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)