2025

Films of 2025

My favourite films of 2025:

What Does That Nature Say to You (Hong Sang-soo)
The Ice Tower (Lucile Hadžihalilović)
Ghost Elephants (Werner Herzog)
The Story of “Scénario”/L'histoire de "Scénario" (Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Paul Battaggia, Fabrice Aragno, Nicole Brenez)

Flight Risk (Mel Gibson)

Comments:

I saw very few new releases over the past 12 months so this list is more of an early draft for a later, more thorough list.

Have I missed much? Answers on a postcard.

2024 titles that I saw for the first time this year:

By the Stream (Hong Sang-soo)

Exposé du film annonce du film “Scénario” (Jean-Luc Godard, Fabrice Aragno, Jean-Paul Battaggia, Nicole Brenez)

Here (Robert Zemeckis)

Little Shrew (Snowflake) (Kate Bush)

Rust (Joel Souza)

Scénarios (Jean-Luc Godard)

The Unholy Trinity (Richard Gray)

2025 watchlist:

Where to Land (Hal Hartley)

No! YOU’RE WRONG. or: Spooky Action at a Distance (Crispin Glover)

Frontier Crucible (Travis Mills)

No Other Choice (Park Chan-wook)

Father Mother Sister Brother (Jim Jarmusch)

The Sixth Robber (Chris Huo)

Tree Above Volvo (Hong Sang-soo)

Remake (Ross McElwee)

The Ozu Diaries (Daniel Raim)

Megadoc (Mike Figgis)

Boorman and the Devil (David Kittredge)

Thieves Highway (Jesse V. Johnson)

The Shadow’s Edge (Larry Yang)

The Fence (Claire Denis)

Avatar: Fire and Ash (James Cameron)

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (Gore Verbinski)

Kontinental ’25 (Radu Jude)

KINKI (Koji Shiraishi)

The Piano Accident (Quentin Dupieux)

Transcending Dimensions (Toshiaki Toyoda)

Hunting Season (Raja Collins)

Audie Murphy, de Colmar à Hollywood (Zouhair Chebbale)

Films that I hope to see in 2026:

At the Middle of Life (Hong Sang-soo)

The Bookie & the Bruiser (S. Craig Zahler)

Flowers from the Ashes (Chen Kaige)

Paper Trail (Don Hertzfeldt)

The Way of the Wind (Terrence Malick)

Mutiny (Jean-François Richet)

The Strangers: Chapter 3 (Renny Harlin)

Send Help (Sam Raimi)

Remain (M. Night Shyamalan)

Shelter (Ric Roman Waugh)

Archangel (William Eubank)

Notable physical media releases:

Godzilla Vs Biollante (Criterion)

Mikey and Nicky (Criterion)

V-Cinema Essentials: Bullets & Betrayal (Arrow)

The Magnificent Chang Cheh (Eureka)

Bumpkin Soup (Third Window)

Mermaid Legend (Third Window)

Scent of a Spell (Third Window)

The Adventurers (Eureka)

A Certain Killer / A Killer's Key (Arrow)

The Shepherd of the Hills (Powerhouse/Indicator)

Little Man, What Now? (Powerhouse/Indicator)

Peter Ibbetson (Powerhouse/Indicator)

The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (Powerhouse/Indicator)

Edge of Eternity (Powerhouse/Indicator)

The Iron Rose (Indicator)

Girls Without Shame (Indicator)

Strange New Worlds : Science Fiction at DEFA (Eureka)

Carnal Knowledge (Powerhouse/Indicator)

The Eel (Radiance)

Hardboiled: Three Pulp Thrillers by Alain Corneau (Radiance)

Je T’Aime Je T’Aime (Radiance)

Sirk In Germany 1934-1935 (Eureka/Masters of Cinema)

Heart Of Stone (Eureka/Masters of Cinema)

The Sons Of Great Bear (Eureka)

The Hireling (Powerhouse)

H.M.S. Defiant (Powerhouse)

Rosa la rose, fille publique (Radiance)

Palindromes (Radiance)

The Tale of Oiwa's Ghost (Radiance)

World Noir Vol 3 (Radiance)

Trouble Every Day (Eureka/Masters of Cinema)

Bonjour Tristesse (Powerhouse)

The Shootist (Arrow)

Nosferatu the Vampyre (BFI)

The Ambulance (Eureka)

The Diablocail Dr. Z (Eureka)

The Island (Eureka/Masters of Cinema)

Ms .45 (Arrow)

In the Mouth of Madness (Arrow)

Bad Lieutenant (101 Films)

Une Femme Douce (Radiance)

Le Notti Biance/White Nights (Radiance)

Rio Lobo (Eureka/Masters of Cinema)

A Confucian Confusion / Mahjong: Two Films by Edward Yang (Criterion)

Castle Freak (101 Films)

Columbia Horror - Limited Edition (Powerhouse/Indicator)

Radical Japan: Cinema and State - Nine Films by Nagisa Oshima (Radiance)

2025 R.I.P

Jerry Adler, Sian Barbara Allen, Björn Andrésen, George Armitage, Adriana Asti, Joe Don Baker, Brigitte Bardot, Robert Benton, Bertrand Blier, Hark Bohm, Terry Bollea (aka Hulk Hogan), Paolo Bonacelli, Claudia Cardinale, Alf Clausen, Mara Corday, Samantha Eggar, Jules Feiffer, Eleonora Giorgi, Bruce Glover, Adam Greenberg, Graham Greene, Gene Hackman, Wings Hauser, Kathleen Hughes, Jimmy Hunt, Peter Jason, Tchéky Karyo, Diane Keaton, Udo Kier, Val Kilmer, Kim Sae-ron, Ted Kotcheff, Jørgen Leth, Lar Park Lincoln, David Lynch, Michael Madsen, Jean Marsh, Franco Merli, Tatsuya Nakadai, Mark Peploe, Robert Redford, Tony Roberts, Jill Sands, Lalo Schifrin, Masahiro Shinoda, Ueda Shoji, Gerard Soeteman, Terence Stamp, Jeannot Szwarc, Peter Watkins, George Wendt, Brian Wilson, Harris Yulin

Recommended links:

https://www.yearendlists.com/category/2025-movies

https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/polls/best-films-2025-all-votes

https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2026/world-poll/

https://www.imdb.com/list/ls4154278653/

Film Discoveries of 2025

Best first viewings of 2025:

My viewing highlights of the past 12 months. Fifty pre-2025 titles which I saw for the first time this year that made the strongest impression. My choice of viewing is certainly less adventurous these days. A fifth of these "discoveries" are Westerns. It's no great surprise perhaps as it's by far my favourite genre but even taking my preferences in to account it does seem like an inordinate amount. I'm also a little ashamed that as a so-called Fellini fan I only got around to seeing La Dolce Vita for the first time this year. I had to search high and low for Last Summer. To my mind it's one of the finest and most challenging films of recent times, and the fact that it has had almost zero distribution in the UK outside of a London Film Festival showing speaks volumes. At the time of writing it is still unavailable on streaming and VOD to British film patrons. Most good film discoveries can provide building blocks for future viewing choices and there's much from what I saw in 2025 that I'm keen to explore further: A. C. Lyles Westerns, the early films of Allan Dwan, British Horror shorts, unseen Palme d'Or winners and Christianity in silent cinema to give a few examples. A chronologically ordered version of this list is available on Letterboxd.

  

Standout titles from within the list are marked with an asterisk (*).

*The Bells of St. Mary's (Leo McCarey, 1945)
 Black Tuesday (Hugo Fregonese, 1954)
 Casanova's Big Night (Norman Z. McLeod, 1954)
 Child of Divorce (Richard Fleischer, 1946)
*La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960)
 Exposé du film annonce du film “Scénario” (Jean-Luc Godard, Fabrice Aragno, Jean-Paul Battaggia, Nicole Brenez, 2024)
 A Faithful Woman (Roger Vadim, 1976)
 Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion (Shunya Ito, 1972)
 The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft (Werner Herzog, 2022)
 The Friends (Shinji Sōmai, 1994)
*From Hell to Texas (Henry Hathaway, 1958)
 The Go-Between (Joseph Losey, 1971)
*Gunpoint (Earl Bellamy, 1966)
 Here (Robert Zemeckis, 2024)
*Hill of Freedom (Hong Sang-soo, 2014)
 Introduction (Hong Sang-soo, 2021)
 Johnny Reno (R.G. Springsteen, 1966)
*Judith of Bethulia (D. W. Griffith, 1914)
 The Last Days of Disco (Whit Stillman, 1998)
 The Last Gasp (Ingmar Bergman, 1995)
*The Last of the Fast Guns (George Sherman, 1958)
*Last Summer (Catherine Breillat, 2023)
*The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo (Margaret Tait, 1955)
*A Letter to Freddy Buache (Jean-Luc Godard, 1982)
*The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ (Ferdinand Zecca, Lucien Nonguet, 1903)
*The Mender of Nets (D. W. Griffith, 1912)
 Mermaid Legend (Toshiharu Ikeda, 1984)
 Moving (Shinji Sōmai, 1993)
 My Heart Is That Eternal Rose (Patrick Tam Kar-ming, 1989)
 Ouvroir the Movie (Chris Marker, 2010)
 Picture Windows: Lightning (Joe Dante, 1995)
*Priest of Darkness (Sadao Yamanaka, 1936)
 The Ranchman’s Vengeance (Allan Dwan, 1911)
 Reflections in a Golden Eye (John Huston, 1967)
 The Return (Sture Rydman, 1973)
 Rosa la rose, fille publique (Paul Vecchiali, 1986)
 Rouge (Stanley Kwan Kam-Pang, 1987)
 Scénarios (Jean-Luc Godard, 2024)
*Série Noire (Alain Corneau, 1979)
*Shanghai Blues (Tsui Hark, 1984)
 Silence (Masahiro Shinoda, 1971)
 Stage to Thunder Rock (William F. Claxton, 1964)
*Star in the Dust (Charles F. Haas, 1956)
 The Struggle (D. W. Griffith, 1931)
*The Thief’s Wife (Allan Dwan, 1912)
 The Thin Man (W.S. Van Dyke, 1934)
 Through Sicily (Piero Marelli, 1920)
*Tide of Empire (Allan Dwan, 1929)
 The Virginian (Victor Fleming, 1929) 
 Where East Is East (Tod Browning, 1929)

Books Read in 2025

I set myself a goal to read an average of 4 titles a month this year. My grand tally for the year is 50, which is a major leap from previous years even if some of these weren't exactly lengthy tomes. I do find that switching between fiction and non-fiction titles regularly is useful to keep up the momentum. I'm much more likely to give up on a book now if it doesn't seem to be sustaining my interest after ten or twenty pages, in order to avoid the error I've made many times in the past of stubbornly sticking with a book no matter what. The only resounding dud amongst this selection was The Testament of Mary but, mercifully, it was a concise and quick read. Four of these books (The Thin Man, Silence, Brighton Rock, Treasure Island) were bucket list titles of mine, and I'm happy to say that they all lived up to my high expectations. 

I seem to have developed an appetite for biographies. Unsurprisingly a lot of what I read was film related. Patrick McGilligan's superlative examination of the life and work of Woody Allen (himself the author or subject of several titles on here) sets an extremely high standard for this kind of non-fiction, and restored my faith in film studies texts after some truly loathsome and self-regarding volumes in recent times on Elaine May (by Carrie Courogen), Michael Cimino (by Charles Elton) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder (by Ian Penman). Abel Ferrara's engaging memoir 'Scene' was a good title to end the year on; an honest and reflective work that manages to impart some hard earned wisdom and gratitude. 

Here is a list of all the books that I read in 2025. My own personal favourites from within the list are marked with an asterisk (*).

*The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett

 Mere Anarchy by Woody Allen

 Jimmy the Kid by Donald E. Westlake

 Undressing Emmanuelle: A Memoir by Sylvia Kristel

 Blood on the Moon (Reel West) by Alan K. Rode

 Poems and Shorter Writings by James Joyce

*Silence by Shūsaku Endō

 You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense by Charles Bukowski

 High Noon (BFI Film Classics) by Philip Drummond

 I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison

 England Made Me by Graham Greene

 Westerns: Aspects of a Movie Genre by Philip French

 A Congregation of Jackals by S. Craig Zahler

*Woody Allen: A Travesty of a Mockery of a Sham by Patrick McGilligan

 Texas by the Tail by Jim Thompson

 Conversations with Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies, and Moviemaking by Eric Lax, Woody Allen

*Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

 Still in the Saddle: The Hollywood Western, 1969–1980 by Andrew Patrick Nelson

 Wild Strawberries (BFI Film Classics) by Philip French, Kersti French

 God and the Devil: The Life and Work of Ingmar Bergman by Peter Cowie

 The Searchers (BFI Film Classics) by Edward Buscombe

 For Esmé — with Love and Squalor and Other Stories by J.D. Salinger

 Hawks on Hawks by Joseph McBride

 20 Drawings of Palestinian Writers by Tom Loffill, with a foreword by Ghadeer Ebrahime

 The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in the Hollywood Western by Michael Coyne

 Wayne and Ford: The Films, the Friendship, and the Forging of an American Hero by Nancy Schoenberger

 The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín

*Conversations with Flannery O'Connor by Rosemary M. Magee (Editor)

*The Presence of Grace and Other Book Reviews by Flannery O'Connor, Carter W. Martin (Editor), Leo J. Zuber (Compiler)

 The Passion of the Christ (Controversies: 4) by Neal King

 Spirited Away (BFI Film Classics) by Andrew Osmond

 The Gutter and the Grave by Ed McBain

*The Movies, Mr. Griffith, And Me by Lillian Gish, Ann Pinchot

*D. W. Griffith: Interviews (Conversations with Filmmakers Series) by Anthony Slide (editor)

*Brighton Rock by Graham Greene

*The Morning Watch by James Agee

*On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho by Matsuo Bashō, Lucien Stryk (Translator)

 The Films of Edgar G. Ulmer by Bernd Herzogenrath (Editor)

 Rosemary's Baby (BFI Film Classics) by Michael Newton

 Lovecraft's Guide to Writing: A Collection of Essays by H.P. Lovecraft

 Nosferatu: eine Symphonie des Grauens (BFI Film Classics) by Kevin Jackson

 Tod Browning's Dracula by Gary D. Rhodes

 What's with Baum? by Woody Allen

 Woody Allen: Interviews, Revised and Updated (Conversations With Filmmakers Series) by Robert E. Kapsis (Editor)

 'Injuns!': Native Americans in the Movies by Edward Buscombe

 Latches by Kate Fleet

 A Grave Undertaking by Lionel White

 Mario Bava: The Artisan as Italian Horror Auteur by Leon Hunt

 Dwell by Simon Armitage, Beth Munro (Illustrator)

 Scene: A Memoir by Abel Ferrara

December 2025

Best First Viewings:

Rosa la rose, fille publique (Paul Vecchiali, 1986)

Ella McCay (James L. Brooks, 2025)

The Ranchman’s Vengeance (Allan Dwan, 1911)

Through Sicily/Attraverso la Sicilia (Piero Marelli, 1920)

The Old Cowboy/Stary kowboj (Witold Giersz, 1973)

The Ice Tower (Lucile Hadžihalilović, 2025)

With All Our Hearts (Hiromasa Yonebayashi, 2021)

The Train Robbers (Burt Kennedy, 1973)

A Little Western/Mały western (Witold Giersz, 1961)

Books Read:

'Injuns!': Native Americans in the Movies by Edward Buscombe

Latches by Kate Fleet

A Grave Undertaking by Lionel White

Mario Bava: The Artisan as Italian Horror Auteur by Leon Hunt

Scene: A Memoir by Abel Ferrara