to. This is not the case with Red Rooms, however: starting from an idea Cronenberg himself toyed with in his 1983 masterpiece Videodrome – the existence of a secret media apparatus broadcasting torture footage and snuff films – Québécois writer-director Pascal Plante's third feature revolves around the trial of a man suspected of running a dark-web live stream where he dismembered, raped, and killed three teenage girls. Yet there is no graphic imagery in Red Rooms – instead, Plante focuses his narrative attention on an aloof, tech-savvy fashion model (a fantastic Juliette Gariépy) and her quietly unsettling obsession with the accused serial killer. Gariépy's eerie, wide-eyed consumption of the disturbing images Red Rooms withholds from its audience – reducing their presence to skin-crawling snippets of ambient sound – and her character's terse interactions with a more naïve true-crime fangirl (Laurie Babin) and the bespoke AI chatbot in her sleek Montreal high-rise apartment amount to a bone-chilling, evocatively detached portrait of the toxic sensationalist feedback loop between a near-globalised mass media and the individual fascinations and fantasies it activates and amplifies. Like many of Cronenberg's best films, Red Rooms is horrifying not least because it makes a plausible case for the societal and cultural status quo being diseased in a fundamental way. Red Rooms is available on Apple TV, Rakuten TV, blue TV, Sky, DVD, and Blu-ray.

17
The Phoenician Scheme
directed by Wes Anderson
(United States/Germany, 2025)

At this point, the pattern is all too predictable: Wes Anderson makes another intricately designed film, a good chunk of the commentariat can't seem to see beyond its fetching surfaces, and the film is promptly dismissed as another depthless exercise in style by a director suffering from severe arrested creative development. The mid-century finance caper The Phoenician Scheme, starring the wonderful Benicio del Toro as a dubious mogul seeking to secure his fortune through a series of infrastructure projects in the fictional Middle-Eastern nation of Phoenicia, is the latest Anderson offering to suffer this fate – and as was the case with The French Dispatch (2021) and Asteroid City (2023), the reports of artistic stasis have been greatly exaggerated. Beyond its delectable costume and production designs, The Phoenician Scheme calls to mind Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer (2023), specifically its commentary on the creation of the post-war world order: like Nolan, Anderson tells a story of Western opportunism, imperialist entitlement, artistic appropriation, and ideological integration in the wake of World War II; though this film doubles as a broader comment on the Middle East's place in the contemporary American imagination. Why, the movie seems to ask, does the region no longer evoke Casablanca (1942) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962), romanticised and orientalist as they may be? The answer, of course, lies in all those backroom deals over percentages, profit shares, excavation privileges, and slave labour del Toro's Zsa-Zsa Korda takes part in, and in Anderson's illuminating cuts to the servant personnel looking on silently. Both a minor-key silly madcap comedy with some delightfully morbid touches and a continuation of Anderson's ambivalent, deliberately slippery multi-project exploration of the legacy of the 1950s, The Phoenician Scheme was one of the most subtly subversive films of the year. The Phoenician Scheme is available on Sunrise TV, blue TV, Apple TV, Rakuten TV, DVD, and Blu-ray. (Read my full review. / Listen to our podcast discussion.)

16
Colours of Time
directed by Cédric Klapisch
(La Venue de l'avenir, France/Belgium, 2025)

An exploration of the vastness of history and the people trapped inside of it, doomed to disappear into it and have their lives become barely decipherable text, of the strange ways in which the past reverberates into the future, and of the constant push and pull between our lived-in present and our speculative, aspirational, horrifying futures, Cédric Klapisch's Colours of Time is a gem of historically conscious cinema. Constructed around two parallel timelines – one set in the present, depicting four strangers' efforts to disentangle the biography of a shared ancestor, one set in 1894, detailing said ancestor's formative years in the Paris arts scene – this intriguing mixture of lavish costume drama and broadly accessible French comedy is very much a 64-year-old's case for the importance of knowing one's familial and cultural roots; but instead of descending into cranky posturing about the failures of "the youth of today," as such films are often wont to do, it opts for the much more intellectually curious argument that there is almost nothing new under the sun: even in the 1890s, people heralded the death of conversation; Instagram and Zoom filters are reframed as merely a new chapter in the 19th-century tug of war between impressionism and photorealism; and the oft-alleged obsolescence of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, then as now, is little more than an overzealous sales pitch by those who are financially incentivised to believe that technology has rendered artistic expression a primitive holdover from a less civilised past. It takes a diligent filmmaker to weave these strands of thought into a narratively, emotionally, and thematically coherent whole, and Klapisch manages it with barely a hitch along the way. Colours of Time is available on blue TV, Apple TV, Rakuten TV, DVD, and Blu-ray.

15
On Falling
directed by Laura Carreira
(United Kingdom/Portugal, 2024)

It makes all the sense in the world that Ken Loach, director of such anti-capitalist drama staples as Riff-Raff (1991) and I, Daniel Blake (2016), served as executive producer on the debut feature of Edinburgh-based Portuguese filmmaker Laura Carreira. After all, with its downcast portrait of an immigrant warehouse worker (Joana Santos) scraping together a meagre living in the most disaffecting of Scottish environs, On Falling plays like something of a 2020s cover version of the well-established Loach formula, paying special homage to the underrated It's a Free World… (2007) and the gig-economy hellscape of Sorry We Missed You (2019). However, as risky as aligning oneself this closely with an existing canon can be, Carreira's film is a rare standout, not least because of the productive ways in which it deviates from Loach. On Falling perceptively captures how the arc of capitalism bends towards all-consuming alienation, not just in the workers – who are depicted here as passionless husks of themselves, united less in solidarity than in apathetic commiseration, all rigorously focused on the soul-deadening routine of their jobs and the dopamine hits found in their phones – but in capital as well, the product itself being nothing more than a decontextualised mass of consumer items and anonymous barcodes. Yet whereas Loach's cinema is suffused with a barely-disguised fury, On Falling's primary affect is fatigue, a sense of exhaustion, a profound helplessness in the face of an economic power structure where no-one can ever be held directly responsible for anything. Carreira doesn't advocate for defeatism though, as she keeps her gaze firmly focused on the humanity of her characters and the rare moments where they do connect in mutual recognition of each other's personhood: it doesn't have to be this way. On Falling is available on blue TV.

14
Misericordia
directed by Alain Guiraudie
(Miséricorde, France/Spain/Portugal, 2024)

Queer cinema has its fair share of stories about the prodigal big-city gay person returning to their small conservative hometown. In fact, it seems highly likely that French director Alain Guiraudie (Stranger by the Lake, Staying Vertical) has seen dozens of variations on the theme – which is why it's so heartening to see his Misericordia spice up the formula by turning the queer protagonist (played by the excellent Félix Kysyl) into an ambiguous, sexually fluid agent of chaos and the village he visits for a funeral into a not-so-uptight place where all kinds of queer, kinky, and violent desires have long existed to varying degrees of repressedness. Shot by Guiraudie and Céline Sciamma regular Claire Mathon in beautiful, at times almost fantastical autumn colours, Misericordia is a wickedly entertaining hybrid construction that keeps peeling back layer after layer of genre expectation: the queer drama gives way to a blend of Chabrol-esque murder plot and Buñuel-adjacent comedy of manners, which in turn paves the way for a sly satirical thriller about police misconduct and a surprisingly tender exploration of clerical queerness – rounded off by a hint of a parable about the dilemma of living a moral life in the hyper-informed 21st century. That the film nevertheless manages to remain beguilingly understated throughout, mostly remaining a laid-back stroll through gorgeous scenery, occasionally broken up by Kysyl making bedroom eyes at the invariably wonderful supporting cast, is all the more impressive. Misericordia is available on Cinu, Apple TV, DVD, and Blu-ray.

13
Caught by the Tides
directed by Jia Zhangke
(风流一代, Feng liu yi dai, China, 2024)

Jia Zhangke remains the premier chronicler of China's gradual embrace of consumer capitalism over the past quarter-century or so; and Caught by the Tides makes this title fascinatingly literal. Composed primarily of images shot from 2000 onwards – many of which are cut footage or alternative takes from Jia's own films produced during that time – this is a brilliant, often confoundingly loose collage challenging the boundaries between documentary and drama. These are disparate visions of China, and of China as refracted through the lens of Jia's cinema, slowly arranging themselves into narrative shape, paralleling the maddening tendency of history to only really make sense in hindsight. The trademark melancholy longing of films like Platform (2000), Still Life (2006), Mountains May Depart (2015), and Ash Is Purest White (2018), set against real-life testaments to the Chinese economy's ceaseless state-mandated forward momentum, is transformed into pure impressionism here: dialogue is kept to a minimum, narrative logic is necessarily fragmented, the film's ostensible meaning flowing from the suggestive clashing, mirroring, and blending of characters and themes. And yet, for all the zig-zagging lines of enquiry – connecting millennial optimism to the uncanny anthropomorphisation of technology, traditionalism to the empty corporatisation of famous writers, the Three Gorges Dam to COVID prevention strategies, digital-video aesthetics to CCTV imagery – they ultimately all converge upon lead actor Zhao Tao and her incomparable movie-star face: amid all of Jia's yearning, all of those filmic formats, all of that history, it's her image that remains constant, a symbol of another China that's caught by the tides and refuses to drown. Caught by the Tides is currently not available for streaming or on physical media.

12
The Brutalist
directed by Brady Corbet
(United States/Canada/Hungary/United Kingdom, 2024)

At 215 minutes, featuring a prologue, a first chapter, an intermission, a second chapter, and an epilogue, it would be phenomenally easy to dismiss Brady Corbet's The Brutalist as a pretentious exercise in cinematic grandeur. Yet what this sweeping portrait of fictional Jewish Hungarian architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) and his trials and tribulations as a Holocaust survivor in 1940s and 1950s America has going for it is a narrative and thematic vision to match its monumental aesthetics. Corbet and co-writer Mona Fastvold – whose own The Testament of Ann Lee would have been a serious contender for this list, if not for the fact that it only opens in Switzerland in March – offer a compelling reading of the post-war United States' fraught relationship with its own supposed status as an immigrant haven, the often dispiriting experiences of individual immigrants and other perceived outsiders within the boom economy they helped create, the continuities between European fascism and American capital, and the toxic associations between state power, weaponised religious fervour, and the émigré(e) artists tasked with fashioning a look to match modern America's ego. This is, to borrow a phrase from the film itself, "intellectually stimulating" cinema that communicates ambitious, intriguing ideas about history, art, and politics that may not always be unassailable, but which are well worth the discussions they provoke. The Brutalist is available on Apple TV, Canal+, blue TV, Sky, Rakuten TV, DVD, and Blu-ray. (Read my full review.)

11
Die My Love
directed by Lynne Ramsay
(United States, 2025)

An adaptation of Argentine author Ariana Harwicz's near-eponymous novel, spearheaded by producer and star Jennifer Lawrence (who got the idea from Martin Scorsese) and co-penned by playwrights Enda Walsh and Alice Birch, Die My Love is, despite the onslaught of creative participants, very much the work of director and co-writer Lynne Ramsay – not least because of her initial reluctance to even board the project. After declining to put to film Harwicz's story of a writer experiencing postpartum depression in rural isolation – a plot that, in Ramsay's estimation, hewed too close thematically to one of her previous works, 2011's We Need to Talk About Kevin – the Scottish filmmaker eventually relented when she decided to stage the material as a dark romantic comedy. And indeed, it is thanks in no small part to this irreverent approach to a woman being pushed into manic-depressive psychosis by motherhood, spousal neglect, and boredom – topics often tackled with tasteful, velvet-gloved caution and neatly labelled signifiers of cinematic empathy – that Die My Love is as memorably visceral as it is. Starring a towering Jennifer Lawrence, ably flanked by Robert Pattinson as her hapless partner and Sissy Spacek as her spectral mother-in-law, this is a cage-rattling full-body fit of a film, a "Yellow Wallpaper"-esque domestic rebellion that counters the maddening dulling of emotion conventionally equated with responsible adulthood and bourgeois normalcy with freewheeling narrative logic, the defiant embrace of puzzling character detail and actorly impulse, and high-drama pop song after high-drama pop song played at maximum volume. There's probably no better emblem for the rousing, exhausting, brilliant experience of watching Die My Love than the indelible image of Jennifer Lawrence asserting her character's frustration and individuality by launching herself through a glass door. Die My Love is currently playing in Swiss cinemas. (Read my full review.)

10
The Secret Agent
directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho
(O Agente Secreto, Brazil/France/Germany/Netherlands, 2025)

If 2024's I'm Still Here – another very worthwhile movie that opened in Switzerland in 2025 – was the diligent memorial plaque on the horrors of the Brazilian military dictatorship curated by the state historical committee, Kleber Mendonça Filho's The Secret Agent is the idiosyncratic art show put together by the university's popular cultures department in collaboration with an oral history project. It may not state its historiographic intentions quite as straightforwardly, but it's exactly that freewheeling oddity – that willingness to include an extended aside featuring an urban legend about a sentient leg – that ultimately makes it the more incisive period piece about the lingering shadow of 1970s Brazil. Built around its "secret agent" protagonist – a fantastic Wagner Moura turn – and his dealings with a Recife dissidents' commune during carnival week in 1977, The Secret Agent is a beautiful blend of languid hangout movie and tense political thriller that firmly believes in the importance of imagining the full-colour life surrounding the moments captured in old black-and-white photographs. It's never less than obvious that Mendonça is as much informed by genre cinema and the drivers of popular culture more generally as he is by the historical record, which he translates into a vibrant film with a keen sense of time and place: the music that people listened and danced to, the movies they wanted to see and sometimes did, the newspaper items they latched onto even though they knew that they were ultimately a distraction from the grim political reality – all of this is the stuff of history too, the mundane normality that persists even when wealthy capitalists hire hitmen who hire other hitmen to kill a man because he had the wrong hairstyle and political conviction at the wrong time and place. The Secret Agent understands and makes tangible the troubling and fascinating idea that, to be able to fashion an identity and make sense of the past, be it national or familial, one must first sift through a decontextualised mess of old pictures, unamenable documentation, half-forgotten second-hand memories, ambient pop-cultural signifiers, official narratives, and unofficial correctives. In a media landscape obsessed with easy nostalgic escapism, Mendonça's playful flipping of the script is a more than welcome intervention. The Secret Agent is currently playing in Swiss cinemas.

9
Juror #2
directed by Clint Eastwood
(United States, 2024)

Following a string of good, if not necessarily great films, 94-year-old Clint Eastwood delivered the absolutely electrifying Juror #2 – at once a welcome throwback to the lost art of the mid-budget adult drama and a stirring late-career reckoning with the myth of the incorruptible American state institution in the age of populism and oligarchy. Revolving around Nicholas Hoult's unremarkable everyman who is called for jury duty and quickly learns that the man on trial is innocent – because it was him who accidentally killed the man's girlfriend – Juror #2 is a wildly entertaining courtroom drama that, as it inexorably moves towards its knotty refusal of a resolution, doubles as a cogent and surprisingly dark reflection on the relationship between truth and justice. In essence, Eastwood, giving the primary themes of some his major works – The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), Unforgiven (1992), A Perfect World (1993), Mystic River (2003) – another spin, and writer Jonathan Abrams deftly posit that, in a world where everyone is a standalone subject trapped in their own unique network of histories, experiences, prejudices, obligations, tensions, and compromises, there might not be such a thing as true justice, that any justice system, and especially one designed as theatrically as the American one, is ultimately built on sand. Even Eastwood's famously unfussy direction feeds into the film's underlying sense of procedural unease: the simple blocking, the genre-defying avoidance of theatrics during the actual trial sequence, the casual shattering of moral and structural certitudes, the fluid movement from purposeful scene to purposeful scene – what might, at first glance, suggest a well-oiled legal machinery ultimately only serves to zero in on the cracks in the official protocol, the myriad ways in which it fails to account for the complexities lurking beneath the messy humanity it's meant to circumscribe. As a character says about the legal system at one point: "It's not perfect, but it's the best one we've got." And maybe, Juror #2 seems to argue, that's not good enough. Juror #2 is available on Apple TV, Canal+, blue TV, Sky, Rakuten TV, DVD, and Blu-ray. (Read my full review.)

8
Hard Truths
directed by Mike Leigh
(United Kingdom/Spain, 2024)

In 2008, Mike Leigh made Happy-Go-Lucky, a deeply moving and very funny film about the clash between kindergarten teacher Poppy and a world who is continuously caught off-guard by her disarmingly positive demeanour. Two years later, the auteur laureate of British realism made Another Year, a gentle dramatic portrait of two families and the ways in which their lives change – and don't change – over the course of a year. 14 years and two tremendous period pieces later, Leigh returns to these ideas in Hard Truths – an at once emotionally devastating and darkly hilarious portrait of two families, built around a broad-brush sketch of a woman who continuously catches the world off-guard by her caustic negativity. Pansy – another floral name, given indelible screen life by a towering Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Oscar-nominated for her turn in Leigh's Secrets & Lies (1996) – is depressed and profoundly unhappy with her life, and has turned all of her insecurity and self-loathing outward: she wields insults and tirades with the eloquence and acerbic wit of a Shakespearean cynic, at even the slightest hint of a provocation – a state of affairs that weighs heavily not only on her husband (David Webber) and adult son (Tuwaine Barrett), but also on her kinder sister Chantelle (a marvellous Michele Austin). Leigh is unflinching in his exploration of Pansy's venomous jags and potentially irredeemable cruelty – so unflinching, in fact, that laughter often seems like the only opportune reaction (at least she's not talking to us!) – but his gaze is not a judging or mocking one. Instead, Hard Truths asks its audience to find a degree of empathy, though not necessarily forgiveness, for Pansy, to consider the life that would lead someone to having an outlook like hers, to see the wounded humanity beneath the rants and the jabs, to note both the contrast between Pansy and Chantelle and the latter's steadfastness when she tells her sister, "I don't understand you, but I love you." It's a delicate narrative balance to strike, and Leigh, along with his excellent actors and their stunningly multi-faceted performances, where every silence carries a slightly different valence, masters it with the unflashy assuredness that has become his trademark. Hard Truths is available on Apple TV, DVD, and Blu-ray.

7
The Mastermind
directed by Kelly Reichardt
(United Kingdom/United States, 2025)

Kelly Reichardt makes beautiful, minimalist, lovingly lived-in films about – what else? – the failure of American individualism as a political proposition, about the alternatives people have carved out for themselves over the decades and centuries, and about how even these alternatives are ultimately contingent on the ruthlessly capitalistic structures they exist within. The Mastermind, like Reichardt's River of Grass (1994), Night Moves (2013), and maybe even First Cow (2019) before it, works through this idea with the help of a warped crime-thriller plot. Set mostly in gorgeously autumnal Massachusetts during the post-Manson, pre-Watergate political doldrums of 1970, it follows art school dropout J.B. (Josh O'Connor), who, apparently bored with his reasonably comfortable small-town family life, decides to stage a New Hollywood-style heist at a local museum and is left to deal with the grim, hilariously foreseeable consequences. From the brilliant, matter-of-fact opening half-hour that chronicles the minutiae of the heist onwards, Reichardt's famously understated narrative touch is perhaps even softer than usual here – resisting the plot's thriller potential at virtually every turn and opting instead for letting the drama play out in a series of wittily evocative glances, gestures, camera movements, and editing choices that highlight the material and spiritual emptiness J.B.'s bid for individualistic success leads him into. Not only is this bracingly efficient introspective filmmaking; the fact that the minor-key odyssey the hapless protagonist embarks upon eventually clashes with and turns on his disinterest in engaging with the ambient political struggles that surround him – specifically the anti-Vietnam War coalition and the Nixon-sanctioned crackdowns it provokes – also firmly anchors The Mastermind in present-day concerns over state violence, art as a supposed hotbed of ideological subversion, and the foolish idea that apolitical apathy is the only viable position. Delicately perched on the threshold between empathetic tragedy and bitter comedy, it's a film that understands and demonstrates in stark terms the absurdity of holding on to the promise of individualism in a United States that has long surrendered itself to the violent enforcement of conformity. The Mastermind is available on MUBI and Apple TV.

6
It Was Just an Accident
directed by Jafar Panahi
(تصادف ساده, Yek tasādof-e sāde, Iran/France/Luxembourg, 2025)

"It is a pity and a paradox," Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote in 2023, "that Jafar Panahi … seems to be valued in the West more for his persecution than for his filmmaking." The statement is a provocative one: the director of Crimson Gold (2003), This Is Not a Film (2011), and Taxi (2015), who was arrested and banned from travelling and filmmaking by the Iranian regime in 2010, and who has continued to shoot movies in secret, is one of cinema's most prominent champions of freedom of expression after all. But Rosenbaum has a point: all too often, the conversation around Panahi begins and ends with his legal status, and thus fails to consider the extraordinary quality of his intelligent, playful, often counterintuitively funny artistry. Take It Was Just an Accident, his Golden Palm-winning film about a mechanic (Vahid Mobasseri) who kidnaps a man he thinks is the guard who tortured him when he was imprisoned for political subversion: a psychological drama crossed with a thriller and a morality play on paper, it unfolds more like a gently absurdist – yet still consistently thrilling – roadmovie, chronicling its protagonists' increasingly frustrated drives through Tehran, as they look for someone who can definitively verify the kidnapped man's identity. It's Panahi's most ambitiously scoped film since 2006's Offside, a showcase for the remarkable guerrilla-filmmaking skills he has developed over the past 15 years, and a strikingly cohesive continuation of the narrative themes he's been toying with since the very beginning of his career: It Was Just an Accident interrogates the tension between truth and the appearance of truth, it demonstrates how much of private and public life is governed by the running of small, maddeningly mundane errands, it slyly plays up the theatrical fiction within its ostensible naturalism, and it does all that while providing a panoramic view of contemporary Iranian life – with a particular focus on the country's socially heterogeneous opposition movement and the questions it will be faced with when, rather than if, the theocratic regime falls. As with every film Panahi makes, it's a miracle that this was made – but even in the face of its unlikely existence, one would do well not to overlook Panahi's master craftsmanship. It Was Just an Accident is currently playing in Swiss cinemas. (Read my full review. / Read my interview with Jafar Panahi. / Read my programme essay for the upcoming Jafar Panahi retrospective at Zurich's Xenix cinema.)

5
The Invisible Zoo
directed by Romuald Karmakar
(Der unsichtbare Zoo, Germany, 2024)

In 1993, documentarian extraordinaire Frederick Wiseman released Zoo, a by-his-standards relatively concise 130-minute observational portrait of the Miami Zoo, its animals, its visitors, its staff, and the expected and unexpected ways in which they interact. On paper, German-French filmmaker Romuald Karmakar's The Invisible Zoo looks suspiciously like more of the same – a three-hour fly-on-the-wall documentary on the Zurich Zoo, its animals, its visitors, its staff, and how their paths intersect over the course of seasons, years, and fundamental infrastructure changes. Indeed, there's little point in pretending the two films aren't similar; but to accuse Karmakar of idle repetition would be to miss the stellar achievement that is The Invisible Zoo. Not only does its longer runtime distinguish it from the occasionally truncated-seeming Zoo; the mere fact of Karmakar picking up on Wiseman's ideas more than three decades later, against the backdrop of runaway climate change, virulent environmental destruction, and growing concerns over the chequered history and increasingly diffuse purpose of zoos as an institution, lends his film a piercing urgency. The Invisible Zoo delivers all the pleasures one would expect from this kind of long-form and long-term observation: the long takes of zoo animals going about their "jobs," as former zoo director Alex Rübel would have it, are mesmerising; it is endlessly fascinating to see a new synthetic savanna slowly coming into being; every aside on workers preparing feeding packages, calming down quarantined tigers and bears, and matter-of-factly discussing daily business like cafeteria sales numbers and malaria outbreaks zeroes in on yet another compelling logistical issue and the institutional mechanisms seeking to resolve it – not to mention the extended sequence of a zebra being shot and dismembered for purely administrative reasons. Bit by bit, Karmakar arranges these initially disparate episodes into a remarkably multi-layered cumulative treatise on the zoo as an intrinsically flawed structure which the various crises plaguing the planet have somehow thrust into the strange position of moral, scientific, and didactic authority. Few cinematic images have seemed more emblematic of the Anthropocene than The Invisible Zoo's late shot of gorillas, visibly bored by the COVID lockdown-induced absence of visitors, tapping the glass of their enclosure because, perhaps, years of children doing just that from the other side have taught them to associate the tapping with normalcy. The Invisible Zoo is currently not available for streaming or on physical media.

4
Showing Up
directed by Kelly Reichardt
(United States, 2022)

Thanks to the vagaries of film distribution, Kelly Reichardt's Showing Up, which premiered in Cannes all the way back in 2022, only debuted in Switzerland in 2025, on Netflix, where it was promptly swallowed by the algorithm and swiftly vanished from the streaming selection again. And yet, it's more attention than any Reichardt film not named First Cow (2019) has garnered in German-speaking Switzerland prior to The Mastermind's MUBI release late this year; and it's enough of a run to make it eligible for this particular list. It is, in essence, a film made in the Reichardt's backyard: set around the campus and amongst the faculty of the now-defunct Oregon College of Art and Craft, a private art college in the writer-director's adopted hometown of Portland, it stars her frequent collaborator Michelle Williams as a sculptor and university administrator struggling to finish work on an upcoming exhibition whilst the distractions and delays pile up around her – from strained family ties and a broken boiler to an injured pigeon and plain old imposter syndrome. Reichardt's gaze is as tender and perceptive as ever, alert to the tremendous meaning contained within simple gestures and the exceedingly cinematic nature of watching a person doing something with care and attention. In Showing Up, the ritualistic feeding of a clingy cat or the observing of one's neighbour, who is also one's landlord and friend, are as significant to understanding the protagonist's life and art as the colour of her statuettes or their arrangement on a gallery display table. Whereas most other films about the creation of artworks never quite manage to resist the temptation to use specific details from the artist's biography to "explain" the provenance of their art, Reichardt's foregrounds the larger material context that both informs and hampers any creative endeavour: for all the high-minded cultural rhetoric about how art is an expression of the human soul, Showing Up is steeped in the knowledge that it will always be conditioned by the prosaic minutiae that make up the bulk of individual existence. Maybe that's the true beauty of Reichardt's cinema: it ostensibly seeks to drain certain cultural and societal constructs of their vaunted mystery, but only to show its audience how much more engrossing the unspectacular humanity beneath actually is. Showing Up is available on DVD and Blu-ray. (Read my full review.)

3
Black Bag
directed by Steven Soderbergh
(United States, 2025)

From Peeping Tom (1960) to Blow-Up (1966), from The Conversation (1974) to pretty much every film directed by Alfred Hitchcock – that cinema is an extension of a deeply human tendency towards voyeurism is an academic and critical truism bordering on platitude. Yet it's one of the great cinematic pleasures to watch a movie that isn't just aware of its own voyeuristic dimension, but which is able to weaponise that awareness and cannily twist it into something even more perversely entertaining. Take, for instance, Steven Soderbergh's latest: based on an unapologetically pulpy paperback-thriller script by blockbuster screenwriter David Koepp (Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible), in which a British intelligence officer (Michael Fassbender) investigates his co-workers, including his wife (Cate Blanchett), for treason, Black Bag is a slick, slyly seductive, at 94 minutes pleasingly brisk treatise on the inherent sexiness of a well-managed economy of information. Directed, lensed, and edited by Soderbergh with his signature precision and usual penchant for beautiful surfaces and the snake-like calmness of stone-cold professionals, this profoundly romantic, acerbically funny espionage romp is signally the work of a man who's been married for 22 years and has learned that there are few things more alluring in such a relationship than the mysteries hiding in the crevices of the established routine. To look at another person means seeing a carefully calibrated performance, to be looked at means being desired, but also having one's performance assessed, scrutinised, put to the test: in the hands of one of Hollywood's premier outsider-insiders, spycraft becomes a potent metaphor for the inscrutable beauty of romance – and the splattering of brain matter against the wall an aching proof of love and mutual affection. Black Bag is available on Apple TV, Canal+, blue TV, Rakuten TV, DVD and Blu-ray. (Read my full review.)

2
Mirrors No. 3
directed by Christian Petzold
(Germany, 2025)

Out in the German countryside, a depressed piano student from Berlin, played by the luminous Paula Beer, survives the car crash that kills her probably-soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend. Instead of returning home to mourn her partner, however, she moves into the house next to the crash site, where she is welcomed by an older woman (Barbara Auer), whom she, perhaps unwittingly, helps reconnect with her husband (Matthias Brandt) and adult son (Enno Trebs). Mirrors No. 3, named after a Maurice Ravel suite about a boat intrepidly braving the ocean waves, is recognisably a Christian Petzold film, another Vertigo-adjacent story of death, doppelgängers, and the curious ways in which people relate to one another. Yet it's also the most disarmingly optimistic film the 65-year-old writer-director has made in quite some time, following through on the trajectory suggested by the closing scene of 2023's terrific Afire. This light touch, which manifests as copious scenes of Paula Beer doing pleasant summer-day chores, riding her bike, drinking coffee and beer, and enjoying the sweet sounds of Frankie Valli's voice, has led some commentators to classify Mirrors as a "minor" outing, a laid-back greatest-hits compilation of Petzold's thematic predilections perhaps – but if this is what constitutes a minor work, the only logical conclusion is that the vast majority of films are falling far short of even these modest ambitions. True, Mirrors is missing the more ostentatiously novelistic gravitas of Petzold's most celebrated films – the Nazi (sub-)text of Phoenix (2014) and Transit (2018), the GDR backdrop of Barbara (2012), the climate-change metaphor haunting Afire – but it contains all the pleasures his cinema habitually provides, and then some. As ever, there is an unobtrusive literary quality to the script, which seems to conceive of its multi-layered characters as versions of Ravel's barque sur l'océan, whom viewers are meant to drop in on for a while without getting a full picture of their past and future – and which inspires the small cast of actors to deliver some of the richest, most productively ambiguous performances seen in any film in 2025. Every glance tells a story, every line delivery reveals a new facet to Petzold's delicate configuration of characters and events. In a cinema landscape where filmmakers are often incentivised to strive for the extraordinary, the flashy, the mindblowing, Mirrors is a fantastic reminder of the profound joy that can be found in a simple, emotionally engaging story told well. Mirrors No. 3 is available on DVD and Blu-ray from 29 January. (Read my full review.)

1
Henry Fonda for President
directed by Alexander Horwath
(Austria/Germany, 2024)

The project of Austrian critic and curator Alexander Horwath's essayistic documentary on Henry Fonda as a vehicle for understanding Hollywood history and its entanglements with modern American politics seems straightforward enough – that is, until Horwath and editor Regina Schlagnitweit jump back to 1650s Leiden in the Netherlands and reveals the full scope of their analytical lens. Henry Fonda for President filters 400 years of American history and (self-)mythology through Oscar winner Henry Fonda as both screen presence and sociocultural construction, from the slave trade to Robert De Niro on the Oscars stage, from European settlers forcibly displacing Native Amercians to Fonda coming to embody an aspirational version of white American masculinity, from early female entrepreneurship to post-Nixonian political disillusionment and the episode of the Bea Arthur sitcom Maude (1972–1978) the film borrows its title from. Over the course of three consistently engrossing hours, Horwath fashions Fonda into a skeleton key with which to unlock the bottomless well of what we call "America," inviting us to think along with him and his curatorial sensibility, with Fonda, with "the movies," with the warped logic of U.S. collective consciousness – and thus to realise the suggestive power hidden beneath an actor's face on and as a projection screen. Every unexpected digression is an illuminating marvel, every quiet aside on how American mythmaking tends to merely paper over the country's exploitation of its underclasses a staggering exercise in intellectual curiosity. Here's hoping the rumours of a six-hour cut are true. Henry Fonda for President is currently not available for streaming or on physical media.

Mittwoch, 31. Dezember 2025

The Best Films of 2025

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