Whatever the results of the awards circuit, critics were more or less unanimous in pronouncing Sirāt to be the best film of last year. Freely shifting between Spanish, French, Arabic and English, this film defies genre expectations and has been described both as a road trip drama and science-fiction. To me, it is one thing above all, as pure a religious experience as you can achieve on film, without being explicitly about any religion in particular. It’s a stroke of genius on the part of its director Óliver Laxe to interpret the rave scene in this manner and I would agree that it’s the most outstanding film of 2025.

It feels like Chinese cinema is on a roll in producing neo-noir crime films, or at least ones that share similar vibes. Only the River Flows is set up like a textbook murder mystery set in a rural town in 1995. But despite the lead detective’s diligence in following the clues step by step, the case defies all logical explanation until we begin to question if this is really a murder mystery after all. It’s no real spoiler to say that this one of those mind-bending films in which nothing is as it seems. It looks fantastic, the abstract themes are at least worth thinking about and yet in the end I feel cheated out of a perfectly good police procedural.

I’ve read about the controversies surrounding this film, how earnest its apparent antifascist take is for example, before I learned anything about its story. Now after watching it, I still can’t make up my mind and I wonder if it doesn’t matter at all. This is a frustrating film on so many levels as it builds viewer expectations towards a certain direction but then refuses to give us the catharsis we need. Still we can’t pull our eyes away from it though due to its spectacular action scenes and sheer bizarreness. I wouldn’t agree that it’s the best film of the year but it’s auteur film, that’s for sure.

I liked BoJack Horseman enough to watch a couple of seasons of it and I thought this new show by its creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg might be at least a little similar, with less drugs and depression. In fact, this is a different kind of show entirely. While the characters have various kinds of trauma from their childhoods, it’s actually a very wholesome show with a strong focus on Jewish culture. I was a little lost at the beginning due to the very fast paced dialogue but by the end I was thoroughly in love with the characters and their family dynamics.

I’ve skipped over so many of the Predator and Alien films that I have no idea what’s going on in that cinematic universe any longer. I opted to watch this one because it was directed by Dan Trachtenberg who made the excellent Prey. The twist here is that the protagonist is a Predator for the first time, teaming up with human-made synthetic to survive on an alien planet. It’s okay enough as an action movie but has too jokey a tone to carry any emotional weight and the predictable lesson of protecting each other belongs more in a Disney feature than a Predator movie.

After Jeanne Dielman unexpectedly topped a poll of the greatest films of all time in 2022, I’d bet I’m not the only person slowly working through the body of work of Chantal Akerman. This one is a very loose adaptation of a volume from Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and knowing nothing of the novel itself, I am stunned by the intensity and alienness of the protagonist’s mindset. It actually made me want to read the book. I’m not certain that this is better than Jeanne Dielman but it is much less talked about and so I think severely underrated.

Being one of Ingmar Bergman’s early works, Summer with Monika is noticeably less refined and you won’t have any trouble understanding what it means. For that matter, it’s a familiar story that most will have seen many variations of already. Yet its rawness has its appeal and this can be considered a foundational film that inspired many others. I dislike its moralizing tone against so-called loose women as it seems unworthy of a director of Bergman’s stature so I would consider it a lesser work.