The whole point of these year-in-review posts is to reflect on the year just gone, of course, but this time round it’s made me think about more than just what films I watched, what films I missed, the various trends they contributed to or failed at, and which of them were better than which others. I’m not about to get too philosophical, but…

While it hasn’t been a great year for my blog (what with the total and entire lack of any new reviews whatsoever), my 100 Films in a Year Challenge has been important on a personal level to a degree it hasn’t been since perhaps even 2007, the year I first attempted the challenge. Back then, the whole point was to get me to watch more films. From about 2012 onwards, I got into such a groove that it was less “can I watch 100 films?” and more “how quickly can I watch 100 films? And how many more after that?” Recently, though, my attention has wandered to other forms of entertainment (even before I felt compelled to include comparative graphs in the statistics post). That’s no bad thing — for years I’ve mentioned how my focus on film viewing arguably detracts from other things I want to do — but, as I’ve finally cracked that (to an extent), the Challenge has resumed its old role of being a force to drag me back to movies. Without the “need” it provides to keep my progress ticking over and complete the goal, I’m certain I would’ve watched even fewer films than I did this past year.

That said, it hasn’t been a great movie year in another respect: quality. Indeed, as the statistics have already revealed, it was my second-lowest scoring year ever, a fact that bears out how I’ve felt about it all along. It’s not got so bad that I wanted to bring back my ‘worst of’ list (which I ditched in 2022 because we don’t need to celebrate negativity), but, truth be told, there aren’t many “all-time favourite”-level films in the list below. Nor was it a hotly-contested battle for the top spot (unlike some years, when half the list could have taken #1 if I’d been in a different mood). That doesn’t mean these are bad films by any means — I didn’t consider ditching the list entirely! — so it’s time for me to stop being such a downer on them and switch into praiseful mode.

It’s ten years this year since I made a significant permanent change to my ‘best of’ list, but I still feel the need to clarify this every year. Maybe that’s unnecessary, but hey, it never hurts to be clear. So, what used to be a “top 10” is nowadays a “top 10%” — I watched 116 movies for the first time in 2025, which comes out as 12 films in this year’s top ‘ten’.

And another point I’ll continue to clarify year after year is that all 116 of those movies are eligible for this list, not just brand-new releases. Nonetheless, I have sometimes included a ranking for the current year; but as I only watched 17 films that had their UK release in 2025 and (no spoilers) very few of them have made the top ten, I haven’t bothered to note their ‘2025 rank’ this time.

Now, without any further caveats…

Joe Wright’s Tolstoy adaptation boasts phenomenal stylised production design and cinematography; enough that the characters and story are almost incidental — whatever their quality, the visuals would be worth it. I have no idea whether it’s a faithful or accurate adaptation, but as an overall work of art, it’s enchanting.

I sort of avoided this for a while, because I’ve not always got on with Jane Campion’s work and thought it might be a bit too abstruse for my taste. Indeed, it’s not always clear why you’re watching what you’re watching as it goes along, but it all clicks into place by the end; which, further, makes me think it might be even better on a rewatch.

Considered dispassionately, Juggernaut deploys most of the familiar beats and clichés of any bomb-disposal-based thriller. But I overlooked all that when actually watching it thanks to the touch of director Richard Lester, who brings a kind of absurd mundanity to the “keep calm and carry on” attitude of the passengers even as bombs are going off beneath them. The silliness and tension work in harmony to make the latter hit home, clichés or no; and the star-studded cast give weight to even small scenes and moments, such that the manhunt on dry land feels as vital as the action at sea.

This first of two Predator movies released in 2025 (I haven’t yet seen the second), this was a direct-to-streaming animated anthology that could have been little more than a promo for the later film (a big-budget theatrical release). Perhaps that’s how it was conceived (I don’t know), but what we got was nothing so vacuous. As it barrels from one thrillingly-realised action sequence to another, you’d think it would become monotonous, yet it’s all so well done that instead it’s a non-stop adrenaline rush. It seems like Dan Trachtenberg (who was also responsible for Prey) just gets what a Predator movie should be.

Quite a few films in this year’s list are great showcases for cinematic flair, and while some of them are very overt in that, others might not scream it in quite the same way, but it’s unmissable when you watch the whole thing. The Untouchables is, naturally, an example of the latter. The Battleship Potemkin-referencing stairway shootout is the most famous example (and, even now, it lives up to expectations as one of cinema’s greatest gunfights), but there are many more superb sequences scattered across the film, and Ennio Morricone’s score is an all-time selection of bangers to boot. No one should come to this film for a history lesson, but it is pure cinema.

Jeunet & Caro’s steampunk fairytale boasts all the darkness and grotesquery you would expect of the latter’s traditional form, alongside production design so exquisite and cinematography so striking that they render it a contender for the best-looking film ever made. Three decades on, you can see where its influence has bled into various other films, but its off-kilter otherworldliness means it nonetheless feels totally unique.

Lifeforce is probably best known for featuring Mathilda May naked and, yeah, there’s certainly plenty of that and, yeah, if you’re so inclined it’s certainly a highlight. It’s sort of gratuitous, but sort of justified because the film is then about how she’s so sexy it kills people and might end the world. That aside, it’s kind of like an updated Quatermass: a British-set sci-fi/horror about gruesome terrors arriving from outer space and potentially threatening us all. The way it escalates as it goes on is absolutely barmy and kinda inspired. They should make more films like this. Frankly, this is exactly the sort of stuff stereotypical 13-year-old boys should want to watch, not more Marvel slop.

This does for the ’90s what Donnie Darko did for the ’80s, albeit even more obliquely. It’s a suburban sci-fi / fantasy / horror for anyone who grew up watching shows like Twin Peaks or Buffy the Vampire Slayer — so, me! As that, the vibes are immaculate and the cinematography is gorgeous, of the kind that really shines when augmented with HDR; but it’s certainly not style over substance, choosing to foreground some deeper themes (some would say at the expense of a story, but I thought they were just intertwined).

The third in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out Benoit Blanc series furthers the impression that the writer-director is a natural heir to Agatha Christie in terms of crafting compelling murder mysteries that also have something to say about people and/or society. The tone here swings darker than the caricatured satire of Glass Onion, but the eye for comedy is not totally lost even alongside weightier religious themes and some well-deserved poking of the American right. Plus, while it’s not as overtly stylised as several other films on this list, it looks gorgeous — like its predecessor, Knives Out, it manages to make digital photography look convincingly film-like and thus outclasses almost everyone else using the medium today.

When choosing what to include in this list, there’s always a tension between “films I thought were examples of great cinema” and “films I personally enjoyed, for potentially esoteric reasons”. The latter usually wins out on balance — and I think some of the films we’ve already passed on this list speak to that, as will the films still to come — but the former is not unimportant. Rebel Without a Cause is definitely a case of the former. Not because I didn’t enjoy it (I’m happy to exclude films that are widely acclaimed but I didn’t like), but it didn’t give me that zing you get from a movie you love whatever its flaws. That said, it still surprised me (it wasn’t wholly what I thought it was going to be), and… well, I don’t want to turn this into a whole review, so I’ll sum up thus: all round, I think it’s an example of great cinema.

If I based this ranking solely on style, Dario Argento’s 1982 giallo would win hands down (though a couple of films from earlier in the list would give it a run for its money, to be fair). The camera moves, the colours, the editing, the banging soundtrack… the vibes are perfection. I’m not convinced the plot completely hangs together (which is not to say it’s not entertaining, I’m just not sure it fully adds up), but when everything else is firing on all cylinders like this, I can let that slide.

The genre of “animated movies about an emotive robot in an (initially) human-free world” may be small — as far as I’m aware, it’s just this and WALL•E (and, depending how you define “human-free”, Robot Dreams) — but I think this one is my favourite. In keeping with so many entries on this year’s list, it’s beautifully visualised; but it also features characters and a story that tug your heartstrings in multiple different ways, and it even manages to surprise occasionally in where it chooses to go and when. Incidentally, this is the first animated film to top my ‘best of’ list in 19 years of producing them, so that’s cool too.

My process for putting together this best-of is to create a long-list throughout the year of films that might end up in contention. I do occasionally look over it and remove things, so I can’t say how many were long-listed overall, but by December 31st it was at 54. Some of these are eliminated quickly — I take a broad view of “might end up in contention”, because an opinion can shift after a film sits with you a while, so I’ll long-list a title I’m only somewhat enamoured with if I feel I might settle into liking it more. Sometimes I do; often, I don’t. Others end up almost getting in to my final ranking, but don’t quite make it — so, as usual, I’d just like to highlight a few of them.

These are not #13–18 on my list (that would be cheating — if I wanted to do a longer list, I could), just a few of the films that came close and I had something to say about (for context, there were at least four or five more in a similar situation that I’m not bothering to touch on).

In no particular order…

• A Real Pain almost made it onto the list thanks to just one scene that made the whole film click for me (which I quoted/summarised on Letterboxd), but that perspective wasn’t quite enough to squeeze it into a top 12 (top 15 or 20, maybe).
• The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog is not one of Hitchcock’s very best works, but you can see the early signs of where he’s going to go. It feels like the product of a talented semi-amateur rather than the fully-fledged auteur he’d become.
• Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning was too bloated and reminiscent of previous instalments (story-wise, the climax was just a do-over of the film-before-last) to reach the highs of the franchise’s very best entries, but I still enjoyed it overall, and the action was as impressive as ever (the aforementioned climax is also a jaw-dropping stunt showcase).
• In 2023, one of my Challenge categories centred on film noir, and it ended with them dominating my best-of list. The same has not happened with poliziotteschi this year. (In fairness, it didn’t happen with gialli in 2023 or noir in 2022, and only one martial arts film made it last year.) My favourites — which were some of the last films to be pushed out of the final version of this year’s list — were The Italian Connection, Slap the Monster on Page One, and Street Law.

Now, let’s recap the 12 films that won the Arbie for my Favourite Film of the Month. Some of them have already been mentioned in this post, some haven’t, but either way, in chronological order (with links to the relevant awards), they were Milano Calibro 9, Macbeth, Lifeforce, The King of Kings, I Saw the TV Glow, The Untouchables, Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man, The Wild Robot, Rebel Without a Cause, Tenebrae, Le Samouraï, and Wake Up Dead Man.

Finally, I’ve always ended this section by listing every film that earned a 5-star rating during the year. It seems right to acknowledge the films that scored top marks, and there’s normally far too many to include in my main list (even if it weren’t for the fact 4-star films usually sneak in too). But, as you’ll already know if you’ve read the statistics, this year there were only four films I scored so highly. It’s no real surprise that, with such a select list, for once all of them made it into the top 10%… but I’ve not actually said which they were anywhere yet, so they bear listing nonetheless: Rebel Without a Cause, Tenebrae, Wake Up Dead Man, and The Wild Robot.

For the last few years, I’ve done very poorly at keeping up with new releases… and 2025 was no exception: as noted earlier, I watched just 17 films that had their UK release during the year. For comparison, it was 57 in 2020; and even if you allow for that being a year when more than usual had home premieres, it was 50 in 2018.

That means this year’s “50 Unseen” list — my annual pick of 50 films designated as being from 2025 that I haven’t yet seen — features plenty of famous flicks, though I’ve also popped in a few smaller-but-acclaimed titles, as well as some that might become more prominent as awards season drags on. I will inevitably have forgotten or misjudged something noteworthy, but — as always — this list has been narrowed down from a much, much longer one based on a variety of factors, from box office success to critical acclaim via simple notoriety, and aims to represent a spread of styles and genres, successes and failures (though I still couldn’t bring myself to include the new War of the Worlds).

28 Years Later
Avatar: Fire and Ash
The Ballad of Wallis Island
Ballerina
Black Bag
Blue Moon
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy
Bugonia
Captain America: Brave New World
Caught Stealing
Drop
Eddington
The Electric State
Elio
Eternity
F1
The Fantastic Four: First Steps
Final Destination Bloodlines
Good Boy
Hamnet
How to Train Your Dragon
It Was Just an Accident
Jurassic World Rebirth
Karate Kid: Legends
The Life of Chuck
Lilo & Stitch
The Long Walk
Marty Supreme
Materialists
Mickey 17
A Minecraft Movie
The Naked Gun
Now You See Me: Now You Don’t
One Battle After Another
The Phoenician Scheme
Predator: Badlands
The Roses
The Running Man
The Salt Path
Sentimental Value
Sinners
Snow White
Spinal Tap II: The End Continues
Thunderbolts*
Train Dreams
TRON: Ares
Weapons
Wicked: For Good
Wolf Man
Zootropolis 2

And with that, another year is over. It’s been a bit of an odd one in some ways, and I feel less confident than ever in predicting what the next year will bring blog-wise… except that I do plan to do it all over again, for the 20th time.

20 years! You know, I was only 20 myself when I started all this. Makes you think… but I’ll save what it makes me think for some future musing.