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The Hollywood Reporter picks the best overlooked films of the year.

December 27, 2025 2:00pm

Published on December 27, 2025

Hidden Gems 2025 (Clockwise from top left): ‘Lesbian Space Princess,’ ‘The Last Viking,’ ‘The Ballad of Wallis Island,’ ‘The Botanist’ © We Made A Thing Studios/TrustNordisk/Alistair Heap/Arsin Meiyu/Monologue Films

With the race for the Oscars starting to narrow, and a small cadre of frontrunners monopolizing all the hot takes and column inches, *The Hollywood Reporter *wants to spare some time for those films that got overlooked this year. The hidden gems that we loved but, for whatever reason, failed to light up awards season or catch fire at the box office.

We’ve polled our critics, reporters, and trusted tastemakers to come up with an oddball collection of cinema delights — from European art house to Asian animation to low-budget U.S. horror — that got lost in the shuffle but deserve another look.

Afternoons of Solitude

Image Credit: Courtesy of Films Boutique

In this immersive documentary, Catalan director Albert Serra uses the same stripped-down slow-cinema techniques he perfected in his 2022 drama breakout Pacifiction — the long takes, the contemplative silences, the quasi-dream mood — to craft a beguiling portrait of Andrés Roca Rey, a 27-year-old Peruvian bullfighter who has become a star in the scene. While never downplaying the brutality of a blood sport performed as high art, Serra gives a masterclass in tone and texture that transforms a controversial tradition into a hypnotic study of ego and mortality.

Dragonfly

Image Credit: Courtesy of EIFF

Andrea Riseborough and Brenda Blethyn dazzle in this bleak and shocking slice of British kitchen-sink drama that takes a surprising twist. Paul Andrew Williams’ movie follows Elisie, and elderly woman living in a drab housing complex (Blethyn) who gets help from her next door neighbor Colleen (Riseborough), arousing feelings of jealousy and resentment from Elsie’s son John (Jason Watkins). What feels like a Ken Loach social drama makes bold and surprising tonal shift into the horror genre in the final reel. Riseborough and Blethyn are at the top of their game (they got a joint best acting award at Tribeca) and the film’s final jolt lingers in the memory.

Drowning Dry

Image Credit: Courtesy of Locarno Film Festival

Lithuanian director Laurynas Bareiša follows up his Venice winner Pilgrims (2021) with an even more haunting sophomore feature that cements his status as a major new voice in Baltic cinema. Using a fragmented, non-linear structure that jumps around like a misremembered dream, Bareiša tracks two sisters and their families during a fateful lakeside retreat where macho posturing and petty domestic tensions give way to a sudden, devastating tragedy. Drowning Dry won best director and best performance honors for its cast at Locarno last year. While its pacing and elliptical structure might not be for everyone, this is a masterful study of how trauma ripples through time, and rewards a patient re-watch.

Ghost Trail

Image Credit: Music Box Films/Courtesy Everett Collection

In this, his debut feature, director Jonathan Millet eschews the high-octane tropes of the espionage genre for a restrained, slow-burning thriller that trades in psychological complexity. Adam Bessa delivers a standout, internalized performance as Hamid, a former Syrian professor turned member of a secret cell of exiles tracking war criminals living in Europe. When he believes he has located his former torturer (Tawfeek Barhom) in Strasbourg, the film shifts into a tense game of cat-and-mouse that relies on Hamid’s ability to identify his monster using only his sensory memories — the sound of the man’s voice, his smell — rather than gadgets or gunfire. It’s a sophisticated exploration of survivor’s guilt and the grueling moral cost of seeking justice in the shadows.

Holy Cow

In her spirited, and César-nominated debut, writer-director Louise Courvoisier delivers a scrapy and rowdy coming-of-age story set in the high-stakes world of artisanal cheesemaking. The film follows Totone (Clément Faveau), an 18-year-old forced into sudden adulthood and the care of his younger sister after their father’s death. Driven by the need for money to keep their farm, Totone and his friends attempt to produce a prize-winning Comté cheese for a local competition. Featuring a cast of non-professional actors, the film captures the sun-drenched, rustic charm of France’s Jura region with a story that manages to be both crudely funny and sweetly touching.

It Ends

Image Credit: Jazleana Jones/Courtesy of Snoot Entertainment

A road trip among childhood friends turns into a long drive through hell — and a powerful metaphor for the existential dread of a generation that fears it has no future. More conceptual horror than gory nail-biter,* It Ends* follows friends on a late-night food run who become trapped on an infinite highway with otherworldly terrors lurking beyond. Confined in their Jeep Cherokee, they must decide whether to accept their fate or attempt escape. Writer/director/editor Alexander Ullom makes the most of his location, one vehicle, four-actor setup, and while the strain occasionally shows, he gets a lot of mileage out of his high-concept scenario before the gas runs out.

*Kabul Between Prayers *

Afghanistan has slipped out of the headlines, but Dutch-Afghan filmmaker Aboozar Amini reminds us of the ongoing struggles, and the precarious humanity, of those left behind after the U.S. withdrawal in 2021. This intimate and heartbreaking documentary centers on Samim, 23, a devoted soldier of the Taliban’s ideology caught between the daily battles as a sustenance farmer and the alluring promises of martyrdom. But the heart of the film is Samim’s younger brother, Rafi, 14, who idolizes his big brother and, amid the confusion of adolescence, is preparing to leave childhood behind and enter a world shaped by decades of military intervention and resulting radicalization.

Lesbian Space Princess

Image Credit: © We Made A Thing Studios/Berlin Film Festival

This Aussie indie gem is a sapphic sci-fi animated adventure involving an introverted space princess who springs into action when her ex-girlfriend is kidnapped by an extraterrestrial race of toxic incels: the Straight While Maliens. Combining deadpan humor with a heartfelt tale of self-discovery and romance, all filtered through a Cartoon Network aesthetic, Lesbian Space Princess is a genre-mashing, “Inter-Gay-Lactic” delight.

My Father’s Shadow

Image Credit: Courtesy of Cannes Film Festival

A father (played by Slow Horses star Sopé Dirisu) struggles to connect with his sons over the course of a single day and one consequential journey across Lagos. It’s June 12, 1993, and Nigeria is holding its first election since the coup of the early ’80s. What should be a fun outing turns into something much more frantic as the results come in and the military regime begins to crack down. Visually stunning, Akinola Davies Jr.’s debut feature blends the personal with the political to examine the weight of paternal history and the inescapable influence of a past that refuses to stay buried.

Oslo Trilogy

Image Credit: Agnete Brun

This trilogy of back-to-back-to-back films from Norwegian novelist and director Dag Johan Haugerud is all about sex, baby. But instead of explicit on-screen erotica, Haugerud gives us shockingly intimate conversations and provocative empathy.

In Sex, which premiered in Berlin last year, a heterosexual chimney-sweep, happily married for 20 years, has a hook-up with another man and ponders what that means about his sexual identity. Love follows a free-living physician, fond of casual sex, and her nurse colleague, a gay man, who develops unanticipated feelings for one of his patients. Dreams, which won Berlin this year, explores the mutability of sexual identity and the power dynamics involved in love and romance through the story of a student who falls for her female teacher.

The three films are thematically linked but don’t share common characters or plot lines, and can be watched in any order. Together, they are a radically hopeful depiction of love and lust, of the connections we all long for.

Room Temperature

John Waters named Zac Farley and Dennis Cooper’s low-budget head-scratcher to his best-of list for 2025, and who are we to argue with the Pope of Trash? The film’s plot centers on an eccentric family living in the California desert whose annual tradition of creating an elaborate home haunted house for Halloween becomes a bizarre, tense art project dominated by the father’s obsessive vision. Strange and disturbing, it is also oddly moving and very funny.

Steve

Image Credit: Robert Viglasky/Neflix

Netflix gave a blink-and-you-missed-it 2-week theatrical release to Cillian Murphy’s new drama in early September, but the British drama, Murphy’s third collaboration with Belgian director Tim Mielants (after last year’s Small Things Like These, and several episodes of Peaky Blinders), is worth another look. Murphy plays the titular Steve, a devoted headmaster at a school for at-risk youth. The film plays out over a single, very bad day for Steve, as he struggles to care for his charges, and keep the school running, while battling his own issues of guilt, addiction and pure physical exhaustion. Often harrowing, but also deeply moving, Steve features another startlingly subtle performance by Murphy, who is using his post-Oppenheimer cred to explore smaller, more delicate roles.

The Ballad of Wallis Island

Image Credit: Focus Features

It would be hard to think of a more typically British movie than this charmer from director James Griffiths. Charles Heath is an eccentric, widowed millionaire and superfan of disbanded folk duo McGwyer Mortimer — the former romantic couple Herb McGwyer and Nell Mortimer. Heath wants to get his favorite band back together and invites the duo — who haven’t spoken for decades — to separate private performances at his home on the remote Wallis Island. Once there, he surprises them with the news that this is a reunion gig. Co-written by Tim Key (who plays Heath) and Tom Basden (playing McGwyer, it co-stars Carey Mulligan as Mortimer. A romantic, melancholy and wholly delightful heartwarmer that always stays on the right side of twee.

The Baltimorons

Image Credit: Jon Bregel/SXSW

This bittersweet holiday romance is the perfect counter-programming to the saccharine overload of the Xmas movie season. Jay Duplass, in his solo feature debut, sans brother Mark, delivers a quirky, non-frills dramedy with *After Hours *vibes. Co-writer Michael Strassner stars as a recently sober ex-improv comic who breaks a tooth on Christmas Eve and requires urgent dental care. He strikes up an unlikely romance with the older dentist (Liz Larsen), and the two explore Baltimore together. What could have been rom-com cringe is, in Duplass’ subtle hands, sweet but never treacly, with plenty of humor and a humanism that sneaks up on you.

The Botanist

Image Credit: Arsin Meiyu/MONOLOGUE FILMS

Jing Yi’s graceful, ephemeral drama doesn’t break much new narrative ground. This is a typical coming-of-age movie about Arsin, a lonely kid in a small town, who falls for a neighboring girl and worries he may lose her if her family moves to the big city. What sets Jing’s feature debut apart is its unique setting, in the stunning landscape of northern China, on the border with Kazakhstan, and its obsession with nature. (Our hero Arsin is a budding botanist and spends his idle time collecting plant specimens for his collection.) There’s not an iPhone or video game in sight. A joy.

The Girl in the Snow

Louise Hémon’s hypnotic, visually dazzling French drama is set in 1899 in a claustrophobic snowbound Hautes-Alpes village. Shortly after the arrival of a lowlander — the young, idealistic school teacher Aimée (Galatéa Bellugi) — an avalanche claims the first local victim and the villagers start to look at Aimée as a bad omen. Hémon films her folklorish-tale with an almost documentary intensity, framing the world of the villagers against the colossal might and mystery of the snowcapped mountains that surround and encompass them. A startling directorial debut that marks Hémon as a talent to watch.

The Last Viking

Image Credit: Venice Film Festival

A bloody but delightful black comedy from Danish director Anders Thomas Jensen, the twisted mind behind Riders of Justice (2020), Men & Chicken (2015), and *Adam’s Apples *(2005). The plot mashes up genre conventions — a bank robber gets his brother to hide his heist haul, hoping to recover the loot when he gets out of prison — with inspired absurdity.

When Anker (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) comes home, he finds his brother Manfred (Mads Mikkelsen ) in no state to help. In the interim, the always-troubled Manfred has had a psychic break. He’s convinced he’s John Lennon. Manfred sees no other choice: He rounds up patients who think they are Paul, George and Ringo to get the band back together and try and jog Manfred’s memory of where he buried the cash. Jensen manages to ground the madcap antics and, especially in the final reel, gory violence, in a deeply humane story about love and acceptance. It’s also wicked funny.

The Ugly Stepsister

Image Credit: Marcel-Zyskind

Emilie Blichfeldt’s period shocker, which premiered at Sundance, gives Cinderella the body horror treatment, retelling the fairytale from the perspective of a stepsister desperate for beauty. Blichfeldt combines the lush, slightly kitschy aesthetic of 1970s Czech fantasy films — the Czech fairytales are still holiday standards across Northern Europe — with full-on bloody gore, including a nausea-inducing tapeworm scene, to visualize the brutal violence done on, and often by, women, in the pursuit of socially-approved beauty standards. Disney meets The Substance.

Twinless

Image Credit: Greg Cotten/Courtesy of Sundance Institute

James Sweeney’s sly dark comedy was a Sundance standout, but the Roadside Attractions/Lionsgate release fell between the cracks, coming out at the tail end of summer, just before the fall festival season. Twinless deserves better. The story of a techy young man (Dylan O’Brien) who becomes unmoored after the death of his twin brother, this is an off-kilter and often shocking movie that somehow manages to balance deadpan humor with emotional gut punches.

Who by Fire

Image Credit: KimStim

In the third feature from the Quebecois director Philippe Lesage, wounded masculinity and elemental male rage derail an idyllic retreat in the Canadian wilderness. Two generations of filmmakers — established adults who have compromised on their dreams, and budding talents worried they might be compromised before they even begin — drink and talk and drink and talk, and friendships begin to unravel in this claustrophobic, slow-burn masterpiece that confirms Lesage’s status as a talent to watch.

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