There’s been an abundance of excellent reasons to get off the sofa this year, with my personal tally of films from festival berths and general release awarding more than five stars than ever before. Though not quite enough to fill all ten spots, leaving me with an oversized field of 4.5s to brutally cut down to size. Consider this a snapshot of fabulous films to catch up on if you missed them.
Best international films of 2025 – quick links
Cactus Pears
Indian filmmaker Rohan Kanawade’s quietly shimmering debut feature is emotionally adept and utterly astonishing. Starring incredible newcomers Bhushaan Manoj and Suraaj Suman, the former plays a Mumbai call centre worker returning to his village to observe the ten-day mourning period for his late father, with the latter as his childhood friend and a farmer with whom he shares forbidden love. With both men pressured to marry, they find quiet peace together in the spot where twin mango trees once stood.
A Useful Ghost
Arguably the wildest comedy of the year, there are so many unexpected layers to Thai filmmaker Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s debut feature, with making love to a haunted vacuum cleaner not, in fact, the most surprising element contained herein.
As a shapeshifting delight that embraces horny queer sex, family disapproval of heterosexual marriage that outlasts death, grief, anti-capitalist musings and reckonings with the country’s darkest history, you sure do get a whole lotta film for your money.
It Was Just an Accident
Once more faced with the threat of political persecution at home, revered Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panah dug deep into his own traumatic history for this startling rug-pull. When he was interrogated while blindfolded in solitary confinement, Panahi found himself wondering if he would recognise his tormentor by voice once released, and, if so, what he would do. This knotty morality play, as savagely funny as it is thrillingly frightening, presents a ragtag band of survivors with this exact predicament.
Babygirl
Nicole Kidman is one of Australia’s finest actors, with Dutch actor-turned-filmmaker Halina Reijn knowing precisely what to do with The Hours star. The hotly anticipated follow-up to bodacious Bodies Bodies Bodies plays with power dynamics, impeccably pairing Kidman with one of the UK’s finest young actors, Harris Dickinson. (His directorial debut, Urchin, was also awesome this year.) In Babygirl, he’s an intern, she’s the CEO. But when they engage in a fraught sexual game, who winds up the boss of whom?
A House of Dynamite
While I haven’t always been able to stomach Near Dark director Kathryn Bigelow’s latter-day career shift into examining the American military-industrial complex, her latest thriller A House of Dynamite blew me away.
Gripping me with primal panic from go to woe, it imagines exactly what would happen in the corridors of power when an undetected nuke races towards the annihilation of a major US city. Presented as an interlocking triptych of perspectives, it’s explosive stuff.
Rebecca Ferguson grounds a mighty ensemble that’s ready to go off.
28 Years Later
It’s actually 23 years, in our universe, since director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland unleashed the Rage virus on an unsuspecting London, turning all infected into ravenous hordes of extremely fast zombies. But who’s counting when we’re desperate to find out what happens next? To their eternal credit, the answer was much weirder, sadder, funnier and, astonishingly, more beautiful than anyone could have predicted and that’s why it’s one of the year’s finest.
One Battle After Another
Phantom Thread director Paul Thomas Anderson takes on Thomas Pynchon’s sprawling novel Vineland, from the rancid Reagan era to our post-9/11 world. Leonardo DiCaprio is cast in one of his funniest roles as a schlubby dad way past his radical anarchist days. He’s forced back into action to protect Willa (magnificent newcomer Chase Infiniti), the daughter he had with a spectacular firebrand. Only Willa can handle herself in this rollicking ride that’s absolutely stacked with Oscars contenders.
Sirat
When I first caught this instant classic from Spanish-French filmmaker Óliver Laxe during the Sydney Film Festival, the base was whacked up so loud that you could feel it in your bones and dust filtered from the State Theatre ceiling. That rumble hasn’t left me in half a year. This haunting quest follows a ramshackle caravan of clubbers and an anxious father-son team as they look for a missing family member and traverse the Moroccan desert, all while radio snatches reveal the world is even closer to doomsday than it is now.
Sinners
Ryan Coogler and Michael B Jordan perfected their dynamic duo in this Deep South-set vampire saga that conceals the reveal for maximum impact.
Jordan is convincing in the dual role of twins Smoke and Stack, trying to make a fresh start on home turf by opening a juke joint. But when that sweet soul music, summoning ancient power, also brings demonic forces to their door in the shape of Jack O’Connell’s Irish jigging bloodsuckers, the fearsome battle that follows contains dark poetry in its bruised heart.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
Sometimes you see a film way back at the start of the year, at Berlinale, and it hooks into your mind, refusing to let go all year long. For me, that film was Mary Bronstein’s panic-inducing take on motherhood. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a thriller by way of an existential howl into the void, both literal and metaphysical.
Towering on the shoulders of homegrown hero Rose Byrne and assembling a wild cast including A$AP Rocky, Danielle Macdonald, Christian Slater and, checks notes, Conan O’Brien, it’s the undisputed champion for me.
