So many movies and TV shows are ‘good’ … but a truly great film or series can dominate my thoughts, plunge me into my feels, and linger at year’s end.
Here’s what really captivated me in 2025.
Bird: a feral magic
Andrea Arnold’s long-awaited return to feature filmmaking came out in February, and I’m still exhilarated by how deftly Arnold infuses her trademark social realism with ancient, wild magic.
In this immersively observational film, Arnold insists wonders are all around if we look for them, as tween heroine Bailey (astounding newcomer Nykiya Adams) uses her phone to record a fey loner who calls himself Bird (Franz Rogowski).
Don’t mistake this for a nostalgic girldad story like Aftersun, with Barry Keoghan in the Paul Mescal role. Amid the violence and squalor of post-industrial Kent is a neo-primeval Albion where toads happily yield their psychedelic drool when serenaded with Coldplay’s ‘Yellow’, and Bird becomes an avenger seemingly powered by nature itself.
It’s atavistically satisfying: the wondrous opposite of folk horror.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You: multisensory polemic
Mary Bronstein’s fever dream of maternal burnout takes us inside Linda’s (Rose Byrne) tortured psyche, tearing sound and visuals apart like a birth injury – but in an intensely multisensory way that keeps us wondering if ‘this is really happening’.
Bronstein uses light to induce vicarious sleep-deprivation psychosis, disorienting the viewer in the windowless maze of Linda’s office suite, or the darkness that swallows up Caroline (Danielle Macdonald) as she flees along a beach at night. Meanwhile, Linda’s fretful, food-refusing daughter and absent, contemptuous husband (Christian Slater) torment her as acousmêtres – disembodied voice-monsters.
Comedy and body horror merge onscreen, from that bloody hamster to the sequence where Linda removes her sleeping daughter’s abdominal feeding tube – a repudiation of their placental connection that feels like the worst magic show, as the tube keeps unrolling grotesquely like magicians’ silks.
ScreenHub: If I Had Legs I’d Kick You review: Rose Byrne’s brilliant breakdown
Andor: everyday hope
Forget it’s a Star War; it’s no good-versus-evil pageant of archetypal heroes, villains, princesses, wizards and scoundrels. Andor rejects individual aggrandisement and leadership as hollow, even fascistic; instead it dramatises ordinary people’s political struggles with an empathy that bruises the heart it captivates.
It’s zeitgeisty, riveting TV because it shows what people do under systemic pressures – their intersecting moral compromises and everyday solidarities. As Rebel philosopher Karis Nemik says in his manifesto: ‘Try.’
Andor doesn’t just happen to be a TV show. Meticulously designed, written and performed, its episodic storytelling is purposefully structured and paced to evoke both the daunting scale of Imperial repression and the Rebel momentum that will snowball into Rogue One (2016).
Yet despite being a prequel, Andor feels immediate, not inevitable. Impulses, accidents and chance encounters shape its characters’ lives more profoundly than cunning plans and schemes. Every person matters, in every moment – making Andor a heartening polemic for a time right now, in a galaxy near, near here.
Sinners and The History of Sound: music as yearning
Ryan Coogler’s rollickingly original vampire fable Sinners might seem tonally incongruous with The History of Sound, a tender queer romance by Oliver Hermanus. But in both powerful films, music carries human yearning across time.
The History of Sound’s David (Josh O’Connor) gently tells Lionel (Paul Mescal), ‘Everyone you know is going to die, you know that’. This is what makes the vampires of Sinners eternally lonely. But to hear, learn and share music is to remember, resurrect and reunite.
For Lionel in History it’s a consolation, and for Remmick (Jack O’Connell) in Sinners it’s a threat, that as the Mende people of Sierra Leone say, ‘There is no death [within] the ear’.
ScreenHub: Sinners review: a barn burnin’, foot stompin’, neck chompin’ good time
Both films contain such intricate commentaries on cultural power regimes that I could write whole books about them – yet in moments of pure performance they resonate intuitively.
Hermanus breaks from Lionel’s point-of-view only once: to show us David’s existential anguish as Lionel duets with Thankful Mary Swain (Briana Middleton) on Malaga Island, a community the state is poised to brutally extinguish.
And Stack’s (Michael B Jordan) joy in his cousin Sammie’s (Miles Canton) lightning-rod blues voice is so transcendent that Coogler can’t resist playing it again, as memory.
ScreenHub: The History of Sound review: abandon all hope of dry eyes
Severance: corporate captivation
Nothing in 2025 had me more captivated, more ironically than Season 2 of Severance – in which Apple TV+ granted Dan Erickson and Ben Stiller the jester’s privilege to critique our alienation by a platformised world that puts us at the whims of maniacal tech weirdos.
Having seduced viewers into delighting in the aesthetic rituals of Lumon Industries’ corporate mystery cult, Severance now exposes what Macrodata Processing actually enables: complete, merciless emotional enslavement. Be warned: tech capitalism actually does this!
So, are severed workers smashing the machine and reclaiming their whole humanity by striving to reunite with their soulmates? Or are their desires as manipulated as the calamitous Outdoor Retreat and Team-Building Occurrence that dunks them in the company’s lore?
(One of my favourite things about Severance is the ambiguity of whether Lumon’s leaders actually believe in the mythos, or only use it to manipulate underlings.)
Severance’s more complicated odysseys offer sharper critiques. Jolly disciplinarian Seth Milchick (Tramell Tillman) is punished for his management ambitions, yet racially exploited as Choreography and Merriment for Lumon’s ideological benefit.
Meanwhile, the staggering IP theft uncovered by spurned loyalist Harmony Corbel (Patricia Arquette) in ruined company town Salt’s Neck should prompt us never to let corporations into the windmills of our minds.
ScreenHub: Severance Season 2 review: back to the office
