Part 8 the editors January 2026 World Poll Issue 116 ENTRIES IN PART 8: Tyson Stewart Iván Suárez Tyler Thier Josh Timmermann Donato Totaro Mustafa Uzuner Diana Vagas Eli VannataNoel Vera Peter Verstraten Nicholas Vroman David Walsh James Waters Nadine Whitney Sjoerd van Wijk Neil Young Tyson Stewart Author of The Return of the Nish, forthcoming in 2026 from Cormorant Books Top Ten Films of 2025 in Thematic Order (and Ranked): 8. Eddington (Ari Aster, 2025) 1. One Battle After Another(Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025) These two films come closest to a modern articulation of western noir in the angsty vein of Pursued (Raoul Walsh, 1947) and Devil’s Doorway (Anthony Mann, 1950) as anything recently produced in Hollywood. They do more than offer simple rallying cries for the left as they critique the hyper-militarization and persistent racial hierarchization of techno-capitalism. They’re not afraid to complicate things, or even irritate, as they roll out unhappy resolutions to the social problems and dramatic conflicts they explore. These zeitgeisty films also reflect Indigenous or at least anti-colonial perspectives. Whether it’s the Pueblo cops in Eddington or the bounty hunter Avanti Q in One Battle, there is an awareness and dare-I-say respect of jurisdictional sovereignty that are opened by these big, impressive Hollywood thrillers that, granted, already have a lot on their minds. 2. Sbormistr (Broken Voices, Ondřej Provaznik, 2025) 3. Un simple accident (It Was Just an Accident, Jafar Panahi, 2025) There is a fine line between boredom and nerve-wracking suspense that these films understand very well. Both films stretch every tense moment out to its natural end. While Panahi made his film under undeniably stressful, precarious conditions, capturing dynamite performances and filming in multiple locations all under state censorship, Provaznik faced his own challenge of getting hyper-realistic acting from children as he explored incredibly mature topics. Fairly bare-bones filmmaking like this is all you really need to tell visceral, gut-wrenching stories about human beings facing indignity and injustice. 4. Friendship (Andrew DeYoung, 2024) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 6. Nouvelle Vague (Richard Linklater, 2025) 7. The Phoenician Scheme (Wes Anderson, 2025) 9. The Shrouds (David Cronenberg, 2024) The Phoenician Scheme The highly driven control freaks that make up the protagonists of this trio all speak to our moment in various ways. Whether it’s the fight for creative control or industrial dominance, or our longing to master death, the characters in these films share obsessive qualities that verge on the sociopathic, or at least, the tragic. It’s telling that not even Godard is seen being rewarded for his stubbornness when history was kind to him. Each of these filmmakers at least stylistically are doing something they’ve done before, but the subject matter in each case feels fresh and innovative, suggesting perhaps that it’s always been the stories that mattered the most. Good for them for finding new ones to tell. 10. 40 Acres (R.T. Thorne, 2024) 5. Sinners (Ryan Coogler, 2025) Sublime existential horror had a little resurgence this year. In the same year that we were lucky enough to get 28 Years Later (Danny Boyle, 2025), we were treated to two revenge fantasies that not only delivered spine-chilling thrills but also had a lot of heart. The threats to individuality and human dignity were bravely extinguished in these two films about the end of their respective worlds. Iván Suárez Writer and cinephile, Gijón Best films released in 2025 listed alphabetically. Blue Heron (Sophy Romvari, 2025) Chaînes Dorées (Golden Chains, Flo Mavy, 2025) Los domingos (Sundays, Alauda Ruiz de Azúa, 2025) Kontinental ’25 (Radu Jude, 2025) One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025) Portales (Portals, Elena Duque, 2025) The Shrouds (David Cronenberg, 2024) Soundtrack to a Coup d’etat (Johan Grimonprez, 2024) Straume (Flow, Gints Zilbalodis, 2024) Yek tasadof-e sadeh (A simple accident, Jafar Panahi, 2025) David Lynch (1946-oo). “Keep your eye on the doughnut and not on the hole”. Tyler Thier Works in the Honors College at Pace University (NYC), and has also written cultural criticism for a variety of publications – Senses of Cinema being among them Martyrs (Pascal Laugier, 2008) Despite being a massive horror buff, I had put off watching Martyrs for the longest time. The reviews, the discourse, its notoriety in general was too much, too nauseating; it all tends to paint the film as the most visceral and upsetting of the New French Extremity. And it surely is, but in a more thoughtful and genuinely haunting way than I could have prepared for. Yes, it lingers for long stretches on a woman’s torture at the hands of a religious death cult, but the torture is depicted less graphically than psychologically scarring. You don’t see the protagonist get stripped of her flesh one piece after another. You just see the aftermath of it. And speaking of aftermath, Martyrs seems to make the case that there is nothing awaiting us after all this brutality – or at least nothing to be particularly ecstatic about. To me, this is much worse. This is what sticks with you. The Invisible Man (James Whale, 1933) Surprisingly the first of the “classic Universal monsters” that I’ve seen, and it’s astoundingly scary and playful. The VFX are impressive, Claude Rains is terrifying, and it’s a very brisk 70 minutes of, essentially, mass murder. Come to think of it, the fact that I watched this on the cusp of winter, with a steaming hot cup of coffee, bundled up on my couch with the windows open, laughing my ass off while countless people are slaughtered by The Invisible Man – well, there’s something dangerous about that. This film gives us a formidable villain who feels like he’s simultaneously slashing the seams of a community’s comfortable fabric and on his way to slash you. For no discernible reason. Stuck (Stuart Gordon, 2007) Caught this one on Criterion as part of their “2000s Horror” series. It’s difficult to write about because it’s so unhinged, so unwaveringly committed to its B-movie parameters, and so crude in its sardonic humour that it utterly shocked me. The premise involves a woman (a white woman with cornrows, mind you) who hits a man while drunk driving. The victim crashes headfirst through her windshield, and is STUCK there. She’s obviously in no rush to call an ambulance or the police, and thus drives home with this almost-corpse flailing around and blocking her view, and leaves him parked with the car in her garage, out of sight – until he’s not. I’ll let my accumulation of its surprises on Letterboxd do the rest of the talking. Josh Timmermann Lives in Vancouver; teaches courses on History and Ancient and Medieval Studies at the University of British Columbia. Recently published a book In the Footsteps of the Ancient Fathers: The Construction and Use of Patristic Authority in the Carolingian Era(Brill); and occasionally writes about movies, music, and other things at JLT/JLT Hamnet (Chloé Zhao, 2025) Yek tasadof-e sadeh (It Was Just an Accident, Jafar Panahi, 2025) Blue Heron (Sophy Romvari, 2025) Weapons (Zach Cregger, 2025) September 5 (Tim Fehlbaum, 2024) Blue Moon (Richard Linklater, 2025) The American Revolution (Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, David Schmidt, 2025) Companion (Drew Hancock, 2025) Friendship (Andrew DeYoung, 2024) Jay Kelly (Noah Baumbach, 2025) Blue Moon Donato Totaro Editor of the online film journal Offscreen and a longstanding member of AQCC (Association québécoise des critiques de cinéma) Resurrection (Bi Gan, 2025) Bi Gan’s ambitious SF arthouse epic is a loving pen to cinema and perhaps something more… although it is hard to say what that ‘something more’ may be. La Grazia (Grace, Paolo Sorrentino, 2025) Establishes Toni Servillo and Paolo Sorrentino as one of the greatest actor-director combos of all time. While more subdued than his prior films it still has moments of formal panache with sensual camera movements, stylized montage breaks, and sublime image-sound choreography. Grace While the Green Grass Grows: A Diary in Seven Parts (Peter Mettler, 2025) Seven hour long diary film about the wondrous synchronicities that exist between humanity and our planet. Reflet dans un diamant mort (Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani, 2025) Euro Cult alchemists Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani are at it again with this ‘shimmering’ deep cut, arthouse explosion of the International Euro Spy film. The Undertone (Ian Tuason, 2025) A paranormal investigative podcaster listens to a series of unmarked audio tapes and gets very spooked. A quiet horror film that explores the regions of sound, off-screen space, and shadows of the mind. Taroman Expo Explosion (Ryo Fujii, 2025) Wild, extravagant, colorful, exuberant pop art exploration of and homage to the Japanese avant-garde artist Taro Okamoto (1911-1996). The Ugly Stepsister (Emilie Blitchfeld, 2025) Feminist, body horror revisionist take on the classic Cinderella story. Train Dreams (Clint Bentley, 2025) A film which shows its influences – namely Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1975) – yet feels uniquely its own piece. C‘eravamo amanto tanti (We All Loved Each Other So Much, Ettore Scola, 1974) 4K digital restoration screened during the Vittorio Gasmann Retrospective at The Cinémathèque Québécoise. Scola’s reflexive tribute to post-WW2 Italian and French cinema. Scola uses the lives of three men who fought together as part of the Resistance movement to chart how the youthful idealism of the immediate post-war euphoria gives way to empty materialism, troubles of the heart and economic struggle. Sinners (Ryan Coogler, 2025) The best Blues vampire movie ever made! Mustafa Uzuner Filmmaker and curator based in Montreal and a PhD student in Cinema and Media Studies at York University The Taxonomy of the Echo-Chamber Contemporary film culture, flattened by the algorithmic sameness of Letterboxd and the seasonal ritual of the year-end list, has locked itself into a predictable echo chamber. These lists operate as a modern aesthetics of classification, where naming and ranking become processes of abstraction that mask particular methods of thinking as objective truths. Such taxonomies do more than organize viewing; they shape how audiences think, presupposing a power that overrides the messy, situated life of cinema itself. In The Aesthetics of Classification and the Politics of Taxonomy, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll frames classificatory systems as theatrical assemblages—structures that layer performances, subjectivities, and concrete material relations while claiming universality. Her reading of Wilhelm von Blandowski’s unfinished nineteenth-century encyclopedia demonstrates how Indigenous knowledge was systematically excluded not for lack of rigor, but because it conceived of being as relational and fluid rather than fixed and isolated. This critique resonates today, as algorithmic platforms threaten to reduce cinematic engagement to computable signals, taste to data, and friction to consensus. Year-end polls often embody a paradoxical pursuit of universality, prioritizing aesthetic collectability over specificity, much like colonial encyclopedias that excluded Indigenous ways of knowing. In cinema, such metric-driven systems risk silencing the frictional encounters that make film social, local, and political. To resist this universalizing logic, we might instead conceive of the list as an assemblage: an unstable structure layering performances, subjectivities, and material relations. What follows is not a universal ranking but a selection of films offered as unstable generalizations—works aware of their planetary entanglement yet rooted in situated histories, relational encounters, and textured realities. Films that refuse abstraction and insist on remaining in the world. 7 promenades avec Mark Brown (7 Walks with Mark Brown, Pierre Creton and Vincent Barré, 2024) Partition (Diana Allan, 2025) O Agente Secreto (The Secret Agent, Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2025) An Impossible Address (Suneil Sanzgiri, 2025) The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing (Theo Panagopoulos, 2025) In the Manner of Smoke (Armand Yervant Tufenkian, 2025) Estados Generales (General States, Mauricio Freyre, 2025) Un Poeta (A Poet, Simón Mesa Soto, 2025) Affeksjonsverdi (Sentimental Value, Joachim Trier, 2025) Los tigres se ven en la lluvia (Tigers Can Be Seen in the Rain, Oscar Ruiz Navia, 2025) Diana Vagas Cinephile, Melbourne, Australia Favourite new-release films (in alphabetical order): The Golden Spurtle (Constantine Costi, 2025): A documentary about the World Porridge Making Championships may sound bland, but this tight-knit village of porridge purists lends itself to a wholesome endeavour. You can’t help but cheer them on as their dedication sees them organise the event for another year. The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt, 2025): A refreshing take on the ‘70s heist film. Josh O’Connor’s unlikeable protagonist stumbles through the bare bones of a “plan,” and we laugh at his unfolding misfortunes in a farcical yet restrained spin on the genre. Rob Mazurek’s jazzy score is also worth mentioning. Sing Sing (Greg Kwedar, 2023): Centers around participants of the Rehabilitation Through the Arts drama program behind bars. The program’s alumni forming the supporting cast tells the story on their terms, their real-life experience helping show how art can be used as a source of liberation. Sorry, Baby (Eva Victor, 2025): Eva Victor masterfully balances the role of director, writer and performer. Depicts with honesty and grace the complexity of working through the aftermath of a traumatic event, and the difficulty in overcoming a state of stasis to try and move forward. Train Dreams (Clint Bentley, 2025): Joel Edgerton’s Robert Grainier tries to cling onto the remnants of his isolated world as the 20th century brings forth changes in society and his craft as a logger. Gorgeous images of the dense Pacific Northwest forests provide a warm embrace despite it all. A movie that’s quiet and achingly beautiful. Favourite first-time watches in 2025 (in alphabetical order): Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975): Spans the life of cowardly yet arrogant Barry Lyndon as he attempts to climb the social ladder in 18th century England, and his eventual fall from grace. A slow burn with painterly visuals, a special mention goes to the scenes filmed by candlelight. The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940): Unsurprisingly Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant’s excellent chemistry is again on show and watching them play bitter exes is a delight. Throw James Stewart into the mix (the nighttime pool scene is a highlight), and you’ve got a witty screwball comedy that is unafraid to show that nobody’s perfect. The Right Stuff (Philip Kaufman, 1983): Kaufman’s epic on the beginnings of the Space Race, and the men who threw themselves into this task with guns blazing. Beneath the courage and comradery, their quest for the stars was far from easy that tested not only them, but everyone in their orbit. Seconds (John Frankenheimer, 1966): The final film of Frankenheimer’s Paranoia Trilogy, its use of fisheye lenses and close-ups makes for a claustrophobic watch on the lengths we go to when we deem our lives unfulfilling and want to start again, but at what cost? Ten Years After… Ten Years Older (Anna Kannava, 1986): Restored for the Cinema Reborn Film Festival, Kannava reflects on returning to her homeland in Cyprus and reconnecting with her grandmother a decade after migrating to Australia. A personal piece that explores the feelings of displacement she grappled with. Eli Vannata Film Archivist and Historian Five favorite films that were released this year: Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2025) Demanding. One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025) Intense. Sinners (Ryan Coogler, 2025) Important. Die My Love (Lynne Ramsay, 2025) Psychological. Hamnet (Chloé Zhao, 2025) Crushing. Hamnet Five favorite films that I watched for the first time this year: Fuses (1967, Carolee Schneemann) Intimate. Mamma Roma (1962, Pier Paolo Pasolini) Devastating. Nymphomaniac Vol. 1 & Vol. 2 (2013-2014, Lars von Trier) Bold. Utvandrarna & Nybyggarna (The Emigrants & The New Land, 1971-1972, Jan Troell) Monumental. Film is Dead. Long Live Film! (2024, Peter Flynn) Inspirational. Noel Vera Contributing film critic for Businessworld; author of Critic After Dark: A Review of Philippine Cinema; writes the blog Critic After Dark Superman (James Gunn, 2025) Back to being the classical Big Blue Boy Scout, but with that distinct Gunn humor. Quezon (Jerrold Tarog, 2025) President Manuel Quezon’s life told as a quasi-dance musical The Phoenician Scheme (Wes Anderson, 2025) Should be prefaced with a Tolstoy paraphrase: All Wes Anderson movies are alike; the better Anderson movies are better in their own way. Black Bag (Steven Soderbergh, 2025) Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) meets Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005). Mickey 17(Bong Joon-ho, 2025) Bong at his most farcical, Robert Pattinson at his most unexpectedly sweet-souled Frankenstein (Guillermo del Toro, 2025) As monstrously haphazardly stitched-together as Shelley’s creature, you can’t help but feel for it anyway. Frankenstein Weapons (Zach Cregger, 2025) Inventively told, surprisingly funny, even more surprisingly moving horror. One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025) Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, turned into a hurtling comic epic about immigration and fascism. Magellan(Lav Diaz, 2025) The rare recent Diaz in color, a striking example of heightened verite Yek tasadof-e sadeh (A simple accident, Jafar Panahi, 2025) A drama about vengeance, accountability, and justice that’s also horrifyingly funny. Peter Verstraten Assistant Professor Film and Literary Studies, Leiden University, The Netherlands The seven best recent films I watched in 2025 in order of preference: O Agente Secreto (The Secret Agent, Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2025) Kontinental ’25 (Radu Jude, 2025) In die Sonne schauen (Sound of Falling, Mascha Schilinski, 2025) Miroirs No. 3 (Mirrors No. 3, Christian Petzold, 2025) The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt, 2025) Sirât (Sirat, Oliver Laxe, 2025) L’étranger (The Stranger, François Ozon, 2025) Three of the best older films I saw for the first time in 2025 Un maledetto imbroglio (The Facts of Murder, Pietro Germi, 1959) Mes petites amoureuses (My Little Loves, Jean Eustache, 1974) I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street, Mario Monicelli, 1958) Nicholas Vroman Writer at Desistfilm and a page of madness based in Olympia, Washington, USA A year of great discoveries – first features by several amazing filmmakers that I had not been acquainted with. And also masterpieces by some of my old favorites. Aoquic iez in Mexico! (Mexico Will No Longer Exist, Annalisa D. Quagliata, 2024) Aro Berria (Irati Gorostidi Agirretxe, 2025) Cobre (Copper, Nicolás Pereda, 2025) El Mundo Al Revés (The World Upside Down, Agostina Di Luciano & Leon Schwitter, 2025) Fiume o morte! (Igor Bezinovic, 2025) Nella colonia penale (In the Penal Colony, Gaetano Crivaro, Silvia Perra, Ferruccio Goia & Alberto Diana, 2025) Otapanje vladara (Wondrous is the Silence of My Master, Ivan Salatic, 2025) Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot (William Kentridge, 2022-2024) Yek tasadof-e sadeh (A simple accident, Jafar Panahi, 2025) Zinzindurrunkarratz (Oskar Alegria, 2023) David Walsh World Socialist Web Site (www.wsws.org) L’histoire de Souleymane (Souleymane’s Story, Boris Lojkine, 2024) To a Land Unknown (Mahdi Fleifel, 2024) One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025) Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk (Sepideh Farsi, 2025) Das Verschwinden des Josef Mengele (The Disappearance of Josef Mengele, Kirill Serebrennikov, 2025) Palestine 36 (Annemarie Jacir, 2025) Riefenstahl (Andres Veiel, 2024) Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2025) The Phoenician Scheme (Wes Anderson, 2025) Sawt Hind Rajab (The Voice of Hind Rajab, Kaouther Ben Hania, 2025) James Waters Writer/Filmmaker, Melbourne New(ish) releases: My Undesirable Friends Part I : Last Air in Moscow (Julia Loktev, 2024) Geu jayeoni nege mworago hani (What Does That Nature Say to You?, Hong Sang-Soo, 2025) Unstable Rocks (Ewelina Rosinska, 2024) Was Hast du Getraumt, Parajanov? (What Did You Dream Last Night, Parajanov?, Faraz Fesharaki, 2024) Frog Unlocked (Pierce Campion, 2025) The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt, 2025) Razeh-del (Maryam Tafakory, 2025) Kuraudo (Cloud, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024) Cameron Winter – Love Takes Miles (Celia Rowlson-Hall, 2025) Nadine Whitney Freelance film critic. Co-chair of The Australian Film Critics Association Den stygge stesøsteren (The Ugly Stepsister, Emilie Blichfeldt, 2025) Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (Stephen and Timothy Quay, 2024) La tour de glace (The Ice Tower, Lucile Hadžihalilović, 2025) The Chronology of Water (Kristen Stewart, 2025) Die My Love (Lynne Ramsay, 2025) Sorry, Baby (Eva Victor, 2025) Train Dreams (Clint Bentley, 2025) Zuopiezi nuhai (Left-Handed Girl, Shih-Ching Tsou, 2025) The Testament of Ann Lee (Mona Fastvold, 2025) If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (Mary Bronstein, 2025) Sjoerd van Wijk Dutch filmmaker, writer, and film critic based in Nijmegen Here are my five favorite films of 2025, following Dutch theatrical and streaming release dates. Vice Is Broke (Eddie Huang, 2024) The Smashing Machine (Benie Safdie, 2025) Vermiglio (Maura Delpero, 2024) If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You (Mary Bronstein, 2025) Hard Truths (Mike Leigh, 2024) Why Hard Truths at number one? In Hard Truths, a woman down in spirits wears down everyone around her. Pansy Deacon’s husband, son, sister, or bystanders of varying innocence have to endure her tirades. She lashes out against any gesture of kindness coming her way, whether it’s from her sister or the dentist. As usual for director Mike Leigh, he scripts a roundabout route towards the emotional climax of Pansy’s ordeals. Every member of the Deacon family deals with the challenges in their lives in their own way. The late Dick Pope – Leigh’s regular cinematographer – shoots them in breezy takes and with incisive clarity. As such, the film plays off those different attitudes against Pansy. Marianne Jean-Baptiste as Pansy elicits both hilarity and anxiety with her fierce presence. Yet, what started out as comic, turns sad. Over the course of the film any resistance to her all-consuming bitterness vanishes. What’s left is a feeling of terror akin to her husband and son’s daily experience. Leigh has insisted that the COVID-19 pandemic did not play a role in the development of the film. Still, the little references throughout do situate Pansy’s depression in these times of sickness. At least, those who have kept up with the research about COVID-19 experience a disappointment in humanity like hers, due to the ongoing societal indifference to the public health risk that the virus still poses. Yet it’s rather that Hard Truths deals with depression as an ongoing societal issue. As the title suggests, there are some hard truths in the film, about the inability to let love in when the world feels like hell. It holds up a distorting mirror in which one can the better recognize one’s own tendencies towards cynicism and misanthropy. Hard Truths might not only be Leigh’s last film – thanks to its emotional power it might be one of his best. Neil Young Film Critic, Maker, Presenter, Programmer, Actor, A Guest on Earth, Vienna Eight films in chronological order: Beppie (Johan van der Keuken, 1965) L’enfance nue (Naked Childhood, Maurice Pialat 1968) Kamigami no Fukaki Yokubō (Profound Desires of the Gods. Shōhei Imamura, 1968) Edvard Munch (Peter Watkins, 1974) Hail Mary (Jean-Luc Godard, 1985) Sirât (Sirat, Oliver Laxe, 2025) Kutyafül (Dog Ear, Péter Vácz, 2025) Slet 1988 (Marta Popivoda, 2025) Plus two: Adolescence: Episode 2 (Philip Barantini, 2025, TV) DIKTAEAN wins the 2025 Tokyo Daishoten (G1) -(Global Horse Racing TV, 2025, online). “Evil has no limits. If you are a good person, everybody expects you to be good. If you are very good then you become Albert Schweitzer or Mother Theresa. Then you’re very good because you are helping people. But evil has no limits.” – Udo Kier (1944-2025).
