Best films of 2025: from Mission Impossible to The Brutalist

Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible - The Final Reckoning

(Image credit: FlixPix / Alamy Stock Photo)

last updated 22 May 2025

This year is packed with highly anticipated sequels and fresh new reels, from "Bridget Jones" and "Mission Impossible" to Michael B. Jordan in a Mississippi mobster horror.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning

"For nearly three decades, Tom Cruise has been running, soaring, slugging and white-knuckling it through the Mission: Impossible series," said Manohla Dargis in The New York Times. Small wonder, then, that he looks a bit "beaten up" on the poster for "The Final Reckoning", the franchise's eighth instalment, and perhaps its last. But even if time is catching up with the 62-year-old actor, he is still pushing himself to "lunatic extremes". In this "enjoyably unhinged" follow-up to 2023's "Dead Reckoning Part One", he plunges into deep waters and hangs off airborne planes – "insistently defying the odds as well as his own mortality".

The story picks up where that last film left off, with an AI program called "the Entity" threatening to eradicate mankind, having first taken over the internet and now trying to seize the global nuclear arsenal. Of course it falls to secret agent extraordinaire Ethan Hunt, and his usual sidekicks, to do the impossible and save the human race. In these dark political times, audiences are likely to be thirsting for some "rollicking", stunt-heavy fun from the M:I team, said Nicholas Barber on BBC Culture; but whereas "Dead Reckoning" was a "frothy Euro caper" sprinkled with "mischief, glamour and romance", this instalment manages to be doomy and portentous, as well as silly, with "cod philosophy about destiny and choice" in place of "snappy banter", an excess of ponderous exposition, and far too much of the action taking place in dark caverns and tunnels.

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Brady Corbet's Oscar-winning film follows Hungarian-Jewish architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) and his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones). Together, they flee post-war Europe and travel to the United States to begin rebuilding their lives. This is "not a film to devour, but to be devoured by", said Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent. Pierced with the "fierce cynicism" found in Corbet's earlier works, “The Brutalist” could have been a "traditional historic epic", but is transformed into an "existentially disturbing monster movie. The monster in question is, of course, America."

"Bold, confrontational and oversized in every way imaginable", the sprawling three-hour film is an "uncompromising cinematic statement", said Wendy Ide in The Observer. Shot almost entirely on VistaVision (a format last used in Hollywood in the 1960s), it's a "visually arresting" movie, and Brody is "impressive" as the "gaunt, haunted" László. In all, it's a "remarkable achievement", and the kind of colossal "passion project" that is usually reserved for a tiny handful of "celebrated auteurs". With "The Brutalist", Corbet gains entry to this exclusive club.

With a smidgen of "The Wind in the Willows" and a dollop of "The Incredible Journey", this "charming" film is about an unnamed slate-coloured cat making its way through the vestiges of a ruined civilisation in the aftermath of an environmental catastrophe. When the land around it begins to flood, the cat's only chance is to leap onto a sailing boat, which it shares with a "lolloping" labrador, a "superior" bird, a "sedate" capybara, and, eventually, a lemur. Together, they float towards what we pray is safer ground; what they themselves expect from it, we can only guess. "You could see the film as a piece of outsider art", but children will watch it "until the pixels wear out".

The film isn't "overly eventful", said Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent. The animals "explore a flooded city and have a run-in with a whale". There's some inter-species tension, to be sure: the dog is kind but "obtrusive", the cat "distrustful". Yet "there's something else, more enigmatic and spiritual, at play, too" – for all their differences, the animals realise they have to work together. "Flow" "can't avoid a certain vaporous New Age spaciness", said Jonathan Romney in the FT. But the animation is "brilliantly realised" (even if it has an "unfinished quality" in places), and the characterisation of the creatures is "flawless". This is a movie that will "captivate children and adults alike".

It would be difficult to make a boring documentary about Edna O'Brien, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator. The Irish writer, who died last year aged 93, scarcely said or did "anything uninteresting in her life": she "fearlessly and thrillingly" told the truth about the female experience in her novels and she was "incapable of recounting a duff anecdote". And this "beautifully constructed" portrait certainly does not sell her short. Using previously unseen diary entries, and featuring an interview with O'Brien herself, which she gave shortly before her death, it is a "tender and gripping" tribute to a woman who "carved her own path despite many attempts to bring her into line".

O'Brien is "a gift from the documentary filmmaking gods", said Hilary White in The Irish Independent. Her recollections, which are interspersed with archive footage and contributions from talking heads, are "brittle" and often shocking. We learn how her debut novel, "The Country Girls" (1960), "scandalised" conservative Ireland; and that her success overseas provoked the ire of both her violently abusive, alcoholic father and her novelist husband. Unbowed and newly separated, she moved to London and became "a darling" of its "celebrity set". She threw "lavish parties" attended by the likes of Paul McCartney, had a fling with Robert Mitchum and a relationship with an unnamed British politician that had "severe effects" on her "productivity, personal finances and health". The writer sits at the centre of Sinéad O'Shea's "sobering, endlessly interesting" film, said Kevin Maher in The Times – "a passionate woman in her final days", ruefully reflecting on a life that was glittering, "but always undercut by conflict and gnawing dissatisfaction".

Director Ryan Coogler was responsible for two of Marvel's "most satisfying and textured" films, said Wendy Ide in The Observer: "Black Panther" and its sequel "Wakanda Forever". So he has definitely earned the chance to make a "passion project", but who would have guessed that it would be a film as "wild" and "untrammelled" as this "sexy southern-gothic horror" – "a blues-infused vampire flick in which the music flows as freely as the blood". In "Sinners", Michael B. Jordan takes the dual role of Smoke and Stack, "gangster twins" who have returned to their hometown in Mississippi in 1932 flush from Al Capone's Chicago. They are now intent on opening "a black-owned juke-joint under the noses of the Ku Klux Klan" with their cousin, a talented young blues guitarist (newcomer Miles Caton); but it turns out that an "evil" even greater than the KKK awaits them.

Coogler takes his time to conjure a vivid picture of the black Deep South and its culture, said Angelica Jade Bastién in New York magazine; we see "bracing" shots "of cotton fields plumbed by sharecroppers, endless skies and dusty roads, the verdant expanse of a land that has witnessed so much sorrow"; the characters are cleverly drawn, and brilliantly acted. But about an hour in, Jack O'Connell's vicious Irish vampire arrives, and things go awry. His motives are "thinly drawn and haphazardly framed", and the "connective tissue" that has thus far held the film together gets "lost". A "heady fable of past and future", this bold genre mash-up has "billion-dollar confidence", said Danny Leigh in the FT; yet instead of exploring the political and cultural subtexts raised in the film's first half, Coogler merely "cranks the volume". "Amid the audacity, it feels like a loss of nerve."

"In 1960, John, Paul, George – but not yet Ringo – became The Beatles," said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday. "In 1962, the Rolling Stones were born. But in the year in between, 1961, another key moment in modern musical history took place – the then 19-year-old Bob Dylan arrived in New York" with his acoustic guitar. "A Complete Unknown", the title of which comes from his track "Like a Rolling Stone", is the story of what happened over the next few years, culminating in his divisive switch to electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. Directed by James Mangold ("Walk the Line"), the film "grips, moves and does an excellent job of reminding everyone, even Dylan agnostics", of the importance of his music, thanks not least to its star Timothée Chalamet, "who never stops looking like Timothée Chalamet", yet somehow convinces us that "he might just be the young Bob".

The events building up to Newport unfold rather listlessly, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator – at one point we see Dylan in a record store, checking if his album is in stock – but the film "has a seductive, meditative, cumulative power. I wasn't bored for a single second." As for Chalamet, he is "astonishing, and does his own singing. He may even be better at singing Dylan than Dylan is at singing Dylan."

Every now and then, a film comes along "that understands the potential of cinema so deeply that it changes the medium for everyone", said Kevin Maher in The Times. The 2015 Holocaust drama "Son of Saul" was one of those films, as was "2001: A Space Odyssey". "To that list we now have to add 'Nickel Boys', an adaptation of Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that is told completely, and audaciously, through point-of-view shots of its two protagonists, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson)." Opening in Jim Crow-era Florida, the film introduces us first to Elwood, whose blissful home life is turned on its head when he is sent to the "brutal Nickel Academy, a so-called reform school based on the real-life and equally infamous Dozier School for Boys". There, he meets the "slick but sensitive Turner", and an instant bond is formed. The film commits "welcome sacrilege by altering the horribly downbeat ending of Whitehead's novel"; and though its subject matter is grim, it's surprisingly uplifting.

"The first-person use of the camera may not be a new filmmaking technique," said Alistair Harkness in The Scotsman, but in Nickel Boys, director RaMell Ross "takes it to another level", immersing viewers in the boys' world in a way that is "quite extraordinary". This is a film that is "unlike anything else out there". Whitehead's book could easily have been adapted into a "sedate, conventional" drama, said Radhika Seth in Vogue. Instead, Ross has created "something gorgeously bold and beguiling, bringing a surprising freshness and vitality to an undeniably gruelling story".

Those oh-so familiar "vampire clichés" are absent and it's shot like an "arthouse period drama" with costumes and props appropriate for the 19th-century setting, "spectacular outdoor scenes" shot in the Czech Republic and Romania, and some indoor scenes "illuminated only by candlelight". It is, however, still a Dracula film, so "familiar things keep happening to familiar characters", and while it's less scary than sad it still has its "share of gruesome shocks". Not many Dracula films "give you so much to sink your teeth into".

"Hold the blue soup and pack away the big knickers," said Kevin Maher in The Times: "Bridget Jones has finally grown up." Over three "increasingly shambolic movie outings", we've seen this "de facto national treasure" (deftly played by the Texan actress Renée Zellweger) pratfalling boozily "into mud piles and out of taxis", and worrying incessantly about her "'wobbly bits'. But you can only play the nincompoop for so long, and thankfully, and rather thrillingly, it's all change here – in a film of sly sobriety and uncommon depths."

It turns out that Bridget has had a tough few years, said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday: her beloved father (Jim Broadbent) has died, as has her husband Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) – killed while on a human rights mission to Sudan. That was four years ago. But Bridget, who now lives with her two children in a wisteria-draped house in Hampstead, has decided that it is time to stop moping, and allows a friend to sign her up to Tinder as a "tragic widow seeking sexual reawakening". Two romantic options soon materialise: Roxster, a 29-year-old student nicely played by "One Day"'s Leo Woodall, and Mr Wallaker (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a science teacher at Bridget's kids' posh prep school. Not everything in the film "quite works" – a sequence in which Bridget acquires "trout-pout lips" feels "clumsy and dated", for instance – but Zellweger is "better than ever", Ejiofor is "cleverly restrained", and a "beautifully written last lap will send virtually everyone out onto the streets dabbing gently at their eyes".