From modest festival dramas to animated hits and resonant documentaries — we continue to share our favorite films of 2025.
In 2025, many outstanding films were released, but the list compiled based on the editorial vote could not include them all due to limited space. The authors of 'After the Credits' decided to restore justice and talk about films that, in their opinion, were undeservedly left in the shadows.
From 'Battle for Battle' with Leonardo DiCaprio to 'Sinners' by Ryan Coogler — here are the best films of 2025 that proved that auteur cinema can still surprise, and viewers
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'Blue Moon' is exactly the kind of cinema that Richard Linklater and Ethan Hawke do best. It's an intimate story of one evening, where every line is like a confession, and every pause is more precious than any monologue. The ninth collaboration between the director and actor turns into a poignant portrait of a genius in decline — the lyricist Lorenz Hart, who spends a March night in 1943 in a bar while his former partner Richard Rodgers receives ovations for the premiere of 'Oklahoma!'. Linklater squeezes everything out of a single location: cigarette smoke, the clink of glasses, caustic observations about 'Casablanca', and the bitterness of a man who realizes his era is over.
The film explores the fragility of the artist, the pain of professional and romantic rejection — and does so with the director's trademark melancholy, turning conversations into music. 'Blue Moon' does not try to heroize Hart — it shows him broken, witty, desperately clinging to illusions, and that is why it touches to the core. It is an honest farewell to a forgotten legend (for Broadway fans), filmed with such tenderness and understanding that it is impossible not to be moved. In a year when big cinema increasingly shouts, Linklater whispers — and he is heard louder than anyone!
Unfortunately, our editorial top did not include any animated films. Not surprising, since 2025 turned out to be quite sparse in good feature-length cartoons, but one gem could have been included. Of course, we are talking about 'K-Pop Demon Hunters' — a real hit from Netflix and Sony Pictures Animation, which is already being turned into a long-running franchise. So in the near future, we expect the release of a sequel, which has been officially put into development!
A simple story of love and the struggle between good and evil instantly won millions of hearts. The creators masterfully combined Korean mythology, Asian aesthetics, and a whole album of amazing K-pop tracks (Your Idol is mind-blowing, I've been into K-pop since childhood). Before the premiere, no one could have imagined that a project with such a title would turn out not to be some cheap streaming gimmick, but perhaps the main contender for prestigious awards in the categories of 'Best Song' and 'Best Animated Feature'. Well, it can be confidently stated that all the trophies are fully deserved!
'Bugonia' by Yorgos Lanthimos divided the critics of the Venice Film Festival into two camps. Some said the director was not the same anymore, that we would not see a new 'Dogtooth' or 'The Lobster'. Others argued that pickling the audience and unleashing emotions in the last third of the film is in the spirit of the Greek 'weird wave'. The constellation of Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons shines in the firmament of world fame and does not plan to disappear at dawn. The actors once again play both accomplices and rivals. This is a story of an unreliable narrator, forcing the viewer to catch interpretations and build their own theories.
Everything depends on the optics: either Teddy is a crazy kidnapper, or Michelle is a representative of an alien race. In any case, the world is under threat. An unambiguous interpretation lies in the Korean sci-fi comedy 'Save the Green Planet!', on which 'Bugonia' is based. However, the crisis of humanity and the importance of bees are already Lanthimos's merit. He also makes the viewer hold their breath after the deafening denouement and temporarily leaves the director's chair. After watching, you just want to check the ankles of the world elite: aren't they too narrow?
Pedro Almodóvar has long settled into cinema as a way of applying it to reality: the Spaniard's works are not events, but being. They are regular, difficult to adhere to purely dramatic content, even if it is stated in the script. His directorial vision, unclouded and clear, does not claim totality. His women are strong but not authoritarian, his comedy is absurd but grounded, his Spain is colorful and romantic, but real in its unwashedness and roughness.
In the case of 'The Room Next Door', Almodóvar has neither Madrid nor Spain at all, but New York State, the town of Woodstock northwest of Kingston. His women are of course strong, but one of them is terminally ill. The director's comedy has become so thin that it is not there at all. The last hours of a journalist's (Tilda Swinton) life next to an invited friend (Julianne Moore), a common lover (John Turturro) pushed to the background by the heroines and the author, the Flemish colors of free costumes and interior elements — Almodóvar found new tones and images previously not his own to articulate in his language the message of the Irish postmodernist James Joyce: 'Better to pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.'
A lone fixer (Riz Ahmed) in the glossy settings of New York saves a client (Lily James) from the hands of corporate mercenaries hunting for compromising documents. Between the savior and the saved, a subtle game of mutual suspicion and revelations begins, in which an emerging feeling unexpectedly appears. From the work of David Mackenzie ('Hell or High Water'), who returned to big cinema after a long six-year hiatus, you certainly expect something weighty and significant. And the director meets these expectations: — a clearly assembled spy thriller with all the necessary attributes of the genre, easily standing alongside classics like 'Three Days of the Condor' or 'The Parallax View'.
In wide release, a little masterpiece by the author of 'Hell or High Water' David Mackenzie — 'The Dispatcher'. Why the film deserves such a title — in our review.
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Minimum reflection, maximum intellect, and just a bit of extreme romance — an almost perfect recipe for memorable cinema that is not ashamed to seem slightly old-fashioned, but still holds up well against modern industry trends. Riz Ahmed, it seems, can play anything with just his eyes; Lily James — a lonely woman in need of protection, whose life suddenly takes a sharp turn; Sam Worthington — a retired but still perfectly suited hound on the trail. 'The Dispatcher' easily captures attention not only with its gripping plot but also with its performances. And it also easily makes you return to it again and again. In short, as Panikovsky used to say: 'You can tell right away — cinema from an earlier time.'
It is not accidental, but quite natural, that Stephen King's dystopia, written by him at the height of the Vietnam campaign, was brought to the screen precisely in 2025. 'The Long Walk' may lose in inventiveness to a good part of genre analogues and does not always follow the letter of the source material (which, in my view, is outdated in some aspects), but at the same time it represents a model of a well-constructed high-concept thriller, whose main advantage lies in the exhaustive revelation of the author's message. The film by Francis Lawrence is not a set of speculative moral lessons on the topic of dictatorship, human nature, the pernicious influence of capitalism on the psyche, or the collapse of the so-called 'American Dream', but an unambiguously interpreted statement.
Unlike the Korean 'Squid Game', which lingered in memory thanks to its garish, screaming aesthetics, or 'The Hunger Games' with its abundance of characteristic attributes of 2010s teen fiction, this film does not even particularly flaunt its spectacle component. This is not a 'battle royale' with satirical overtones, but a grim chronicle of trampling human dignity into the dirt, where exhausted youths, covered in blood, sweat, and mud, are driven to slaughter under the deafening crackle of machine-gun fire, each burst marking the elimination of an athlete from the ranks. There are, however, glimpses of light in 'The Long Walk', mainly emanating from the character played by David Jonsson, but they are too rare and fragmentary to give hope to the heroes and viewers. And yes, this is the second after Darabont's 'The Mist' adaptation of a Stephen King work where the altered ending far surpasses the book version.
Everything I knew about Chris Hansen and his program before watching 'Predators' by David Osit, I learned from the 'South Park' episode 'Le Petit Tourette' (Season 11, Episode 8). Apparently, this is another reason why this documentary made such an impression on me. What was the essence of Chris's project To Catch a Predator? His team, along with police and 'decoys' (adults who look like teenagers), tracked down adults who started communicating on social networks with those they perceived as minors and brought them to a meeting under the supervision of law enforcement. Viewers were shown the host's conversation with the subjects and their subsequent arrest, emphasizing the preventive nature of these actions to protect children.
For the US, this show became a kind of marker of the era, and Chris Hansen a recognizable figure in pop culture (besides 'South Park', the host was mentioned and parodied in dozens of shows and sitcoms). At the same time, To Catch a Predator was not a separate program, but a series of special investigative episodes within the news-documentary show Dateline NBC. By 2007, 19 of the 25 highest-rated hours on MSNBC were night-time reruns. NBC canceled the show in the same 2007 amid a major scandal (we'll skip the spoilers) and growing criticism of the format. The show was accused of provocation and possible violations of the rights of suspects.
David Osit came to create 'Predators', realizing that around the old TV segment, a whole community of fans, archivists, and imitators had formed — from YouTube 'hunters' to subreddits living for this, collecting full, non-broadcast versions of 'stings'. Another starting point was questions. How did it happen that a program that disappeared from the air more than 15 years ago still roams the internet in the form of memes and reposts, and do viewers who rewatch and distribute these clips become part of that same public humiliation?
As a result, we got one of the best documentaries of recent years, which leaves no room for 'moral escape'. We are allowed to feel for ourselves where journalism ends and the exploitation of someone else's misfortune begins. And how a television project, originally conceived as a means of protection and warning, over time begins to obey the laws of dramaturgy and ratings. The documentarian's focus is no longer just on the host himself, but also on how the channel assembles the story, calculates the degree of shock, and creates a convenient image of the 'model predator' on screen.
We are shown not individual scandals, but an entire ecosystem: media, police, activists, and the public, which mutually fueled (and will continue to fuel) the existence of this format. A little over an hour and a half flies by in one breath, awakening primal curiosity and a multitude of emotions, including from how easily someone else's shame, pain, and fear turn into sensational content.
One of the quietest premieres of last year is the comedy drama 'Code 3' by Christopher Leone, telling about an ambulance paramedic, portrayed by Rainn Wilson, known to most viewers for his role as Dwight from the cult sitcom 'The Office'. At first glance, the amusing tone of the narrative and the lead performer together create a feeling of lightness and ease during viewing. However, the film's setup makes it clear that we are facing a person suffering from deep depression at his job.
Rainn Wilson demonstrated perhaps one of the best performances of his career. Relying on his clownish persona, he masterfully plays on the contrast of irony and drama, showing the full depth of feelings and experiences with just a glance. The character he embodies is full of despair, cynicism, and indifference, but at the same time looks extremely human, evoking sincere sympathy and understanding. Many rightly note the similarity of 'Code 3' with the harsh drama of Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire, as both films touch on synonymous themes. However, unlike the naturalistic noir with Sean Penn, Christopher Leone's tragicomedy gives viewers hope for a bright future, which is so lacking in our permanently unstable world.
The adaptation of the bestseller 'Black Flies', a participant in last year's Cannes Film Festival, has reached Russian cinemas — the shocking thriller 'Asphalt Jungle' with Sean Penn and Ta
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According to the plot of the film 'Downhill', Aurora (the wonderful Joana Santos) immigrated from Portugal to Scotland in search of a better life and got a job at a warehouse of a local analogue of Wildberries. The better life did not work out, and day by day she only looks for goods that need to be sorted and shipped. She and her colleagues understand that, in general, you cannot live like this: even robots would find such work unbearable, and Aurora is a living person with interests, feelings, and hobbies. We, however, practically do not see them: a person adapts to the environment, and the only way to adapt in Aurora's living conditions is to suppress emotions, give up leisure, and to some extent stop being oneself.
Aurora's drama is mundane; there are no tragedies in her life — events that would be easy to classify as such and lament over — because her entire life from a certain angle is a tragedy. Of unsettlement, confusion, internal migration towards hopeless melancholy. The debut of Laura Carreira is not without reason compared to the cinema of Ken Loach — like the main British socialist, she is concerned with the internal destruction of a person against the backdrop of an external crisis of society. But where Loach always shows the pathos of class solidarity, Carreira offers a rather tender melancholy of everyday episodes. Unrequited love for a good-natured Pole (a great scene in a bar), a scar on the hand of a sociable saleswoman, an extra portion of stew in moments of hunger; ultimately — simple kindness.
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