Best films of 2025 and our final podcast.

Welcome friends.

As always, our final episode of a calendar year is a look back at our cinematic highlights, structured around Neil’s and my top ten films lists. We always try to put this in something of a broader context, suggesting the always subjective criteria of judgement that go into our selections and the sense of incompleteness, compromise and general fallibility of ranking one’s artistic pleasure and admiration. But Neil is right when he comments on the show that lists are a way of organising thought amid the incessant noise of cultural overload.

That question of structure becomes a recurring preoccupation across the conversation. Neil mentions that, when assembling his ten, he found himself instinctively pairing films; spotting “cousins” that echo each other in tone, narrative, or thematic focus.

This is something of a recognition that cinematic appreciation often works through a clustering: films that don’t merely share “topics” (capitalism, community, violence, grief), but share strategies for coping with a world that increasingly refuses coherence.

For me, an undeniable feature of 2025 in cinema has been the many narratives that reflect a feeling of senselessness—stories that don’t “resolve” so much as metabolise disorder. We keep circling filmmakers who can register the insanity of the present without converting it into a tidy thesis. Radu Jude is the obvious touchstone here: we talk about how his filmmaking avoids the temptation of big declarative statements, holding sincerity and cynicism, humour and despair, in the same hand.

Kontinental 25, as much as any other film this year, explores the granular experience of politics as a kind of moral nausea, digital immediacy of its form aping the doom-scroll logic of being pulled from one sickening little story to the next.

We keep returning to the sense that many “state of the nation” films this year (especially in the American context) operated as overt statements—almost insistently discursive—while, at the same time, we explored quieter, more contemplative works that approached personal and social crisis through subtler uses of form, tone, and time.

Many films this year, implicitly and explicitly, explored the tensions of capitalism as a kind of lived texture: bureaucracy, managerialism, the violence of systems that call themselves neutral. From the handheld realism of Souleymane’s Story (Boris Lojkine) right through to the expansive mythos and genre pleasures of Sinners (Ryan Coogler), the poli