Ray’s Top 10 for 2025

2025 marks the fourth year of what has now become an annual tradition: agonizing over the list, caught between performativity and pure dopamine. A few things are different this time. The industry, ever more so, is tasked with answering the existential questions regarding the ethical use of generative videos, mergers, box-office numbers, and perhaps most importantly of all, the role of advocacy cinema in the current zeitgeist, where paranoia and distrust for the government and each other litter film discourse, wherever you might look. 

On a lighter note, I now have the privilege to read over other writers’ work with Luke, Jacquelyn, Dany, Kate, and Quelynda: a stressful and duteous job by nature, but we have also enjoyed every word that our incredible team of writers, editors, and designers have managed to put out. In many ways, in performing my responsibilities for this journal, I have had many of my aforementioned questions answered and anxieties quelled. William’s pieces defending the Bee Movie and Carlos’s piece ranking all the Paul Thomas Anderson films are entertaining and insightful; Ellison and Cyd composed writings on Civil War and Eddington’s role in shaping the contemporary American political discourse. In our print journal, Kate took a deeper dive into cinema’s role in fostering conversation about Gunn’s Superman, while Sadie discussed the harsh standards that female celebrities have to face through analysis of a series of recent films. These discourses helped me greatly in organizing my own thoughts on cinema this year. I hope some of them have proven useful for you as well. 

This year, I caught fifty-two new releases–a slight drop off from the number of previous years. For the record, I would like to attribute that to an increase in foreign old films, rather than a less-than-desirable time management on my part. Out of these films, here are the ones that stood out:

Honourable Mentions:

Calle Malaga (dir. Maryam Touzani), Mickey 17 (dir. Bong Joon Ho), Superman (dir. James Gunn), The Naked Gun (dir. Akiva Schaffer), Roofman (dir. Derek Cianfrance), The Roses (dir. Jay Roach), The Phoenician Scheme (dir. Wes Anderson), Bugonia (dir. Yorgos Lanthimos), Wake up Dead Man (dir. Rian Johnson), Caught Stealing (dir. Darren Aronofsky)

10. F1 Movie

The F1 Movie joins the ranks of Carry On (2024), The Killer (2023), and Bullet Train (2022) to become my 2025 pick for the bullet-train-esque movie of the year. At risk of sounding facile, the F1 Movie is a very movie movie (in a good way). 

There should never be an argument made against entertainment. Film is an art form for the masses; even its most esoteric supporters recognize the need to get people into theatres. The F1 Movie did that this year. Continuity editing and the classical Hollywood elements still work very well. The racing is exhilarating, the editing, energetic, and Hans Zimmer’s continued flirtation with electronic music sends pulses of excitement down your spine. 

Kosinski, who also directed Top Gun: Maverick and Lady Gaga’s music video Hold My Hand, is acutely aware of the octane movie’s goal, never overdirecting the scene. An increasingly legacy-conscious Brad Pitt and newcomer Damson Idris deliver an on-screen dynamic that flows smoothly along the racing action. 

As our AMC goddess Nicole Kidman says, “We come to this place… for magic.”

9. Sinners

In an industry dominated by intellectual property and franchise logic, Sinners arrives as a genuine outlier: a large-scale, non-IP studio film whose box-office success over the past five years exposes the hollowness of Hollywood’s risk-averse assumptions. It is not luck; it is long overdue. 

Drawing on Black cultural imagery, music, and ritual, it flirts with excess and the spectre of appropriation. The blues and its shape-shifting structural flexibility translate well into the larger film, combining both other musical motifs and cultural elements to deliver a picture that is larger than life. It is a Jim Crow-era vampire story, but it is also an epic where social background, romanticism, fantasy, lust, love, and camaraderie of a cruel bygone era come to life. This is the film that critics on film Twitter love to declare as impossible to make nowadays. Yet, it is here, burning with life.

8. It Was Just an Accident (یک تصادف ساده)

Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’Or–winning film possesses an unexpected sense of humour. One running joke has nearly every figure of authority carrying a portable point-of-sale machine, ready at all times for the instantaneous, frictionless acceptance of bribes. It is funny. It is also cruel and infuriating. 

Iranian trauma appears endless, cycling through new forms without resolution. When does it stop? When physical violence briefly recedes, psychological torment overtakes its presence without fail. Panahi was sentenced in absentia by an Iranian court to two years in prison and a two-year travel ban while promoting this film in the US. 

7. Jay Kelly / Sentimental Value (Affeksjonsverdi)

Does George Clooney—or rather, Jay Kelly—have a personality? That question meditates at the core of Jay Kelly, where Clooney plays a man reckoning with the costs of success, fame, and the emotional distance separating him from his two daughters. The film is sincere in both its inquiry and its method: a two-hour journey across Europe designed to test whether success and family can coexist. The answer it arrives at is an uneasy one: fame and human connection emerge as inverse variables in the same equation.

If the film occasionally falters, it is in how narrowly it frames the world beyond Clooney’s orbit. Secondary figures are sketched thinly. A telling visual metaphor appears in the train sequence. The train is romanticized into oblivion in the most convenient way possible. Its interior evokes last-century Soviet rolling stock, while its exterior is the restored Arlecchino train in mid-century Italian futurism. The anachronism is minor, but revealing. Like the film itself, the gesture never quite escapes the aesthetic garden it aims to interrogate. Still, the film offers a measured study of celebrity, coming from the celebrities who might know one thing or two about the premise.

A more quietly devastating variation on this theme appears in Sentimental Value, similarly about family trauma caused by a movie-making father. The film opens with a quiet, assured beauty, faintly reminiscent of The Tree of Life, establishing a single house with such spatial and emotional clarity that it accrues meaning simply by being inhabited. Something as ordinary as domestic space is granted weight, culminating in a final movement that briefly convinces you that the worst has happened. Joachim Trier proves that he can generate forceful character studies within the entirety of Oslo or from one family’s home.

Piano Teacher and Irreversible DVDs also make great gifts for kids. 

6. No Other Choice (어쩔수가없다)

Park Chan-wook possesses this mythical ability to make electronics, cross dissolves, and very, very yellow sunset lighting look angelic. Similar to Oldboy and The Handmaiden, No Other Choice thrives on Park Chan-wook’s almost carnivalesque bravura. The film shares some commonalities with Parasite in its critique of South Korea’s capitalist, inhumane, masculine-insecurity-driven workplace culture. What is different is Park Chan-wook’s tonal recalibration, made evident if you compare it with Costa-Gavras’s equally engrossing The Ax. No Other Choice ditches the subdued neo-noir cynicism and aesthetics of its inspiration and replaces it with a more materialistic, modern-day form of employment anxiety. 

However, the film falls short on its tonal consistency with the whiplash between extremes of comic relief, personal and familial tragedy, critique on society, and other ambitious elements that Park Chan-wook chooses to pursue. Nevertheless, Lee Byung-hun gives a career-defining performance, straddling these atonal lines between slapstick incompetence and physical endurance, a caring family man and a murderer,

5. Broken English 

An inventive and eccentric tribute to the inimitable Marianne Faithfull, singer, actress, and 60s cultural icon, Broken English unfolds within the surreal confines of the “Ministry of Not Forgetting.” Staffed by Tilda Swinton, George MacKay, and a chorus of sharp and creative women writers, singers, and artists, the Ministry serves as both stage and commentary box, where Faithfull’s life is discussed, dramatized, and deconstructed. Directors Pollard and Forsyth even bring Marianne herself into the studio, her reflections intercut with archival footage that bridges the distance between past and present.

A subject like Faithfull demands a film rich in cultural resonance, and Broken English rises to the challenge. Its narrative conceit can, at times, feel overly elaborate, but the emotional core remains clear. The austere beauty of the Ministry’s brutalist setting radiates unexpected warmth, mirroring the film’s blend of irony and affection. As the film recounts Marianne’s mistakes, successes, unapologetic candour, and scars left from a deeply misogynistic culture, I couldn’t help but feel emotional about a life well-lived. She passed away in January this year, but her legacy will live on. 

4. Nouvelle Vague

Ah yes, the French New Wave, possibly the most well-known movement of cinema (much more so than German Expressionism or Italian Neorealisms). The term has unfortunately been increasingly co-opted as a catch-all joke term that is symptomatic of the convoluted pretentiousness exuded by the Letterboxd users: “Shut up with your little black and white French New Wave bull***t.” For the cinephiles, thankfully, the movement is a revolutionary period of time, where filmmakers scorned the establishment and challenged the rigid rules of the cinema; thankfully, too, that Nouvelle Vague captures the chicness of the period without creating an opportune moment for someone to scoff at the cigarette cloud, Godard’s sunglasses, or the French. 

Other than leveraging the “arthouse” effect of the Academy Ratio and the 35mm film stock Kodak Double X 5222 and Ilford HP5+ 400, Richard Linklater also employs an especially convincing crew. Guillaume Marbeck is fantastic as the self-assured, wise prick Godard. Zoey Deutch is Jean Seberg, with a pixieish Ohio-accented French in charge of morale through the character’s sarcastic sense of humour. Matthieu Penchinat is brilliant, playing the cinematographer Raoul Coutard, who forever starts a take with “Rolling Godard.”

If there is any lesson to take away here, it is this: Despite how easy it is to point a finger at the smug asshole next to you and yell “pretentious,” the writers of Cahiers du cinéma have proved that art geniuses sometimes indeed behave this way and come from such places. We might just have to put up with these oddballs until they make the next À bout de souffle or Les quatre cents coups. Come to think of it, there are a few characters like that at Double Éxposure. 

3. Sirāt

Sirāt opens with a sequence of an EDM festival in the middle of the unyielding and unforgiving Moroccan desert. Then the tour de force electronic music of Kangding Ray kicks in, and the film goes slow motion. What is left on screen is as uncomfortable and alien as it is striking. Europeans dance in nihilism, fueled by psychedelics, closely packed together, akin to a group-conscious organism. 

Critics of the film label it as embracing a settler's attitude or orientalizing the desertscape. I think that is missing Óliver Laxe’s point. The film–about a father and son searching for their missing daughter and sister, forced to follow a group of nomads–does not endorse this decadent escapism. Rather, it focuses on the constantly surprising human compassion that refuses to be extinguished in the face of a world that is vehemently violent, cruel, and unrelenting. Like its name Sirāt (a thin bridge connecting heaven and hell), the film transposes the participants of the bacchanal into a despairing desert ore train along with the refugees of another unnamed war. 

There is one shot in the film where the three vehicles dash through the desert, leaving a trail of dust on the car behind. It left the same religious effect on me, akin to seeing Deakin’s sequence where Jake Gyllenhaal races against time in the snow to the nearest hospital in Prisoners. This is one of those films that resists any attempt to describe it: you have to see it. 

2. Oprahn (Árva)

As I left the theatre, I overheard complaints about the ambiguity of the father and the underdevelopment of the mother. I think that is exactly the point. The film unfolds through the eyes of twelve-year-old Jewish half-orphan Andor Hirsch, whose postwar Budapest is rendered as a oneiric haze of confusion. His supposed father dominates the frame, consuming all the air in his world and suffocating the hope Andor once held for the heroic return of his “real” father. His mother, distant and cold, carries her own invisible wounds, struggling to keep the family intact under the weight of collective trauma.

For a twelve year old, the moral calculus of survival is impossible to grasp: the difference between compromise and corruption remains blurred. The film captures that blur with haunting precision. Its evocation of 1950s Hungary is so immersive, so thick with texture and life, that long after the credits roll, you remain suspended in its atmosphere, unable to shake the quiet devastation it leaves behind.

1. One Battle After Another

Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is not perfect. Like many, I think the film stopped one step too short of giving the audience a poignant answer as to how to fix the problems it lays out. At the same time, it undeniably provides us with hope wrapped in urgency and impeccable presentation that are much needed at this moment in time. It rightly destroys the uber-fascists and white nationalists' grotesques and denounces 70s Marxist guerrilla terrorism as ineffective and disorderly. 

Bluntly named characters—Steven J. Lockjaw, Perfidia Beverly Hills, Junglepussy—signal the film’s satirical register, though nothing about them is careless. Their exaggeration is part of a kinetic, politically charged style that is reminiscent of Dr. Strangelove’s absurdity. 

In some ways, I placed One Battle After Another above every other film because you can find hints of other directors’ works in it. Paul Thomas Anderson’s maximalist style is Park Chan-wook but cohesive, while his commentary on politics puts Ari Aster and Alex Garland to shame.

What distinguishes the film is Paul Thomas Anderson’s gift for writing people rather than positions. He understands community, intimacy, and the quiet mechanics of love, especially in the father–daughter relationship at the film’s core.  I am happy that the Hispanic community is depicted clearly as a well-oiled machine from the ground up, every day. It does not want to start a revolution with flying manifestos and exploding skyscrapers, but takes care of the vulnerable people over a vast network of intimate communities, meticulously and without fail. 

As I was waiting for the delayed one train outside of AMC Lincoln, riding the high from the movie, two Columbia students who had also just seen the film offered me a cigarette and asked, “Did you like it?” Unsure of what they might think, I said with relative composure, “I really liked that.” “Fuck yeah dude.” What a relief! What a time to be alive for movies like this. 

Granted, there is a lot of personal taste in this list, stemming from my belief that seriousness and entertainment are not incompatible, even in our current political climate. If this list provides some insights into where movies stand now, it should be a recognition that—despite what the biggest cynics say—the medium still knows how to think, feel, risk and evoke.

Ray Wu is the co-Editor-in-Chief of Double Exposure. Three words to describe him are Talkative, During, Movies. He believes that either George Clooney or Tony Leung should play him in a biopic. 

@woooray