It is always an honour to be invited to contribute words to this esteemed site, but particularly so this year, having spent some much needed time in the company of its co-founders and current energy flash and inspiring wordsmith at the 2025 Encounters festival in Bristol in September. It was a chance to reflect on twenty years of working together in various guises and a longer companionship that seems to get more meaningful and necessary to embrace as the years continue to pass. So it is doubly meaningful to compile my list of ten cinematic highlights in the still warm glow of that delightful encounter. Thank you MarBelle, Sarah, and Rob. In honour of that encounter, I have included two shorts in my top ten, and also, because it’s me, there are no honourable mentions but a cheeky inclusion of a film to be paired with each of my final ten choices. Because I can never just do what I’m asked. They are ranked, and all choices (inc. paired with title) are films released in the UK in 2025. Here’s to 2026 and more great cinema and more in-person shenanigans with friends who are fellow film-comrades.
10. PRESENCE | Steven Soderbergh
Of the two invigorating genre movies released [by one of my favourite filmmakers] this year, I expected the crime film to be the one that stayed with me more. While it has resonance, it’s Soderbergh’s dizzying and unnerving POV ghost story that has remained lodged in my memory and sensory bank the most. A formal delight but also an unsettling treatise on surveillance culture and a profound meditation on mortality and grief. I loved how he found a new way to tell an old story, and so deftly. He remains an absolute gem of a filmmaker.
Pair with: Black Bag (Soderbergh)
9. WEAPONS | Zach Cregger
The second horror movie in my list, and there could have been more (see some of the pair withs). Zach Cregger’s film builds on the promise of his debut Barbarian (2022) with another inventively structured film that takes familiar concepts and twists them into something new, something that feels of its moment politically but also timeless in its confident handling of horror conventions. The way he handles the tone shift in the final act, delivering something hilarious out of dreadful foreboding is a masterclass. One of the best studio genre films of the past few years.
Pair with: Together (Shanks)
8. SORRY, BABY | Eva Victor
This has some of the funniest moments of the year, and they jut fiercely up against some of the most uncomfortable and saddest moments also. A screenwriting masterclass and a lesson in casting too. There is a scene between writer/director/star Eva Victor and John Carroll Lynch that is absolutely a scene for the ages. Proof that there is still life in the American Indie as a genre, and also that A24’s devil dealing with Apple and Trump Jr. hasn’t meant a complete capitulation of taste and class. Another great addition to recent excoriations of contemporary Academia too.
Pair with: Good One (Donaldson)
Most Popular
7. I SAW THE FACE OF GOD IN THE JET WASH | Mark Jenkin
While the world waits for the full release of his latest feature in 2026, Rose of Nevada, Mark Jenkin treated festival audiences with the latest of his unparalleled diary films in 2025. Expansive, hilarious, meta-fictional, auto-fictional, it dazzles with its dexterity. Jenkin’s stream of consciousness narration hits new absurd heights, while also being insightful and delightful about the changes in his life post Bait (2019). His trademarks in sound and personal archive are present in this latest experiment with a form he’s familiar with. Not a lesser work, not an amuse-bouche for longer form, something formidable and unique in its own right.
Pair with: One to One: John & Yoko (Rice-Edwards & Macdonald)
6. A LADDER | Scott Barley
The loss of David Lynch this year left the world of cinema reeling. Pun intended. While many people clamoured to crown his successors (unsuccessfully), Scott Barley released his latest short. This stunning film, which screened at a Lynch tribute, is a love letter to a hero, a reminder of what strangeness and strange beauty looks and sounds like (ergo what we have lost in Lynch), but also what a kindred spirit of moving and unsettling experiential cinema Barley continues to be. A stunning work that should be watched, as per the director’s instructions (and Lynch liked to tell his viewers [and projectionist friends] how to watch his work) in the dark with headphones on. Loud.
Pair with: L’avance (Kebe)
5. KONTINENTAL ’25 | Radu Jude
Radu Jude is by any measure one of the most consistently interesting filmmakers currently working. On the level of form, aesthetics and politics. One of two films doing the rounds in 2025 (three if you count his Warhol grave gawping installation piece Sleep #2), this shot in nine days on an iPhone narrative feature is in some ways his most conventional work for a while. However it feels daring in its immediacy and contemporaneousness – long takes performed in public that feel intimate and virtuosic simultaneously. This is a funny, cutting and incredibly sad in places slice of chaotic 2025 life. A reminder that simplicity of style can feel more cinematic than all the gear and no ideas. Jude remains more vital to cinema with each release it seems. We are lucky to have him.
Pair with: Ebony & Ivory (Hosking)
4. HARVEST | Athina Rachel Tsangari
Shooting on celluloid has become a shorthand for defining the cinematic in an accelerated digital age, and Sean Price Williams’s gorgeous cinematography is here coupled with Athina Rachel Tsangari’s sublime use of time and space, molluscan and out of time, in a film that is majestically textural. Rife with politics and symbolism, it’s also a paean to the collective, to the communal, and it recalls what Tsangari said of filmmaking on the Directors Notes podcast back in 2011 at SXSW. Her latest is a tactile masterpiece and she is a modern master filmmaker. [Watch/Read our Harvest interview with Athina Rachel Tsangari]
Pair with: 28 Years Later (Boyle)
3. THE MASTERMIND | Kelly Reichardt
Another gorgeous, sly, funny and deftly insightful genre play from one of the greatest living (American) filmmakers. Josh O’Connor continues to carve out a delicious roster of performances of crumply, romanticising, out of step men – this one more malevolent than last year’s delightful La Chimera turn – and Reichardt mines the past for sharp commentary on both the present, history and the nature of men. One of the best looking and best scored movies of the year too. Sublime.
Pair with: It Was Just An Accident (Panahi)
2. ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER | Paul Thomas Anderson
Anyone who knows me will be shocked that this is not number one. And there is part of me that maybe put it at number two to spite folks who figured they knew me too well. But my number one is my number one for many reasons. That said, One Battle is an incredible movie. A physical experience and a thrilling encounter. There are so many ways to engage with the film, in form, style and content. The score is incredible, and the performance that for me carries the most grace and power is that of Benicio Del Toro, an actor who I have adored for so long. His performance here is as good as his turn in Inherent Vice. He gets PTA, and he gets Pynchon, like no other, except maybe PTA.
Pair with: Sinners (Coogler)
1. PAVEMENTS | Alex Ross Perry
I couldn’t believe it when I heard that Alex Ross Perry was making a film about Pavement, so soon after my book on Music Films came out, because I knew it would be a film that I would have wanted to write about, given that I just knew it would capture the spirit of the band. While fictional, his brilliant film Her Smell ‘got’ music films, and music as a creative and artistic process (as well as an industry). The final film doesn’t disappoint. It stands as one of the finest achievements in a cruelly neglected genre (outside of my book of course) and one where cinematic artistry can find new ways to honour and react with music. Ross Perry’s film is hilarious, smart, confounding and simultaneously ambitious and seemingly chaotic and instinctive. It’s exactly like the band, but also thrillingly its own beast. One of the best music films ever made, and my film of the year.
Pair with: Videoheaven (Ross Perry)
You can check out the rest of team DN’s Top Ten picks here.
