In 2025 I toned down the film-watching a certain degree, clocking up 248 films in the year, as opposed to 286 the year before. Of the films I saw, 84 percent were first-time viewings, while 16 percent were rewatches. I only managed to see 30 films released in calendar year 2025. Must try harder next year!
In my top 20 most-watched actors, the most prominent was the now-little-known Jobyna Ralston (first name pronounced Jo-bean-a), who played Harold Lloyd's feminine foil in a clutch of mid-1920s comedy films, along with appearing in Frank Capra's last silent film, The Power of the Press (1928). Three actors appeared five times each in my watched films: Harold Lloyd, Paul Newman and Isabelle Huppert - the latter thanks to featuring in a range of Claude Chabrol dramas from the late 1980s onwards. I saw Newman in a flurry of excellent films spanning four decades: The Long, Hot Summer and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof from 1958, through to The Color of Money in 1986. Newman's collaborator Robert Redford, who died in September, appeared in four lively features: the classic Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid and The Sting, the 1974 adaptation of The Great Gatsby, and 1984's The Natural. The much sought-after new British star Josh O'Connor appeared in four modern features: the excellent Eleanor Catton-scripted Austen adaptation Emma, the Kate Winslet-led Lee Miller biopic Lee, and two 2025 films - Kelly Reichardt's downbeat The Mastermind and Rian Johnson's splashy Netflix-funded whodunnit Wake Up Dead Man. Other prominent actors included Clara Bow in the 1920s comedies Children of Divorce, It and The Saturday Night Kid, and Takashi Shimura and Minoru Chiaki, two actors both appearing in Akira Kurosawa's superb Rashomon (1950), Ikiru (1952) and High & Low (1963). It was also poignant to see three films featuring the lovely and under-rated Teri Garr, who died in 2024: The Conversation, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and One From the Heart.
As for my most-watched directors, it was a tie between prolific Harold Lloyd comedy co-director
Sam Taylor, who also directed Mary Pickford and Laurel and Hardy, and beloved Japanese animator
Hayao Miyazaki. For the latter, we rewatched the beautiful classics
My Neighbour Totoro, Spirited Away, Ponyo and
Porco Rosso, and viewed
Castle in the Sky for the first time. Other prominent directors included Taylor's collaborator
Fred C Newmeyer, the aforementioned
Claude Chabrol, and
Buster Keaton (four first-time viewings, including
The Cameraman from 1928). Amongst others viewed in 2025, we saw legendary Japanese director
Akira Kurosawa's
Ikiru and
High & Low for the first time, and rewatched the peerless
Rashomon. Curiosity led me to watch three
Henry Jaglom films on Kanopy:
New Year's Day (1989),
Last Summer in the Hamptons (1995) and
Festival in Cannes (2001), with
Hamptons being the best of the bunch. (Jaglom died in Los Angeles in September, aged 87). And through Mubi it was interesting to see French-Senegalese director
Mati Diop's
Atlantiques (the 2009 short that was later expanded into a Cannes Grand Prix-winning feature) and the art repatriation documentary
Dahomey (2024).
And so onto my favourite 10 features of 2025 - all 2025 releases:
1. NOUVELLE VAGUE (dir. Richard Linklater)Just the note-perfect fan service making-of-
Breathless that cinema buffs deserve and Richard Linklater has always wanted to make. An expert navigation of the rich mine of creativity and the innate and unavoidable frustration of working with the talented and insufferable Godard. Looks beautiful, superb casting (particularly of Zoey Deutch and Aubry Dullin as Seberg and Belmondo) and ably depicts the bemused camaraderie of the cast and crew brought along, willingly and unwillingly, on the fabulist's mad journey that created an improbable, indelible memory.
2. THE BALLAD OF WALLIS ISLAND (dir. James Griffiths)A real delight - why aren't there more films like this? The most charming musical offering on the big screen since Once, with great songs to boot. Not surprising, given the multi-talented Tom Basden and Carey Mulligan are involved. Tim Key, Basden and Mulligan are all superb and it all wraps up into a charming homage to the healing power of music to bridge the doldrums of loss and regret. Also contains the most definitively British euphemism for undies possible. See it - the film, not the undies, although they are obviously in the film - if you can! And if you want to learn more about the making of the film, Key and Basden's May 2025
podcast interview with Adam Buxton is the perfect companion.
3. MIROIRS NO.3 (dir. Christian Petzold)A pleasingly gentle German drama featuring frequent Christian Petzold muse Paula Beer as a woman involved in a rural car-crash who lodges with a lonely older woman living nearby. Examining the trajectories of grief, the solace of companionship, and with touches of pathos as the characters reveal more of their personal demons,
Mirrors No.3 improves on Petzold's previous outing,
Afire, and may well achieve a wider audience. It also features a well-judged deployment of the 1972 Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons northern soul classic, The Night.
4. ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)A spirited, climactic car chase scene for the ages aside, this is a winning reinvention of the paranoid school of 1970s cinema alongside such classics as
The Conversation and
The Parallax View. A pleasing comic turn from Leonardo DiCaprio and a strong supporting cast evoke the us-against-the-world wariness of the perennial underground activist, and the challenges and compromises of bringing a child up in that ever-wary environment. Although it was long in gestation, its depiction of vendetta-style extrajudicial law enforcement is particularly timely.
5. PRIME MINISTER (dir. Michelle Walshe & Lindsay Utz)
A useful antidote to years of self-serving revisionism skewing the narrative of Ardern's time in power, and distinctive due to the commendably frank and revealing access provided by her partner Clarke Gayford's personal interviews and the recorded-for-posterity Turnbull Library archival project interviews. Ardern's fleeting reference to Boris Johnson is a timely reminder that, whatever their political stripe, leaders aren't always equal to the tasks placed on their desks, and the skills and emotional investment required in peaceful, prosperous times don't fly for a second in times of sustained, historic crises like the Christchurch mosque massacres and the Covid pandemic. Gayford's perhaps poorly-worded query to Ardern near the end of the film - could she have perhaps delegated more, and by implication protected her own wellbeing better? - is understandably rejected by Ardern simply because of the sort of person she is; while tasks can be delegated, if you take the role of leadership seriously as Ardern does, overall responsibility can never be sloughed off. If anything, Prime Minister reveals it's a surprise she stuck it out in the role as long as she did. Which does her credit, and is a sad indictment of the corrosive nature of modern politics.
6. THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME (dir. Wes Anderson)Potentially Anderson's best and most accessible comedy since
The Grand Budapest Hotel more than a decade ago.
The Phoenician Scheme largely swerves the recent Anderson motif that seems to permit audiences to enjoy themselves but only a moderate amount, rather than providing an unseemly and potentially disorderly amount of entertainment. An excellent cast as always, with particular mention to Mia Threapleton, who more than holds her own onscreen, and delightful cameos from Michael Cera as a Swedish assistant and Richard Ayoade as a verbose revolutionary. Making the film in Potsdam seems to have chimed perfectly with Anderson's natural sensibilities, offering a healthy and simpatico dose of Germanic organisational precision.
7. BLUE MOON (dir. Richard Linklater)A delightfully stagey production with a tightly-knit cast and a winning performance as troubled songwriter
Lorenz Hart ("Blue Moon", "The Lady is a Tramp", "My Funny Valentine") by Ethan Hawke acting in shortface (is that a thing?). Able support is provided by Andrew Scott and Margaret Qualley, and the script is laced with acidic epithets, self-deprecation and barbed quips aplenty. Potentially a proud double-feature companion for David and Jack Fincher's
Mank.
8. SORRY, BABY (dir. Eva Victor)Eva Victor’s first feature is a lively and sympathetic depiction of twenty-something trauma and companionship with a polished grasp of humour to leaven the serious subject matter and a compelling gift for inspired casting, idiosyncratic character development and pleasingly authentic dialogue. Hopefully this is the emergence of the next actor-director star alongside the multi-talented Greta Gerwig. Also features an excellent kitten.
9. BUT ALSO JOHN CLARKE (dir. Lorin Clarke)From Clarke's daughter, a warm and insightful overview of a man whose absurdist comedic touch with an everyman flair won over the hearts of two nations, New Zealand and his adopted home Australia. Transplanting the satirical verve of Dudley Moore and Peter Cook to the Antipodes Clarke dominated the 1970s entertainment scene in New Zealand like no other, before reinventing himself as a hugely respected performer in Australia when the land of his birth became too small a pond for so large a talent.
10. MAGIC FARM (dir. Amalia Ulman)A pleasingly shambolic American Vice-like TV crew on the tightest of budgets travel to Argentina looking for quirky novelties to film for their international audience, only to discover the premise of their one and only lead was gossamer-thin. So, obviously, they begin to fabricate a story to film, with the bemused and self-interested cooperation of the locals. Chloe Sevigny is commendably world-weary as the highly-stressed presenter, and Alex Wolff is entertaining as a whining man-baby production assistant, who is charmed by a doe-eyed local with plans of her own.
See also:
Movies: My top 10 films of
2024,
2023,
2022,
2021,
2020,
2019,
2018,
2017,
2016,
2015,
2014,
2013,
2012,
2011,
2010
