This year’s best films did not offer escape so much as confrontation. Across genres, budgets and continents, they asked difficult questions about power, belief, responsibility and survival – and trusted audiences to sit with the answers, or lack thereof.
From intimate stories shaped by memory and trauma to blockbusters operating at the outer limits of scale, these are works that took cinema seriously as both an art form and a moral instrument.
What follows are the ten films that, in very different ways, understood what cinema can still be for.
10. The President’s Cake
The President’s Cake, the debut feature of director Hasan Hadi, echoes his own childhood in southern Iraq under Saddam Hussein.
At a time of severe scarcity – when sugar and flour were outright banned – children were still tasked with baking a cake in honour of the former leader’s birthday, with failure carrying real and lasting consequences. One of Hadi’s friends was expelled from school, conscripted into Saddam’s children’s army and later died.
The film draws on that memory without retelling it literally. Instead, it follows nine-year-old Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef) as she moves through her town in search of ingredients, navigating empty shelves and adults both kind and predatory, never quite sure who can be trusted. Shot with restrained naturalism and anchored by Nayyef’s unsentimental performance, the film captures the quiet fear and warped logic of everyday life without spelling it out.
Hadi resists explanation or moral instruction. He isn’t translating Iraq’s past for outsiders so much as remembering it, allowing politics to surface through detail and texture. The result is a film that builds gently but inexorably, before landing on an ending whose force comes not from shock, but from recognition – a reminder of how easily childhood can be shaped, and damaged, by the systems that surround it.
9. The Secret Agent
This isn’t a spy film – it’s something much richer. In it, Wagner Moura (Narcos) plays a man forced into hiding during the Brazilian military dictatorship of the 1970s. And as he traverses the country in an attempt to escape to safety with the help of other political refugees, a teeming, intricate portrait of the country’s past and present emerges.
Part of why it works so well is that director Kleber Mendonca Filho is never afraid to indulge the film’s many corners – full of asides and occasional surreal diversions that lend it a novelistic breadth. It’s funny, pensive and then suddenly will push you to the edge of your seat. Even at 158 minutes, you’ll likely want to revisit it – if only to experience Moura’s extraordinary performance again.
8. Avatar: Fire and Ash
Since its inception, Avatar has been the moral project of James Cameron’s life. It is rarely framed that way. More often, the series is discussed in terms of scale and spectacle – its unprecedented technical ambition, the billions spent pushing cinema towards new limits. But to understand Avatar as technology first and story second is to misunderstand what that ambition is in service of.
What drives Cameron is not novelty, but a belief that cinema can still move audiences at scale – and, in doing so, challenge them. Across The Way of Water and Fire and Ash, that challenge sharpens into a sustained confrontation with colonial violence, ecological destruction and the moral compromises societies learn to accept. These are deeply sincere films, unafraid to wear their convictions openly, insisting that popularity does not preclude seriousness.
Fire and Ash pushes the argument further, rejecting the myth of the lone hero in favour of collective responsibility. Individual triumph is measured not by dominance, but by service – to family, community and ecosystem. In an era of frictionless replication and hollow spectacle, Avatar remains something rarer: a blockbuster that demands we imagine a future built on responsibility rather than compromise.
7. Blue Moon
When was the last time a film made you think, "what a script"? It’s a rare feeling – usually reserved for stage works that survive the journey to the screen. Yet for all the attention paid to its performances, Blue Moon stands as one of the most finely written films in recent memory. There’s nary a single phrase poorly turned – each one double wrapped in longing, regret and delusion.
If Ethan Hawke wins major awards for his portrayal of songwriter Lorenz Hart, it will be because the writing gives him nowhere to hide – and because no one could deliver those words better. Richard Linklater, meanwhile, is vindicated for waiting 15 years to make this film with Hawke, until both had the life experience to give it its full weight.
Set in a single location over one night, the film follows Hart as his former partner Richard Rodgers unveils Oklahoma! with new collaborator Oscar Hammerstein – a moment that quietly redraws the history of American musical theatre. Hilarious, heartbreaking, bawdy and thoughtful.
6. It Was Just an Accident
The story behind Jafar Panahi’s latest effort – filmed in secret in Iran and earning him a jail sentence at home even as it collected awards around the world – is so compelling that I never thought the film itself could live up to it. I was wrong.
Even on its own terms – divorced from its political and social commentary on contemporary Iran – this is a deeply gripping piece of work. A man hears the unmistakable walk of the one-legged figure who once tortured him. He kidnaps him and plans to kill him, only to doubt whether he has the right man at all. As he gathers others who might be able to identify his captor, nothing becomes simpler – and this tightly wound film keeps you in its grasp until its unforgettable final shot, before leaving you stunned in your seat as the credits roll.
5. No Other Choice
Park Chan-wook’s masterful latest is a blistering, gleeful indictment of soulless corporate hyper-capitalism – both bleak and hilarious. It follows a star company man living his dream life who is laid off from his long-time managerial job – and quickly learns that the only way to keep it all together is to kill off all those who stand in the way of him and the only equivalent role on the market.
Lee Byung-hun (Squid Game)’s performance builds to a palpably unhinged crescendo by the end. The magic trick of the film is that the more it seems he’s lost his mind, the more he fits into the madness of the world as it becomes.
Since 2016's The Handmaiden, Park has asserted himself as one of the best living directors – and one of the few in history, such as Brian De Palma or Steven Spielberg, whose camera is continuously full of life. Every flourish – particularly those that take advantage of screen life and other modern technologies most filmmakers cower in fear from – is a joy to behold.
4. One Battle After Another
One Battle After Another follows a former revolutionary forced back into conflict when his daughter goes missing and old enemies resurface.
But what is the film trying to say? Less about ideology than about people – the flawed vessels who carry belief systems forward, fight for causes larger than themselves and inevitably fall short. What matters is not their failure, but what they pass on to the next generation, in the hope that they might do better.
It is also filmmaking at its most kinetic. Paul Thomas Anderson reaches new heights as a visual storyteller, working on the largest canvas of his career. If he’s Picasso, this is his Guernica. And much of it works because Leonardo DiCaprio has become a quietly selfless performer – unafraid to look foolish, and increasingly committed to lifting everyone around him.
3. The Voice of Hind Rajab
It feels impossible for me to judge The Voice of Hind Rajab as a film, and feels wrong to try to place it on a list among so many mere entertainments. It’s intended not as a work of art, but rather an urgent message to the world, laying bare a grave injustice.
And it achieves its goal with disarming immediacy. Shot as a docudrama, it meticulously recreates the final call of a five-year-old Gazan girl to the Palestinian Red Cross – a child who cried out in vain for someone to help her, before Israeli forces in Gaza knowingly killed her.
We follow the event from the call centre – hearing the real recording of her voice throughout, while the rest is a powerfully-performed reenactment. Even if you’re aware of every detail, living through it is one of the most emotionally affecting experiences you’ll ever have in a cinema.
2. Sirat
Sirat, directed by Spanish filmmaker Oliver Laxe, is perhaps the most spiritual film of the year – informed by Laxe’s personal relationship with Islam. If you weren’t looking for that, however, you may never notice it’s there. Because on its face, Sirat can feel rather inexplicable.
In it, a father from Spain wanders through the nomadic rave culture of Morocco with his son in search of his lost daughter. And as their journey through the wilderness continues – after they strike up a bond with a found family of ravers – unspeakable things start to happen. Laxe, however, isn’t as interested in the unspeakable things themselves so much as how we process them, and how we can best approach the often-inexplicable horrors of the world.
Riveting, unnerving and genuinely unforgettable – Sirat is the most blisteringly original film of the year. Just bear in mind – half the people you recommend it to may never forgive you for having done so.
1. Marty Supreme
Timothee Chalamet has become a cultural force like no other actor from his emerging generation – a legitimate box office draw and committed, engaging performer. If that’s enough success to make you resent him, perhaps reserve that sentiment for when the work he’s promoting isn’t on the level of Marty Supreme.
To call this a sports drama doesn’t do it justice. Loosely inspired by the life of American table tennis champion Marty Reisman, this is an eccentric gem – peppered with unforgettable faces, period texture and jolting detours. It may not be the cinematic anxiety attack that was director Josh Safdie and writer Ronald Bronstein’s last film Uncut Gems, but it shares its DNA – and has more on its mind.
Whereas that film followed a born loser, this is a man who will never let the apparent truth get in the way of his own success. And as he rides a sea of deception through a duplicitous world to win fool’s gold, his ultimate victory is in finding a sincere self on the other side. He’s a force of nature so strong, Chalamet himself seemingly hasn’t been able to shed character since so exquisitely bringing him to life. An all-timer – Rocky by way of After Hours.
Honourable mentions: Hamnet, The Testament of Ann Lee, Sinners, Splitsville, 28 Years Later, Bring Her Back, Sentimental Value, Happy Birthday, Nouvelle Vague, F1, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, My Brother's Shadow
