We share the Best Movies of 2025 article as it appeared last month in our 2025 Yearbook, which you can buy in hardcover for €19.95 or in digital format for €3.99. There is also a “hardcover” + digital format “bundle” for €20.99 that includes free shipping costs for the Peninsula and the Balearic Islands, for a limited time. *The list includes films released between December 1, 2024 and November 30, 2025.
1.-One battle after another
A group of young anti-system revolutionaries fight every day to change things in a morally deplorable world. That is the premise of ‘One Battle After Another’, where Paul Thomas Anderson once again accepts the challenge of adapting a novel by his revered Thomas Pynchon after ‘Pure Vice’. During its almost three hours of duration, this film leaves you breathless, both for its feverish pace and for its powerful and hopeless speech. The world is in the hands of crazy people and idealism and the hope that this will change is inevitably diluted over time. Paul Thomas Anderson makes a film of unfathomable magnitude, whose lucidity elevates him as a true revolutionary of American cinema. Complete review of ‘One battle after another’.
2.-The Brutalist
The first part of ‘The Brutalist’ has been the best that has been seen on a movie screen in a long time. From the dazzling opening sequence, with the chaotic arrival at Ellis Island while Daniel Blumberg’s incredible music plays, the odyssey that the protagonist lives until he is reunited with his wife is of astonishing visual strength, dramatic complexity and narrative fluidity. You arrive at the 15-minute timed intermission wanting to applaud. The second half continues to be impressive, despite some dips in pace. However, they are still simple slips in the configuration of a whole full of narrative and stylistic ambition, whose viewing has the capacity to leave an impact on the viewer as lasting as the structure of a brutalist building. Complete review of ‘The Brutalist’.
3.-Sundays
At the end of the screening of ‘Los Domingos’ in Donosti, the feeling of having seen the Golden Shell was palpable in the atmosphere. The third feature film by Alauda Ruiz de Azúa (‘Cinco Lobitos’, the ‘Querer’ series) is one of those great films that come to stir consciences and generate debates. However, the director never opts for scandal or provocation, signing a beautiful coming of age from an unusual place: Ainara (Blanca Soroa), 17 years old, wants to become a cloistered nun. Her family, upper-middle class and Catholic-educated, receives the news with stupor, thus generating an enormous conflict between each of its members, especially her aunt (Patricia López Aranaiz), who is not a believer and does not understand her niece’s vocation. Through a solid and vibrant narrative, Ruiz de Azúa explores with immense lucidity the doubts that arise when faced with such a complicated decision. The best thing about ‘Los Domingos’ is its attempt to understand what is totally foreign to us and do so from a perspective that neither judges nor instructs. The director’s reflection of society may be bitter, but it is tremendously accurate and realistic. His way of filming, discreet and without fuss, only reinforces the narrative force and a perfectly constructed script. The 10 best movies from San Sebastián.
4.-Weapons
‘Weapons’ is one of those films that blur film genres. The public goes to the cinema expecting a horror film and finds a disconcerting mix of humor, suspense and touches of suburban horror, gore and “jumpscares” that work even if you don’t want them to. A tremendously allegorical film that offers no easy answers or fixed interpretations. It is valid to feel bewildered, since ‘Weapons’ works equally as a horror film (the iconic Aunt Gladys will have her own film), as a comedy horror and even as a veiled social criticism, directed at certain “witches” who corrupt children. Complete review of ‘Weapons’.
5.-Emilia Pérez
‘Emilia Perez’ is a very strange hybrid, a mole with all kinds of ingredients that, surprisingly, works wonderfully. After a fabulous start, with a musical number on par with ‘Annette’, the film advances through increasingly slippery territories in terms of its dramatic coherence: a musical that transforms into a narco-thriller and then takes a turn towards the most kitsch melodrama. A transition between tones and genres that has its equivalent in the physical and moral change that the protagonist experiences. Complete review of ‘Emilia Pérez’.
6.-Sirat
Although he had already attracted attention on the festival circuit with his first two films, ‘All of you are captains’ (2010) and ‘Mimosas’ (2016), both premiered (and awarded) in Cannes, it was with ‘Lo que arde’ (2019) when Oliver Laxe revealed himself as a superlative filmmaker, capable of combining an unwavering authorial vocation with the ability to connect with broader film-loving audiences.
Beyond the extraordinary sensory experience that viewing entails, something common in Laxe’s films, what is most surprising about this film is its narrative dimension. ‘Sirat’ is essentially an adventure film: the physical and metaphysical epic of a group of travelers who are forced to take a dangerous detour to reach their destination. A shamanic mix of twilight western, mystical road movie and war suspense story, with ‘Cursed Cargo’ (‘Sorcerer’, 1977), by William Friedkin, as the main reference. In the end, paraphrasing the meaning of the word “sirat”, it is an inner journey from hell – the one that can open up in our lives when we least expect it – towards paradise, towards healing. Complete review of ‘Sirat’.
7.-The Mastermind
The mastermind of Kelly Reichardt once again devises a script that transforms a genre historically loaded with action and testosterone (the theft of some paintings) into a delicate almost-Bressonian exercise that imposes its own rules and its own times. ‘The Mastermind’ is an anti-epic and minimalist adventure from a filmmaker who continues to investigate the complex history of the United States with small and human stories but brimming with great cinema. Complete review of ‘The Mastermind’.
8.-Blue Moon
Richard Linklater approaches the tragic figure of lyricist Lorenz Hart (he died of alcoholism at the age of 48) by recreating a single night in his life: the premiere of the successful musical ‘Oklahoma!’ (1943), the first work that Richard Rodgers composed without him. Starring a sensational Ethan Hawke – in what could be the best performance of his career – ‘Blue Moon’ is a biopic that moves away from the usual Wikipedian appearance to offer a portrait of the character that is more psychological than biographical, more focused on transmitting his character and sensitivity through words (the film is wonderfully written) than on listing his life and miracles. The 10 Best Movies of Gijón 2025.
9.-Pilgrimage
Carla Simón closes a thematic trilogy on the family history of its author, after ‘Verano 1993’ and ‘Alcarràs’. ‘Romería’ is divided into two timelines: one in the 80s and the other in the 2000s. The latter works as the foundation on which the film is built, while the other takes a more lyrical drift. Through conversations with different family members and relying on the diary that her mother left written, she reconstructs the story of her parents, victims of AIDS. Through a relevant story on both a personal and social level, Carla Simón takes a giant step into the big cinematographic leagues with a film that seeks to convert memories into images in order to resurrect the dead. Complete review of ‘Pilgrimage’.
10.-The ugly stepsister
The debutante Emilie Blichfeldt starts from Grimm’s Cinderella to mutilate her and remove her entrails. It does so through three narrative strategies, three operations that go far beyond simple cosmetic surgery. The first is to take the older stepsister’s point of view. This change in perspective allows the writer and director to focus attention on the suffering of a character who struggles to fit into an aesthetic ideal symbolized by a delicate little shoe. The second strategy is to reinterpret the story in a feminist key. And the third, bet on comedy and horror. With ‘The Substance’ as an unavoidable reference and formal nods to the cinema of Walerian Borowczyk, ‘The Ugly Stepsister’ combines grandiose humor, pop irony and body horror to create a sharp gore satire that works equally well as macabre entertainment, period fantasy and perverse fairy tale with a substantial moral. Complete review of ‘The Ugly Stepsister’.
11.-Materialists
12.-Witch hunt
13.-Queer
14.-The light we imagine
15.-The Order
16.-When autumn falls
17.-A simple accident
18.-Memories of a snail
19.-Afternoons of loneliness
20.-The girl with the needle
