Part 3 the editors January 2026 World Poll Issue 116 ENTRIES IN PART 3: Nicholas de Villiers Connor Denney Emanuele Di Nicola Sérgio Dias Branco Matthew Dillon Wheeler Winston Dixon José D’LauraDana Duma Cristóbal Escobar Adalberto Fonkén Simon Foster Giampiero Frasca Geoff Gardner Libertad Gills Nicholas de Villiers Professor of English and Film and Programming Director of Movies on the House at the University of North Florida (USA) 2025 favourite films: Still mourning Jacksonville’s loss of Sun-Ray Cinema (thus limited to what I could see at AMC or stream), and in a year of letdowns from directors I admire (Luca Guadagnino, David Cronenberg, Bong Joon Ho, Wes Anderson, Celine Song, and, sorry to say, Guillermo del Toro) often plagued by what Namwali Serpell has identified as the “New Literalism,” my list of favourites this year includes two brilliant documentaries about queer icons and the rest of the films are mostly body horror… Pee-wee as Himself (Matt Wolf, 2025) plus “Paul Reubens Selects” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Tura! (Cody Jarrett, 2024) Weapons (Zach Cregger, 2025) Bring Her Back (Danny and Michael Philippou, 2025) Keeper (Osgood Perkins, 2025) Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2025) 28 Years Later (Danny Boyle, 2025) Together (Michael Shanks, 2025) Friendship (Andrew DeYoung, 2024) Good Boy (Ben Leonberg, 2025) plus the post-screening video explaining the Kuleshov Effect Connor Denney Cinephile, Boston, Massachusetts Tardes de soledad (Afternoons of Solitude, Albert Serra, 2024) O Agente Secreto (The Secret Agent, Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2025) The Shrouds (David Cronenberg, 2024) Suyoocheon (By the Stream, Hong Sang-soo, 2024) Grand Tour (Miguel Gomes, 2024) Miséricorde (Misericordia, Alain Guiraudie, 2024) The Phoenician Scheme (Wes Anderson, 2025) Miroirs No. 3 (Mirrors No. 3, Christian Petzold, 2025) Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie, 2025) Der Spatz im Kamin (The Sparrow in the Chimney, Ramon Zürcher, 2024) The Secret Agent Emanuele Di Nicola Film critic, journalist, editor to Nocturno and Editor-in-Chief to Nocturno.it New films (alphabetical order): De Pupil (The Pupil, Karin Junger, 2025) Die My Love (Lynne Ramsay, 2025) L’accident de piano (The Piano Accident, Quentin Dupieux, 2025) L’étranger (The Stranger, François Ozon, 2025) Remake (Ross McElwee, 2025) Six jour, ce printemps-là (Six days in spring, Joachim Lafosse, 2025) The Mother of Flies (John Adams, Zelda Adams, Toby Poser, 2025) Together (Michael Shanks, 2025) With Hasan in Gaza (Maʻa Ḥasan fī Ġazzah, Kamal Aljafari, 2025) Zvan: Il romanzo famigliare di Giovanni Pascoli (Zvanì, Giuseppe Piccioni, 2025) Sérgio Dias Branco Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of Coimbra Eojjeolsuga eobsda (No Other Choice, Park Chan-wook, 2025) A House of Dynamite (Kathryn Bigelow, 2025) The Life of Chuck (Mike Flanagan, 2024) One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025) The Phoenician Scheme (Wes Anderson, 2025) The Shrouds (David Cronenberg, 2024) Sinners (Ryan Coogler, 2025) Sirât (Oliver Laxe, 2025) Wake Up Dead Man (Rian Johnson, 2025) Yek tasadof-e sadeh (It Was Just an Accident, Jafar Panahi, 2025) Ten films are hardly enough to account for a year of cinematic art – and I am still catching up with important titles such as O Agente Secreto (The Secret Agent, Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2025), The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt, 2025), or O Riso e a Faca (I Only Rest in the Storm, Pedro Pinho, 2025). Other films, including Drop (Christopher Landon, 2025), L’histoire de Souleymane (Souleymane’s Story, Boris Lojkine, 2024), or Jeunes mères (Young Mothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2025), also came close to making the list – and are well worth seeking out. These ten titles highlight particularly compelling examples of fiction cinema released in 2025. I limited the scope to fiction films not because documentary is less important, but because I wanted to focus on constructed worlds, where meaning emerges through mise en scène, image, sound, and genre rather than direct record. The selection is guided by clear stylistic imprint and a strong sense of variety: they look, sound, move, and think differently. Several work through genre – thriller, horror, mystery, action – using recognisable frameworks to process power, belief, race, violence, and collective anxiety. Others move in the opposite direction, toward austerity or contemplation, privileging duration, landscape, and bodily presence over narrative payoff. Ways of looking at people – and of staying with them – recur throughout the list. What matters is not only who these films attend to, but how that attention is shaped aesthetically. Some articulate a reparative mode, grounded in attention, ritual, music, and communal survival. Others push toward harsher, tragic registers, where choices are constrained and loss takes hold. Taken together, these films suggest cinema as a humanist endeavour that remains plural, contested, and driven by form. It Was Just an Accident Matthew Dillon Melbourne-based writer and editor. Read his articles at www.matthewdillon.net A Complete Unknown (James Mangold, 2024) One does not have to be a Bob Dylan aficionado to appreciate this film’s craft and deftness or the performances of the ensemble cast, particularly Timothée Chalamet as the songsmith extraordinaire. Aftersun (Charlotte Wells, 2022) The manner in which this tight and astonishingly moving film creates moments of tension and pathos had me thinking of Paris, Texas. Credit Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio for their moving performances as young dad Callum and his daughter Sophie on holiday in this ‘90s-set film, but also the extraordinary control of first-time director Charlotte Wells. Black Bag (Steven Soderberg, 2025) This elegant and clever exploration of spycraft and the spooks who practise it sees Mr Soderberg doing what he does best: films that are as intelligently composed as they are entertaining. Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender play a couple who work in British intelligence charged with identifying a traitor, who might just be one of them. Conclave (Edward Berger, 2024) Brilliant performances from a strong ensemble cast and polished direction make this papal fable a compelling and thoroughly enjoyable – though slightly silly – movie. Vingt Dieux (Holy Cow, Louise Courvoisier, 2024) Set in a rural cheese-producing region of France, this drama tells the story of irresponsible 18-year-old Totone (Clément Faveau), who must grow up quickly when he is charged with looking after his little sister Claire (Luna Garret) and the struggling family farm. I saw this film with my Mum, who loved the cinema and passed away not long afterwards, so despite its imperfections will be remembered fondly. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (Christopher McQuarrie, 2025) Having walked out two-thirds of the way through the penultimate film in this eight-part series, there was no guarantee I’d make it to the starting line for this, part eight. Yet a ticking bomb (of course), a (near) impossible task and propulsive action make this a compelling finale (I hope) for the series. Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968) The sweeping cinematography, the soaring Ennio Morricone score, the charismatic performances, especially from Henry Fonda playing against type, and Sergio Leone’s confidence at the helm all add up to one thing: an unforgettable epic. The Natural (Barry Levinson, 1984) So iconic that The Simpsons has riffed on it, Robert Redford’s ode to baseball and second chances is as enjoyable (for me) as it is hokey and unlikely. This was one of seven Redford vehicles I watched after the legendary actor passed away, the best of those I’d not seen in the past, yet not in the same league as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (Peter R Hunt, 1969) Tight, moving and engaging. One could not ask for more from a James Bond tale. Perfect Days (Wim Wenders, 2023) A simple story, skilfully told, of the pleasures enjoyed in the life of a Tokyo toilet cleaner, who finds beauty in his quotidian routine. Wheeler Winston Dixon Writer and filmmaker Ten of my favourite films of 2025, in no particular order: The Shrouds (David Cronenberg, 2025) Kuraudo (Cloud, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024) Sinners (Ryan Coogler, 2025) Sorry, Baby (Eva Victor, 2025) Nouvelle Vague (Richard Linklater, 2025) Affeksjonsverdi (Sentimental Value, Joachim Trier, 2025) Yek tasadof-e sadeh (It Was Just an Accident, Jafar Panahi, 2025) If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (Mary Bronstein, 2025) O Agente Secreto (Secret Agent, Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2025) One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025) 2025 has been a very strange year for the cinema. In the United States, it’s almost like cinema in France in the 1940s under the Vichy Regime; cinema in wartime. And as befits the times we live in, this is an unsettling and unsettled bunch of films. The Shrouds was inspired by the death of Cronenberg’s wife Carolyn, who died in 2017, and is an appropriately bleak meditation on love, loss, and mortality. Kuraudo (Cloud) explores themes of digital alienation, the real-world consequences of online anonymity, and the dehumanising nature of the modern “hustle economy.” Sinners, set in 1932 in the Jim Crow-era Mississippi Delta, follows twin brothers who return to their hometown to open a juke joint, only to be confronted by the pervasive racism of the time and a malevolent supernatural force that seeks their destruction. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You deals with a stressed-out mother dealing with her daughter’s mysterious illness, her husband’s absence, and her own mental and emotional breakdown. Sorry, Baby follows Agnes (Eva Victor), a reclusive college literature professor, as she struggles to heal from a sexual assault that occurred years earlier when she was a graduate student. Nouvelle Vague is Richard Linklater’s affectionate yet generally accurate love letter to the 1960s New Wave, and a call to contemporary filmmakers to return to basics. Affeksjonsverdi (Sentimental Value) explores family dynamics, intergenerational trauma, and the healing power of art as an estranged father attempts to reconnect with his daughters through a film project. Yek tasadof-e sadeh (It Was Just an Accident), another triumph by Iranian dissident director Jafar Panahi, tells the story of Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), a former political prisoner working as an auto mechanic, who encounters a customer whose distinctive limp and artificial leg leads Vahid to believe the man is “Peg Leg,” the brutal guard who tortured him years ago in prison. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You centres on a mother and therapist whose life spirals into chaos while dealing with an absent husband and a daughter’s mysterious illness. O Agente Secreto (Secret Agent) is perhaps the most ambitious and prescient film on my list, starring Wagner Moura as a professor trying to survive during the Brazilian military dictatorship of the 1970s. Rounding out the list, One Battle After Another speaks to the current political crisis in the US with authentic urgency, shot in 1950s style VistaVision on 35mm film, using cameras loaned to the production by actor/cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi. The Shrouds José D’Laura I keep dreaming in 24 frames per second, living in Paradise, aka, Dominican Republic Any “Best Films of 2025” list is a chimera: trying to capture a whole year in 10 movies. But every year has its unforgettable films. Here are mine: One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025). Anderson established himself as one of the best American directors with this film. DiCaprio and Del Toro are impressive as are the whole cast. It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi, 2025). Palme d’Or at Cannes. Panahi is a master writing stories with layers, full of moral questions. Hamnet (Chloé Zhao, 2025). Everything about Shakespeare has our attention. One of the greatest writers and an intimate story about him. O Agente Secreto (The Secret Agent, Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2025). Last year, Brazil had I’m Still Here. Now we can appreciate The Secret Agent, with an exceptional Wagner Moura, best actor in Cannes. Affeksjonsverdi (Sentimental Value, Joachim Trier, 2025). Every familiar drama tells truths about ourselves. The key is how Trier shows those characters’ feelings. Eojjeolsuga eobsda (No Other Choice, Park Chan-wook, 2025). Another example of a good script by Korean master Chan-wook. Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie, 2025). The good feel movie of the year. Always, real stories can bring real emotions. Jay Kelly (Noah Baumbach, 2025). A profound exploration of fame, identity and family relationships. Nouvelle Vague (Richard Linklater, 2025). As a fan of Jean-Luc Godard’s body of work, this is the movie to fall in love with. Arguably the best prima opera of cinema. Frankenstein (Guillermo del Toro, 2025). Can a director say anything new about an old story? If you are Guillermo del Toro, yes. All you need is to be in love with your monster. Dana Dumar Film critic, editor in chief of Film magazine and the website revistafilm.ro, PhD professor at the National University of Theatre and Film (UNATC) Bucharest Affeksjonsverdi (Sentimental Value, Joachim Trier, 2025) Talking about the sacrifices men dedicated to art must do, the movie reunites two great interpretations of Renate Reinsve and Stellan Skarsgård. Ken (Yes, Nadav Lapid, 2025) This original movie includes a satire of Israel`s aggressive treatment of Palestinians and also a meditation on social compromise. O agente secreto (Secret Agent, Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2025) It is understandable why this movie, showing the confrontation of an individual destiny with the absurdity of the dictatorship of ‘70s Brazil, was critics’ favourite in Cannes. Sirāt (Oliver Laxe, 2025) A road movie full of dark adventures becomes a mix of horror and self-revelation. The Phoenician Scheme (Wes Anderson, 2025) A new demonstration of Anderson’s capacity to build worlds and to fill them with significant stories. Nouvelle Vague (Richard Linklater, 2025) Full of cinephile quotes, the movie recounts the birth of the most influential movement in the history of cinema. Godard fans can see how À bout de souffle was made. Lumière, l`aventure continue (Thierry Frémaux, 2024) Meant to mark the cinema’s 130th anniversary, the movie is a love letter addressed mostly to Louis Lumière, recognised as the creator of film language. Father Mother Sister Brother (Jim Jarmusch, 2025) The Golden Lion winner in Venice 2025, this film confirms the author`s capacity to describe surprising family secrets and lies. One Battle after Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025) Inspired by revolutionary anti-regime movements of the ‘70s, the movie suggests they are similar to the present violent acts generated by official policy regarding people of different races in the United States. Kontinental ‘25 (Radu Jude, 2025) The movie won the author a Silver Bear for its script in the 2025 Berlinale and is a black comedy full of cinephile allusions and a reflection on the cruelty of some laws. Cristóbal Escobar Lecturer in Screen Studies at the University of Melbourne and a film programmer for the Santiago International Documentary Film Festival (FIDOCS) and the Bulleke-bek Brunswick Cinema (BBBC) The list below gathers a few films that, for different reasons, resonated with me most intensely in 2025. I saw most of them in venues that gave the work the conditions to fully vibrate: Nuestra tierra at the Cineteca Nacional de Chile; Sirât in IMAX; Un poeta at the Cinemateca de Bogotá; and It Was Just an Accident at the Astor Theatre. Others were experienced at outdoor screenings under the night sky (Sotto le nuvole), or in the quiet of my home cinema – alone (Dry Leaf) or with friends (Fwends). Also, in conversations with other programmers and colleagues, we kept returning to how these types of films are so often precarious and at risk – and yet, precisely for that reason, fully alive. One 2025 anecdote says a lot about the conditions under which such films appear, and are treated, these days. Maguellan, by Lav Diaz – probably the most important film of the year, alongside Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, IMHO – screened at Cannes just before midnight in a theatre next to a crowded pub. People were yelling, and that drinking noise kept leaking into the room. Watching a film that draws much of its force from being away from the metropolis – out in the Pacific, where one almost merges with the sea – became, under those conditions, a tortuous act. In other words, the invitation to encounter this kind of cinema felt insulted – or, at the very least, betrayed – by one of the world’s most important film festivals. What makes this worse is that Maguellan didn’t screen at any of Melbourne’s film festivals in 2025 either, and Afternoons of Solitude met the same fate in 2024. Both films offer experiences shaped by movement, light, duration, intensity, and the unpredictable exchanges that transform our ways of seeing and listening. So one can only hope that, like many of the works listed below, they will find alternative venues to be screened in town in 2026. Magalhães (Magellan, Lav Diaz, 2025) The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt, 2025) Sirāt (Óliver Laxe, 2025) Nuestra Tierra (Landmarks, Lucrecia Martel, 2025) Yek tasādof-e sāde (It Was Just an Accident, Jafar Panahi, 2025) Sotto le nuvole (Below the Clouds, Gianfranco Rosi, 2025) O Agente Secreto (The Secret Agent, Kleber Mendonça Filho 2025) Un poeta (A Poet, Simón Mesa Soto, 2025) Khmeli Potoli (Dry Leaf, Alexandre Koberidze, 2025) Fwends (Sophie Somerville, 2025) Adalberto Fonkén Lima-based social communicator and film writer for the Séptima Ilusión blog Best Films: One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025) + O agente secreto (The Secret Agent, Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2025) Two thrillers about resistance networks and persecutions involving human characters and sinister supremacist and military groups in distant times but marked by fear, misinformation and absurdity. Blue moon (Richard Linklater, 2025) The Monkey (Osgood Perkins, 2025) Chiet chea manusa (Becoming human, Polen Ly, 2025) Kuángyě shídài (Resurrection, Bi Gan, 2025) El eternauta (The eternaut, Bruno Stagnaro, 2025) In this post-apocalyptic series, a sudden climate change disrupts technology and communications, isolating the inhabitants of Buenos Aires. But toxic snow isn’t the only threat to humanity. El mensaje (The message, Ivan Fund, 2025) A media calle (Halfway down the street, Eduardo Orcada, 2025) El corazón del lobo (The heart of the wolf, Francisco Lombardi, 2025) Re-discovery: Die büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s box, Georg Wilhelm Pabst, 1929) Resurrection Simon Foster President, Film Critics Circle Australia; Festival Director, Sydney Science Fiction Film Festival My favourite films of 2025, in alphabetical order: Affeksjonsverdi (Sentimental Value, Joachim Trier, 2025) Barrio Triste (Stillz, 2025) Chan hang rawang rao (Flat Girls, Jirassaya Wongsutin, 2025) If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (Mary Bronstein, 2025) Kuángyě shídài (Resurrection, Bi Gan, 2025) Materialists (Celine Song, 2025) One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025) Sinners (Ryan Coogler, 2025) Videoheaven (Alex Ross Perry, 2025) Weapons (Zach Cregger, 2025) A short observation on the timeless quality of great cinema. I pushed hard this year to fill some gaps in my ‘Shame File’ of unwatched classics. I sat spellbound by Joseph Sargent’s Goldengirl (1979), in which Susan Anton’s perfect athlete is revealed to be the by-product of ex-Nazi geneticist Curd Jürgens (Oh Lord, I love this film!); was enthralled by Robert Siodmak’s wondrously widescreen and wildly outdated Custer of the West (1967), starring platinum blonde force-of-nature, Robert Shaw; and, remain infatuated with lead actress Tatyana Samoylova and the technical and emotional wonder that was her debut film, Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes are Flying (1957). Most nourishingly, I finally watched Nashville (and squirm to admit it, given how much I crap on about the 1970s being Hollywood’s last great golden period). Director Robert Altman and writer Joan Tewkesbury foresaw an America consumed by the immoralities of showbiz and politics combined, and how that melding would precede a self-destructive societal mindset. Showbiz (here, country-western music) and politics (here, devout nationalism) sells righteousness in the service of capitalism, dignity in the service of self-gain. I imagine the mayor of Altman’s dark slice of Americana might be some vulgar celebrity with delusions of status and grandeur, obtained by any means and maintained at any cost. I know, only in the movies… Giampiero Frasca Italian film critic and writer Many political films this year, many cinematic calls to resistance. In the past, in the present, always. To never lose focus on what surrounds us. 10) Sirât (,Oliver Laxe, 2025) Apocalypse in the (Moroccan) desert for a film that moves to the rhythm of the deep bass of rave music, giving life to an intense sensorial and spiritual experience. 9) Anul Nou care n-a fost (The New Year that Never Came, Bogdan Muresanu, 2024) Choral story of an exhausted people who nourish the hope of a tomorrow free from oppression. A film that develops like a symphony and ends with a wonderful crescendo. 8) Kuangye shidai (Resurrection, Bi Gan, 2025) Enchanting metaphor on time and the stratification of the image with a particularly refined aesthetic. A hypnotic flow that gratifies and lulls, releasing the power of cinema. 7) Here (Robert Zemeckis, 2024) A fixed shot, as profound as the sense of time, the place as the protagonist, in an animistic conception that focuses on the development of eternity in the face of the contingency of the characters, in a reversal of the usual balance of the story. Another reflection on the loss of subjectivity in cinema, in this year in which we have seen so many (Nickel Boys, Presence, In a Violent Nature, Warfare). 6) Yek tasadef sadeh (It Was Just an Accident, Jafar Panahi, 2025) The materialisation of a political trauma that will probably never end, created through the tones of the theatre of the absurd and crossed by the allegory of an always confused and conflicted perspective of the characters. 5) Sawt Hind Rajab (The Voice of Hind Rajab, Kaouther Ben Hania, 2025) A gruesome reconstruction of an event that happened: the horror outside, which cannot be seen but only imagined, is the materialisation of the drama of a people of which fiction can now only provide a faint reflection. 4) Ainda Estou Aqui (I’m Still Here, Walter Salles, 2024) The drama of the disappeared in Brazil during the ‘70s dictatorship, a family saga led by a woman of epic courage and enormous political clarity and topped off with a monumental interpretation by Fernanda Torres, who would have deserved the Oscar, if the Oscar were still a credible award. 3) Weapons (Zach Cregger, 2025) A composite, disturbing and frightening film, in which the proliferation of different points of view is surprising but essential to the mystery structure. A horror fairy tale with a Gothic flavour and a post-postmodern concept. 2) One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025) You can only breathe the air of Pynchon’s Vineland. The revolution for PTA turns first into wild eroticism and then into an instinct of paternal protection. In a current America made of grotesque and testosterone masks, racist and conspiracy theorists that seem like caricatures but perhaps they are just the squalid reality. 1) Sinners (Ryan Coogler, 2025) A commercial horror film that has a very refined soul, in which vampirism is a clear metaphor for the ruthless white cultural appropriation along the axis of history. Intense and moving. Geoff Gardner Chair of the Organising Committee of Cinema Reborn Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos, UK/Ireland/South Korea/USA, 2025) Grand Tour (Miguel Gomes, Portugal/Italy/France/Germany, 2024) Inside (Charles Wiliams, Australia, 2024) Yek tasadef sadeh (It Was Just an Accident, Jafar Panahi, Iran/France/Luxembourg, 2025) Maskerade (Masquerade in Vienna, Willi Forst, Austria, 1934) Miroirs No. 3 (Mirrors No. 3, Christian Petzold, Germany, 2025) Botong-ui Gajok (A Normal Family, Hur Jin-ho, South Korea, 2023) Sinners (Ryan Coogler, USA, 2025) Sorry, Baby (Eva Victor, USA, 2025) Vittoria (Alessandro Cassigoli & Casey Kauffman, Italy, 2024) Bugonia Libertad Gills Filmmaker, film critic, researcher and lecturer of Videographic Criticism at the University of Leeds / www.libertadgills.com The Unknown (Tod Browning, 1927) I Cannibali (The Year of the Cannibals, Liliana Cavani, 1968) Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest, Satyajit Ray, 1970) Nightshift (Robina Rose, 1981) Iracema: Uma Transa Amazônica (Jorge Bodanzky and Orlando Senna, 1981) The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (Nan Goldin, 1985) Peter Hujar’s Day (Ira Sachs, 2025) Kusama’s Self-Obliteration (Yayoi Kusama and Jud Yalkut,1967) With Hasan in Gaza (Kamal Aljafari, 2025) Chin Chin (Deborah S. Phillips, 2013-2014) Gratitude to the film festivals and movie theatres where I saw these films projected: Hyde Park Picture House, Locarno Film Festival, Il Cinema Ritrovato, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, Marienbad International Film Festival, Beyeler Foundation (exhibition), Pirelli HangarBicocca (exhibition), and Leeds International Film Festival.
