Part 5

ENTRIES IN PART 5:

Christoph Huber

Curator, Austrian Film Museum

A reverse history:

• Broken Rage (Kitano Takeshi, 2024)
• Black Summer (John Hyams, Abram Cox, 2019–2021)
• Drogówka (Traffic Department, Wojciech Smarzowski, 2012)
• XX: Utsukushiki hyōteki (XX: Beautiful Target, Ikeda Toshiharu, Kurosawa Naosuke, 1995)
• Penitentiary III (Jamaa Fanaka, 1987)
• Autoportraits (Hervé Demoures, 1979)
• Suna no utsuwa (Castle of Sand, Nomura Yoshitarō, 1974)
• Bello, onesto, emigrato Australia sposerebbe compaesana illibata (A Girl in Australia, Luigi Zampa, 1971)
• Älskande par (Loving Couples, Mai Zetterling, 1964)
• Fuhrmann Henschel (Josef von Báky, 1956)

Most depressing 160 minutes at a cinema (in 70mm)
One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025)

Antidote:
Ambush at Tomahawk Gap (Fred F. Sears, 1953)

3D screening bonus (mindblowing even digitally):
El tesoro de las cuatro coronas (The Treasure of the Four Crowns, Ferdinando Baldi, 1983)

Also worth mentioning:

• Melody Electronics (1988) – Full Walkthrough (Albert Birney, 2024)
• A House of Dynamite (Kathryn Bigelow, 2025)
• Zabriskie Point Re-imagined (Damon Packard, 2025)
• V/H/S/Halloween (Bryan M. Ferguson, Casper Kelly, Micheline Pitt-Norman, R.H. Norman, Alex Ross Perry, Paco Plaza, Anna Zlokovic, 2025)
• Adult Swim Yule Log 2: Branchin’ Out (Casper Kelly, 2024)
• Doppelgänger (Dominik Graf, 2025)
• The Klimperclown (Helge Schneider, Sandro Giampietro, 2025)
• Vom Vater bleibt nur mehr der Rest im Bild (Manfred Neuwirth, 2025)

Darren Hughes

Critic and Artistic Director of Film Fest Knox in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Ten great films I saw for the first time in 2025 that helped me cope with the maddening stupidity of my country.

Keeper of the Flame (George Cukor, 1942)
Cukor, Katherine Hepburn, and Spencer Tracy pulling no punches. They really were the greatest generation.

A Foreign Affair (Billy Wilder, 1948)
Wilder returns to Berlin to make a movie about American fascism.

Home from the Hill (Vincente Minnelli, 1960)
A classic “sins of the father” story expressed as a pure, uncut hit of American melodrama.

Blacks Britannica (David Koff, 1978)
“Look, you want us to reproduce the sub-proletariat that you imported into this country in our father’s time. You now want to reproduce that same sub-proletariat and make us do the shit work that our parents did. And all I can say to you is, ‘Get stuck. Fuck you.'”

Henry Fonda for President (Alexander Horwath, 2024)
Death-bed Fonda, still furious decades later while railing against Ronald Reagan, John Wayne, and Ward Bond.

Tardes de soledad (Afternoons of Solitude, Albert Serra, 2024)
The seductive spectacle of violence. My favorite new film of the year.

The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt, 2025)
A study of that least-noble of creatures: the self-absorbed, protected-from-all-consequences white man. (It me.) To paraphrase Flannery O’Connor, perhaps we would be better men if there had been somebody there to throw us in the back of a paddy wagon every day of our lives.

Morgenkreis (Morning Circle, Basma al-Sharif, 2025)
My favorite experimental film of the year somehow manages, in only 20 minutes, to express the totalitarian power of assimilation, the madness of living with the ambient hum of genocide, and the everyday anxiety of being a parent in this timeline.

One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025)
Both a chilling depiction of the State’s no-holds-barred exercise of power and a hopeful (?) glimpse of solidarity.

Sirāt (Óliver Laxe, 2025)
On a short list of films that can be described as truly apocalyptic cinema. Laxe’s vision of the End Times is mystical, terrifying, and visceral. “This film should be played loud!”

Afternoons of Solitude

Darik Janik

Filmmaker, Melbourne

1. Historias del buen valle (Good Valley Stories, José Luis Guerín, 2025)
2. Geu jayeoni nege mworago hani (What Does That Nature Say to You, Hong Sang-soo, 2025)
3. Miroirs No. 3 (Christian Petzold, 2025)
4. Zwei Staatsanwälte (Two Prosecutors, Sergei Loznitsa, 2025)
5. Peter Hujar’s Day (Ira Sachs, 2025)
6. Le Lac (Fabrice Aragno, 2025)
7. Si nous habitons un éclair (The Heart of Eternity, Louise Chevillotte, 2025)
8. La limace et l’escargot (The Slug and the Snail, Anne Benhaïem, 2024)
9. One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025)
10. Kontinental ’25 (Radu Jude, 2025)

Ioannis Kanonakis

Film critic, contributing writer and member of the International Cinephile Society. Based in Athens, Greece.

• Sept promenades avec Mark Brown (7 Walks with Mark Brown, Pierre Creton, Vincent Barré, 2024)
• Yeohaengjaui pilyo (A Traveler’s Needs, Hong Sang-soo, 2024)
• Su-yucheon (By the Stream, Hong Sang-soo, 2024)
• Khmelī potoli (Dry Leaf, Alexandre Koberidze, 2025)
• Exposé du film annonce du film “Scénario” (Jean-Luc Godard, Fabrice Aragno, Jean-Paul Battaggia, Nicole Brenez, 2024)
• L’aventura (Sophie Letourneur, 2025)
• Miséricorde (Misericordia, Alain Guiraudie, 2024)
• Scénarios (Jean-Luc Godard, 2024)
• La prisonnière de Bordeaux (Visiting Hours, Patricia Mazuy, 2024)
• Geu jayeoni nege mworago hani (What Does That Nature Say to You, Hong Sang-soo, 2025)

Daniel Kasman

Editor in Chief, Notebook; VP Publishing, MUBI

NEW
Ástin sem eftir er (The Love That Remains, Hlynur Pálmason)
FELT (Blake Williams)
Huo zhe yan (The Furious, Kenji Tanigaki)
The Perfect Neighbor (Geeta Gandbhir)
Un poeta (A Poet, Simón Mesa Soto)

OLD
Moy syn (My Son, Yevgeni Chervyakov, 1928)
Deadlock (Roland Klick, 1970)
Gehenu Lamai (The Girls, Sumitra Peries, 1978)
Tenkôsei (I Are You, You Am Me, Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1982)
Ghazla Al-Banat (The Razor’s Edge, Jocelyne Saab, 1985)

Christopher Kearney

Independent screenwriter, teaches English at George M. Steinbrenner High School in Lutz, Florida.

1. Eephus (Carson Lund, 2024) 
2. The Life of Chuck (Mike Flanagan, 2024) 
3. One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025) 
4. Train Dreams (Clint Bentley, 2025) 
5. Yek tasādef-e sādeh (It Was Just an Accident, Jafar Panahi, 2025)
6. Sinners (Ryan Coogler, 2025)
7. Affeksjonsverdi (Sentimental Value, Joachim Trier, 2025) 
8. The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt, 2025) 
9. O Agente Secreto (The Secret Agent, Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2025)
10. Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie, 2025)

The Mastermind

Simon Killen

Managing Director, Hi Gloss Entertainment

Premieres

• O Agente Secreto (The Secret Agent, Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2025)
• First Light (James J. Robinson, 2025)
• No Other Choice (Park Chan-wook, 2025)
• Silent Friend (Ildikó Enyedi, 2025)
• Yek tasādef-e sādeh (It Was Just an Accident, Jafar Panahi, 2025)

In retrospect

• The Fate of Lee Khan (King Hu, 1973)
• El sol del membrillo (The Quince Tree Sun, Víctor Erice, 1992)
• Yajū shisubeshi (Passport to Darkness, Seijun Suzuki, 1959)
• D’Est (Chantal Akerman, 1993)
• Bílá holubice (White Dove, František Vláčil, 1960)

2025 proved another excellent year of cinema. Both in terms of premieres, and in retrospective screenings. The quality of film restorations gains momentum, and makes the Cinematheque experience a richer one by the year. Cannes and Venice delivered several excellent features, some will get well distributed, others sadly not. The actual cinema market is teetering – as it always seems to – on the edge. Event and tent-pole films have consistently under-delivered in 2025, and as major studios are increasingly influenced/owned by tech companies, it’s hard to see groundbreaking filmmaking getting the space it needs to develop within the US studio system. It’s also hard to see the same owners treating their catalogues with anything like the respect they deserve.

Many auteurs acting outside of the system have tended in recent years to deliver sprawling nearly three-hour films, often local-issue-specific, which then struggle for screens outside of festivals. As a distributor, this trend is becoming a concern.

Highlight moments in 2025:

• Seeing world premiere of Pin de fartie (Alejo Moguillansky, 2025) – in the presence of the El Pampero Cine team in Venice.
• Being in the Cinema Grande in Venice as Kim Novak – in fine fettle – received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement.
• The speech by the team behind No Other Land upon winning Best Documentary Feature at the 2025 Oscars.

Rainer Knepperges

Filmmaker, Cologne

My greatest discoveries in 2025:

Hell’s Heroes (William Wyler, 1929)
Bambini in città (Children in the City, Luigi Comencini, 1946)
Und das am Montagmorgen (And That on Monday Morning, Luigi Comencini, 1959)
Il diavolo (To Bed or Not to Bed, Gian Luigi Polidoro, 1963)
Breaking Away (Peter Yates, 1979)

My favourite films of 2025:

Juror #2 (Clint Eastwood, 2025)
Heretic (Scott Beck, Bryan Woods, 2024)
A Complete Unknown (James Mangold, 2024)
The Carpenter’s Son (Lotfy Nathan, 2025)
Bild und Ton gehen auseinander (Johannes Lehnen, Nora Ludwig, 2025)

Bogna Konior

Writer & professor of media theory at NYU Shanghai

Militantropos (Yelizaveta Smith, Alina Gorlova, Simon Mozgovyi, 2025) – Ukraine
Made by the Ukrainian film collective Tabor, this poetic, kaleidoscopic documentary, brimming with life force, observes how invasion alters the human psyche and the rhythms of daily life.

2000 metriv do Andriivky (2000 Meters to Andriivka, Mstyslav Chernov, 2025) – Ukraine/United States
2000 Meters to Andriivka uses body-cam and drone footage to follow Ukrainian soldiers reclaiming a conquered village. It stands as evidence and as a charged act of recognition for those thrust into these vital moments, many of whom did not live to see the film.

Na srebrnym globie (On the Silver Globe, Andrzej Żuławski, 1988) – Poland
On the Silver Globe is a cosmic epic, pulsating with mythic power and madness; nearly destroyed by the Polish communist authorities, it survives as an incomplete vision, its missing sequences replaced by Żuławski’s narrated stills. Even unfinished, it remains more glorious than most contemporary sci-fi.

The Childhood of a Leader (Brady Corbet, 2015) – United Kingdom/France/Hungary
The Childhood of a Leader offers an elegant, suspenseful portrait of a young boy’s psychological formation, quietly foreshadowing the birth of authoritarianism.

Kyua (Cure, Kurosawa Kiyoshi, 1997) – Japan
Cure follows a detective investigating a series of hypnotic murders in this once-in-a-lifetime masterpiece of metaphysical, nihilist horror.

Les chambres rouges (Red Rooms, Pascal Plante, 2023) – Canada
Red Rooms is an impressive, distressing adaptation of Tennyson’s 1833 poem, inflected with true-crime and cybergothic motifs, telling the story of a woman developing an obsession with a serial killer and offering a sharp reflection on female fascination with “true crime.”

La Cérémonie (The Ceremony, Claude Chabrol, 1995) – France/Germany
La Cérémonie follows working-class girls taking “revenge” on their employers in a portrait of class resentment, where patterns of bad luck, victimhood, self-pity, and hypocrisy accumulate until the explosive, violent end.

Dune: Part Two (Denis Villeneuve, 2024) – United States
Dune: Part Two maps messianic power, prophecy, and war shaping political and spiritual destiny in this stunning epic, laying bare how moral judgments collapse in the long run of history.

Saint Omer (Alice Diop, 2022) – France
Saint Omer stages the trial of a woman who killed her child as a confrontation between the secular French legal system and a worldview shaped by exile and West African spiritual traditions.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (Rungano Nyoni, 2024) – Zambia/United Kingdom/Ireland
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl follows a young woman who, amid funeral rituals and absurd politeness, channels long-suppressed rage to challenge a family’s posthumous sanctification of a vile uncle.

Gary M. Kramer

Writes for Cineaste, Gay City News, Philadelphia Gay News, the San Francisco Bay Times, and Senses of Cinema, among other publications.

Of all the films I saw this year – and that number is several hundred – these are the ten that I just couldn’t stop thinking about or telling people to see.

L’histoire de Souleymane (Souleymane’s Story, Boris Lojkine, 2024)
This eye-opening peek into immigrant lives and networks was buoyed by Abou Sangaré’s astonishing performance in the title role. By the film’s final emotional scene, I was as exhausted as Souleymane.

O Riso e a Faca (I Only Rest in the Storm, Pedro Pinho, 2025)
A phenomenal, intimate epic about colonialism, I found many sequences indelible – from an explicit sex scene to an episode where a well-meaning NGO worker sees the reality of who he is working for and what it all means.

Sirāt (Óliver Laxe, 2025)
This shattering film may be the most intense cinematic experience all year. And I loved the electronic dance music, too.

El jockey (Kill the Jockey, Luis Ortega, 2024)
As brilliant as it is baffling, and full of vivid imagery, Kill the Jockey made me laugh and gasp, often at the same time. Nahuel Pérez Biscayart gives one of the year’s best performances.

Seses (Drowning Dry, Laurynas Bareiša, 2024)
Bareiša’s slippery narrative held me rapt – then it wowed me. Drowning Dry told a very simple story in a very complex way, which is why it was so riveting.

To the Victory! (Valentyn Vasyanovych, 2025)
Brilliantly shot with a static camera, the moving drama To the Victory! imagines a post-war Ukraine that is simultaneously triumphant, darkly funny, and achingly sad.

Tatami (Zar Amir Ebrahimi, Guy Nattiv, 2023)
This gripping, political film about a judoka competition was morally complex and artfully shot in luminous black and white. It didn’t make a single false move on or off the mat.

The Things You Kill (Alireza Khatami, 2025)
Another tricky narrative that makes viewers recalibrate what they are watching. Khatami’s unnerving psychological thriller haunted me all year.

On Swift Horses (Daniel Minahan, 2024)
From the early swoon-inducing shot of Jacob Elordi lying on a car in winter, to a grand romantic gesture in the finale, I melted at the queer relationships that struggled to take root in this underappreciated gem.

After the Hunt (Luca Guadagnino, 2025)
Almost too clever for its own good, this wild satire punctures multiple sacred cows including academia, the #MeToo movement, snowflakes, and cancel culture. I’ve seen it three times and it only gets better – and funnier – with each viewing.

Sirāt

Peter Krausz

Film Critic, Film Journalist, Member of FIPRESCI, Former Chair of AFCA, Movie Metropolis.

In rank order:

1. Affeksjonsverdi (Sentimental Value, Joachim Trier, 2025). Beautifully realised father–daughter, and sibling relationship, set alongside a film rehearsal.
2. Yek tasādof-e sādeh (It Was Just an Accident, Jafar Panahi, 2025). Superb combination of politics, thriller elements, and coping with past abuse.
3. Kokuhō (National Treasure, Lee Sang-il, 2025). The film follows the deeply affecting journey over 50 years of two Kabuki performers in Japan.
4. Sinners (Ryan Coogler, 2025). Original and challenging combination of racism, horror, music, and dramatic revelations.
5. One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025). Extraordinary satire/drama combining political operatives, current social state of play, and an insightful subtext.
6. Weapons (Zach Cregger, 2025). Distinctive drama/satire on the disappearance of children and the culpability of a group of disparate characters, modelled on Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950).
7. Nouvelle Vague (Richard Linklater, 2025). Wonderful homage to Godard’s making of À bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960), shot in luminous monochrome, in a stylish re-creation.
8. Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2025). In typical confronting style, Lanthimos combines issues of alien invasion, climate change, and consequential outcomes. Another original piece of cinema.
9. Riefenstahl (Andres Veiel, 2024). Devastating, well-researched documentary about Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi-focused filmmaking, and her attempt to control her image and knowledge of the WWII atrocities.
10. September 5 (Tim Fehlbaum, 2024). Excellent docudrama re-creation of the media handling the broadcast of the deaths of the Israeli athletes by terrorism at the Munich 1972 Olympics.

Eugenia Lai

Cinephile. New York

• Grand Me (Atiye Zare Arandi, 2024)
• Fly Me to the Moon (Sasha Chuk, 2023)
• Henry Fonda for President (Alexander Horwath, 2024)
• Krynytsya dlya sprahlykh (A Spring for the Thirsty, Yuri Ilyenko, 1965)
• Baibai rabu (Bye Bye Love, Fujisawa Isao, 1974)
• Bez strakha (Without Fear, Ali Khamraev, 1971)
• Māyā Miriga (Mirage, Nirad Mohapatra, 1984)
• Algo viejo, algo nuevo, algo prestado (Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Hernán Rosselli, 2024)
• Whisky (Juan Pablo Rebella, Pablo Stoll, 2004)
• So Close, So Far (Zhu Yudi, 2025)

Marc Lauria

Cinephile. Brisbane, Australia

1. One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025)
2. O Agente Secreto (The Secret Agent, Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2025)
3. The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt, 2025)
4. Tardes de soledad (Afternoons of Solitude, Albert Serra, 2024)
5. Nuestra tierra (Landmarks, Lucrecia Martel, 2025)
6. Kontinental ’25 (Radu Jude, 2025)
7. Sirāt (Óliver Laxe, 2025)
8. Yek tasādof-e sādeh (It Was Just an Accident, Jafar Panahi, 2025)
9. Cover-Up (Laura Poitras, Mark Obenhaus, 2025)
10. Suburban Fury (Robinson Devor, 2024)

The Secret Agent

Richard Leathem

Producer and Presenter, Film Scores 3mbs, Melbourne

Favourite new releases of 2025:

1. Sirāt (Óliver Laxe, 2025)
2. Affeksjonsverdi (Sentimental Value, Joachim Trier, 2025)
3. Babygirl (Halina Reijn, 2024)
4. Yek tasādof-e sādeh (It Was Just an Accident, Jafar Panahi, 2025)
5. I Swear (Kirk Jones, 2025)
6. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (Mary Bronstein, 2025)
7. Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie, 2025)
8. One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025)
9. Dāne-ye anjīr-e maʿābed (The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Mohammad Rasoulof, 2024)

Favourite first-time watches of 2025:

The Boston Strangler (Richard Fleischer, 1968)

Elaine Lennonn

Film historian and author. She has written books about Robert Towne and Nancy Meyers, among others, and is widely published in international film journals.l

1. Flow (Gints Zilbalodis, 2024) – Feline feelings
2. Train Dreams (Clint Bentley, 2025) – One-way ticket
3. Eddington (Ari Aster, 2025) – COVID moment
4. Caught Stealing (Darren Aronofsky, 2025) – Grand larking
5. A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg, 2024) – Ground zero
6. F1: The Movie (Joseph Kosinski, 2025) – Frankenheimer redux
7. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (Christopher McQuarrie, 2025) – Over and out
   9=. Jay Kelly (Noah Baumbach, 2025) – Mature reflection
   9=. Affeksjonsverdi (Sentimental Value, Joachim Trier, 2025)

Special Mention:
Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story (Laurent Bouzereau, 2025) – The time, the place

Nathan Letoré

Teaches film and French literature in Marseille. Editor at Outskirts film magazine, writes about cinema for Le Courrier, and works for FIDMarseille.

New:

• Si petite (So Small, Jacques Meilleurat, 2025)
• Historias del buen valle (Good Valley Stories, José Luis Guerín, 2025)
• O agente secreto (The Secret Agent, Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2025)
• Bajo las banderas, el sol (Under the Flags, the Sun, Juanjo Pereira, 2025)
• Kontinental ’25 (Continental ’25, Radu Jude, 2025)

Old:

• Gunki hatameku shita ni (Under the Flag of the Rising Sun, Fukasaku Kinji, 1972)
• Beauty Knows No Pain (Elliott Erwitt, 1971)
• Inside/Out (Rob Tregenza, 1997)
• Assault on Precinct 13 (John Carpenter, 1976)
• Dracula (Terence Fisher, 1958)

I spent much more time with older films than new in 2025. If I could extend my lists beyond a total of ten, the new one would be almost the same, but the old one would be considerably longer. Of the five new films, Si petite is the most likely to sink without a trace, but that would be a huge shame: it is one of the few films to reinvent what is meant by “Bressonian” without being derivative (though I should add as a disclaimer that I work at FID, where this was screened). The similarity in the titles of two of my films is too good to resist, but the films belong on the lists regardless.

And not a film, but: Andor, season 2.

Kontinental ’25

Tara Lomax

Screen Media Scholar and Educator, Discipline Lead of MA Screen Studies at AFTRS

Since 2017, my World Poll contributions have focused only on new release franchise instalments to give some attention to popular films in this poll, and I continue with this approach with this contribution. I have seen many other notable works of world cinema this year, and I’m sure many will be mentioned by other contributors. My aim with this approach is to document the Hollywood franchise mode over time and trace its development.

In 2025, Hollywood cinema faced a critical period of industrial instability and technological change. The franchise mode is also in a state of uncertainty as filmmakers working within this mode grapple with the distinct demands of expansive storytelling in an industry shaped by streaming, AI, and a declining cinemagoing culture. This is particularly evident in the declining dominance of the ‘Marvel Cinematic Universe’ franchise. Ultimately, it is the anticipation of this period of instability that has motivated my approach to this poll in the first place.

My selection this year is limited to ten instalments released from long-running or established Hollywood franchises, such as ‘Avatar,’ ‘MCU,’ ‘Wicked,’ ‘Predator,’ ‘Jurassic Park,’ ‘Mission: Impossible,’ and the ‘DC Universe’ (‘DCU’), but it has had to leave out instalments from many other franchises, including ‘John Wick,’ ‘The Conjuring,’ ‘Zootopia,’ ‘Minecraft,’ ‘Stitch,’ and ‘How to Train Your Dragon.’ This year saw success in children’s franchises, as well as international franchises from Japan, India, and China. In Hollywood, the creative and commercial inconsistency of the ‘MCU’ (and the superhero genre more broadly) has given the impression that the franchise mode is in decline, but surprises from the ‘Predator’ and ‘Final Destination’ franchises – as well as the potential long-tail success of the newest ‘Avatar’ instalment – signals its persistence.

Below is my non-exhaustive selection of significant (but not necessarily good) Hollywood franchise instalments released in 2025 in order of my own preference: films listed towards the top of the list reflect instalments I enjoyed and that I consider to be a reflection of a compelling engagement with the mode, and the last couple have been begrudgingly included for the sake of documentation:

1. Avatar: Fire and Ash (James Cameron, 2025)
2. Wicked: For Good (Jon M. Chu, 2025)
3. The Fantastic Four: First Steps (Matt Shakman, 2025)
4. Predator: Badlands (Dan Trachtenberg, 2025)
5. Thunderbolts* (Jake Schreier, 2025)
6. Jurassic World: Rebirth (Gareth Edwards, 2025)
7. Final Destination: Bloodlines (Zach Lipovsky, Adam B. Stein, 2025)
8. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (Christopher McQuarrie, 2025)
9. Superman (James Gunn, 2025)
10. Captain America: Brave New World (Julius Onah, 2025)

I also extend an honourable mention to my favourite cinemagoing experience of the year, which was a 20th-anniversary screening of Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005). This was not a first viewing for me, but the opportunity to celebrate two decades of this film by reciting almost every line of dialogue in a cinema made it feel like new. 

*The New Avengers

Ioannis Makris

Cinephile; Editor of the Greek-based internet film blog Peri Tainion; Member of the cinema group Cinediadromes

Best movies of 2024 seen in 2025:

1. Manas (Marianna Brennand, 2024, Brazil)
2. Ainda Estou Aqui (I’m Still Here, Walter Salles, 2024, Brazil)
3. Pigen med nålen (The Girl with the Needle, Magnus von Horn, 2024, Denmark)
4. Ty – Kosmos (U Are the Universe, Pavlo Ostrikov, 2024, Ukraine)
5. Dāne-ye anjīr-e maʿābed (The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Mohammad Rasoulof, 2024, Iran)
6. L’histoire de Souleymane (Souleymane’s Story, Boris Lojkine, 2024, France)
7. Kneecap (Rich Peppiatt, 2024, Ireland)
8. Crossing (Levan Akin, 2024, Georgia)
9. Anul Nou care n-a fost (The New Year That Never Came, Bogdan Mureșanu, 2024, Romania)
10. Sterben (Dying, Matthias Glasner, 2024, Germany)

Bob Manning

Cinephile and Adelaide Cinematheque member

My list of the 10 required films shown in Adelaide theatres and at the Adelaide Cinematheque during 2025:

1. Anora (Sean Baker, 2024)
2. A Complete Unknown (James Mangold, 2024)
3. Ainda Estou Aqui (I’m Still Here, Walter Salles, 2024)
4. One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025)
5. The History of Sound (Oliver Hermanus, 2025)
6. Mr. Burton (Marc Evans, 2025)
7. The Ballad of Wallis Island (James Griffiths, 2025)
8. Caught Stealing (Darren Aronofsky, 2025)
9. Affeksjonsverdi (Sentimental Value, Joachim Trier, 2025)
10. President’s Cake (Kingdom of Reeds, Hassan Hadi, 2025)

Ian McAlpin

Cinematographer, New York, NY

All seen in a cinema. On a different day they would appear in a different order.

New

Sirāt (Óliver Laxe, 2025)
One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025)
O Agente Secreto (The Secret Agent, Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2025)
Yek tasādof-e sādeh (It Was Just an Accident, Jafar Panahi, 2025)
Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie, 2025)
Ještě nejsem, kým chci být (I’m Not Everything I Want to Be, Klára Tasovská, 2025)

New to Me

The Straight Story (David Lynch, 1999)
Na srebrnym globie (On the Silver Globe, Andrzej Żuławski, 1988)
Us (Jordan Peele, 2019)
Zemlya (Earth, Oleksandr Dovzhenko, 1930)

Jack McCulloch

Location Sound Recordist

Top Five Films of 2025

1. Affeksjonsverdi (Sentimental Value, Joachim Trier, 2025)
2. Kuángyě Shídài (Resurrection, Bi Gan, 2025)
3. Sinners (Ryan Coogler, 2025)
4. Sorry Baby (Eva Victor, 2025)
5. Yek tasādof-e sādeh (It Was Just an Accident, Jafar Panahi, 2025)

Top Five Retrospective Screenings of 2025

1. La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc, Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928)
   – MIFF, Recital Centre, live score by Julia Holter
2. Lóng Mén Kè Zhàn (Dragon Inn, King Hu, 1967)
   – Melbourne Cinémathèque, ACMI, 4K DCP
3. Wild Zero (Takeuchi Tetsurō, 1999)
   – Thornbury Picture House, with special guests Guitar Wolf
4. Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975)
   – Astor Theatre, 4K DCP
5. Leave Her to Heaven (John M. Stahl, 1945)
   – Melbourne Cinémathèque, ACMI