Sinners.
Issue 116 of Senses of Cinema is now out, and I’ve contributed to the World Poll, highlighting ten films from 2025 in alphabetical order.
• No Other Choice (Eojjeolsuga eobsda, 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)
• It Was Just an Accident (Yek tasadof-e sadeh, 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 The Secret Agent (O Agente Secreto, Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2025), The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt, 2025), or I Only Rest in the Storm (O Riso e a Faca, Pedro Pinho, 2025). Other films, including Drop (Christopher Landon, 2025), Souleymane’s Story (L’histoire de Souleymane, Boris Lojkine, 2024), or Young Mothers (Jeunes mères, 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.
You can read other picks and observations here.
