Best films of 2025: from Flow to The Brutalist

Adrien Brody as the 'gaunt, haunted' László Tóth in Brady Corbet's Oscar-winning film, The Brutalist

(Image credit: Alamy / FlixPix)

last updated 31 March 2025

This year is packed with highly anticipated sequels and fresh new reels, from "Bridget Jones" and "Mission Impossible" to Oscar-winning animation and a Bob Dylan biopic.

The Brutalist

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.

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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".

"Well, this is a delight," said Wendy Ide in The Observer. "A playfully meta" comedy set in large part on a gay nudist beach near Athens. Indeed, "The Summer with Carmen" "is so breezily sun-kissed and adorable" that you could almost prescribe it as a cure for seasonal affective disorder. Yorgos Tsiantoulas and Andreas Labropoulos play Demos and Nikitas, two best friends who while away their time on the beach coming up with ideas for films that Nikitas, an aspiring writer-director, could make. Demos eventually suggests that he draws inspiration from events of a previous summer, which featured "a break-up, a hook-up or ten – and a small, worried-looking stray dog named Carmen". As a film, it's "frothy and seemingly frivolous", but director Zacharias Mavroeidis strikes "a deft balance between gently mocking his two central characters and celebrating their enduring bond; between sentiment and saltiness; between adhering to the rules of screenwriting and skewering them". He also delivers "crisply observed characters and fully lived-in relationships".

This is a film "about nothing", said Jonathan Romney in the FT; it is "almost Seinfeldian in its cultivation of knowing inconsequentiality". And though "daring and ebulliently queer", it is rather "shapeless" and "in-jokey", an "extended and somewhat forced wink at viewers who have pored over screenwriting manuals… and flung them away in exasperation". With its "bright and sunny palette", the film is easy on the eye and not the most taxing of intellectual exercises, said Catherine Bray in The Guardian. "Come for the acres of flesh, stay for the cute dog."

"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".

Restoring "mystery and magic to the concept of an undead bloodsucker", "Nosferatu" is a remake of F.W. Murnau's 1922 silent classic, which was based on Bram Stoker's "Dracula", said BBC Culture. Written and directed by Robert Eggers, it stars Lily-Rose Depp and Nicholas Hoult. Bill Skarsgård (who is also returning as It the clown in a new TV series next year) will play the "horrible old vampire". 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".

On 5 September 1972, 11 Israeli athletes were taken hostage at the Munich Olympics and then shot by Black September, a Palestinian militant organisation. Director Tim Fehlbaum retells the story through the eyes of the ABC Sports team as they "scramble to follow the tragedy" and in the process write "the rules of capturing a terrorist attack live on air", said Esquire. "We thought it would be interesting to take a step back, look at the first time a crisis like this was on live television, and reflect on how we consume media today," said Fehlbaum. Starring Peter Sarsgaard, it is however "more of a white-knuckled journalism thriller than a deep look into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict".

"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".

The title of the eighth "Mission: Impossible" film suggests "it might be Tom Cruise's final mission", said The Guardian. Its budget of $400 million (£314 million) makes it the fourth most expensive film ever. "The Final Reckoning" follows on from 2023's "Dead Reckoning" and sees the return of Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Angela Bassett and Vanessa Kirby, joined by Hayley Atwell, Pom Klementieff and Hannah Waddingham. As Ethan Hunt, Cruise is "up against a dangerous AI program", The Entity, which "seems to predict his every move" and if it falls "into the wrong hands" could be disastrous, said Variety. He discovers The Entity is "stashed aboard" an old Russian submarine, but there's a "foe from Ethan's past" on its trail too…

Twenty-three years on, Cillian Murphy is rumoured to be reprising his "28 Days Later" lead role in this "highly anticipated sequel" to the 2002 zombie tale, said Metro. Among other cast members are "some of Hollywood's biggest names" including Jodie Comer and Aaron Taylor-Johnson. No plot details have been released but Danny Boyle is back in the director's seat and the production is believed to have been filmed on iPhone.

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