One Battle After Another, Sentimental Value and Sinners lead the best movies of 2025

There have been a lot of upheaval in the entertainment industry year but the one consistent thing is there will always be great storytelling.

While the biggest films of the year by box office have been franchise hits or animated family movies, if you know where to look, there were also original stories or big swings that restores your faith that there are still some new ideas.

These were the best movies of 2025.

A note on release dates: this list includes movies that were released widely this calendar year in Australia. So films such Marty Supreme, Nouvelle Vague, Hamnet, No Other Choice, The Secret Agent, It Was Just an Accident and Blue Moon that due to be released in 2026 were not eligible, but may well make it onto next year’s list.

ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER

It’s remarkable how many different films One Battle After Another manages to be, and it can be a bit of a choose your own adventure in how you want to see it.

It can be a pure-play action blockbuster that is wildly entertaining through and through. It can be an auteur-driven film that only director Paul Thomas Anderson could’ve made. It can be an eviscerating political polemic that is more in tune with rising fascism in western societies than any other 2025 release. It can be all those things at once.

The Leonardo DiCaprio-starrer is a story about a former political revolutionary who is forced into action after his teenage daughter is threatened by an old adversary.

You’ll want to see this again and again.

SENTIMENTAL VALUE

This wonderful Norwegian work from filmmaker Joachim Trier is a character-driven family drama that manages to be surprisingly light despite the gravity of its themes including generational trauma. It never signposts the big moments, preferring to lead the audience, not push them.

Starring Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgard, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas and Elle Fanning, it’s an emotional story about the fractured relationship between a filmmaker father and his two adult daughters, as well as unspoken special bond between the two sisters.

Beautifully written and structured with superb performances, it’s a film that deepens with each viewing, especially one particular scene near the end.

SINNERS

From its first frame, you knew there was something fresh and exciting about Sinners. Pulsing all the way through, it transports you to 1930s American south, specifically to a juke joint where the blues vibrates with primal energy.

One sequence in particular, now legendary and will be remembered for the ages, is a heady trip as masses of bodies move as if controlled by an unseeable and unknowable force. In the story of the film, that attracts a malevolent force, an ancient vampire.

The horror film from Ryan Coogler and starring his frequent collaborator Michael B. Jordan in the dual roles of twins is an enrapturing experience that feels like nothing else that was released this year.

THE SEED OF THE SACRED FIG

Inspired by the 2022 protests which saw thousands of women take to the streets in Iran, defying the country’s tyrannical and oppressive ruling regime, this astute and elegant drama begins as a family story about a father, his wife and his two daughters.

What happens around the dinner table soon becomes a parable for the wider patriarchy in Iran that has denied women basic rights, and it morphs into a thriller with a surprising final act.

The writer and director, Mohammad Rasoulof, fled across the border while still in post-production and is now a political refugee in Germany.

IF I HAD LEGS I’D KICK YOU

Mary Bronstein’s movie is a cinematic anxiety attack, a raw, high-strung film about a mother spiralling into a nervous breakdown as the challenges of effectively single parenting a perennially ill child pile on and on. And on and on and on.

Linda is beyond breaking point, and whether you have kids or not, that feeling of being out of control and overwhelmed by your life is something relatable to all. Perhaps that’s why this film punches you right in the guts.

The highlight, of course, is the pitch-perfect, superb performance from Rose Byrne, who brings exasperation, humour and heartache to a complex character that is in every frame of the film.

CONCLAVE

Months before the actual Pope died, triggering a conclave of cardinals to elect a new pontiff, a fictional version of papal politicking was happening on screen. It was sharp, it was funny and it had this arch, baroque tone that captured the strategising, machinations and campaigning involved.

Directed by Edward Berger and featuring a cast with Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow and Isabella Rosselini, it explored the factional power games and the ambitions of men reluctant to admit their own desires.

A proper political thriller, but with gold-threaded robes and a divine hand.

SING SING

Not to be confused with that kid’s movie featuring musical animals, this deeply compassionate prison drama is some of the most affecting cinema you could have watched this year.

Instead of the usual grim and violence we tend to see in these settings, Sing Sing is about how humanity continues to exist where physical freedoms do not.

Colman Domingo leads a cast of mostly non-actors, many who were previously real-life prisoners that part in the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program at the centre of this story.

It’s not about redemption so much as about how being able to connect with ourselves and to others is why we live.

BLACK BAG

In a word: slinky. In a few more words: Sexy as hell. This slick, taut spy thriller from Steven Soderbergh features Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender as married agents, with one of them investigating the other for a leak.

The twisty plot is a bit of a lark and the real draw is the spy games being played by the ensemble, which includes Marissa Abela and Naomie Harris. But it’s the charged chemistry between the two leads who circle each other with their tete-a-tetes that makes this film so damn pleasurable.

There’s something carnal and out-of-reach about the way every character moves through these opulent spaces. You could just eat it up.

NAKED GUN

Is the requel Naked Gun the best movie ever made? No, of course not. But it was the most laugh-out-loud fun you could have had in a cinema this year. The jokes came so thick and fast, whether it was copious sight gags, literal humour or just the most ludicrous threesome with a snowman you could never have imagined.

This was just uproarious fun and a reminder that especially when it comes to comedies, it’s an experience to be shared. You’ll laugh harder, longer and more frequently, and at the end of it, you’ll feel lighter. The endorphins are ripping through your body, and the world seems a little less dark.

Plus, Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson had genuinely excellent chemistry, shame it didn’t last in real life.

LESBIAN SPACE PRINCESS

How is a movie with genitalia jokes was still one of the most wholesome things to play on a screen this year? That’s the beauty in Lesbian Space Princess, a film that is undeniably earnest and yet bitingly funny, socially incisive and emotionally true.

The Australian animated feature tells the story of Saira, the titular lesbian space princess of the planet Clitopolis. She has terrible anxiety, a love complex and a slight tendency to stalk her adventurous ex-girlfriend.

When that ex is kidnapped by the Straight White Malians as bait to attract Saira, she has to muster up the courage to confront her demons. A winner all around.

Honourable mentions: The Brutalist, Hard Truths, September 5, I’m Still Here, Flow, Warfare, Materialists, Splitsville, A House of Dynamite, Twinless, The Mastermind, Bugonia and Wake Up Dead Man.