In no particular order, here are The Conversation’s top five films of 2025 as reviewed by our experts.

1. One Battle After Another

The latest film from director Paul Thomas Anderson follows Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio), an ageing hippie hero and a relic of a fictional noughties brigade, the French 75. Led by his lover Perfidia Beverley Hills (Teyana Taylor), they robbed banks, bombed buildings and liberated detention centres in the name of their ideology of “free borders, free choices, free from fear”.

Left to bring up their daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), Bob spends his days off-grid unshaven, smoking weed. All is (somewhat) well until the brutal army veteran, Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn), who believes himself to be Willa’s real father, barrels back into their lives in pursuit of his “daughter”.

Leonardo DiCaprio as Bob. Warner Brothers

It is at heart a family melodrama, drawing on the classic tropes of bad versus good father and conflicted mother, questioning the legitimacy of the family unit. On to these narratives bones, Anderson grafts a vision of a post-Obama America in thrall to shadowy corporate interests, a legacy of rounding up and deporting immigrants, and an old white male order hell-bent on its own agenda of personal revenge.

After the lights have gone up, it may well be that what stays with you most is its terrifying imagery of detention centres and the horror of immigrant round-ups. It is this certainly that led Steven Spielberg to acclaim “this insane movie” as more relevant than Anderson could ever have imagined.

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• ** Read more: One Battle After Another: this insane movie about leftwing radicals and rightwing institutions is a powerful exploration of US today ** *

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Ruth Barton, Fellow Emeritus in Film Studies at Trinity College Dublin

2. Sinners

Sinners is set in Jim Crow-era Mississippi, a time of harsh segregation and racial injustice. It follows Sammie (Miles Caton), a young Black guitar player, who gets his big break when his cousins, the gangster twins Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan), return to open a juke joint in their hometown. This new venture brings money, music and a sort of freedom but also danger to their door.

On the juke joint’s opening night, Sammie’s blues music draws the Irishman Remmick (Jack O’Connell) to the bar. But Remmick is no average man, he’s a vampire.

One of the twins (Michael B. Jordan) and Sammie (Miles Caton) in Sinners. Warner Brothers.

Remmick uses his own song, The Rocky Road to Dublin to invite the Black patrons to join him and the others he has turned into vampires, offering them the chance to escape Jim Crow Mississippi. The song he chooses, although catchy, is a story of exchanging one form of suffering (life in Ireland during the height of English oppression) for another – life on the English mainland where the ballad tells of victimisation and violence. This is one of many moment where the real stories of Irish and Indigenous Choctaw oppression are used in the film to draw connection between oppressed people and the stories they tell and were told.

Such nuance within the film meant that I watched it several times and gained more insight and enjoyment with each viewing.

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• ** Read more: Sinners: how real stories of Irish and Choctaw oppression inform the film ** *

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By Rachel Stuart, Senior Lecturer in Criminology and Deviant Identities at Brunel

3. A Real Pain

We are constantly confronted by history. The history of our cultures and traditions. Of our families. Of our own personal relationships. Can we – or should we seek to – ever escape the tightly woven net of our preoccupation with our past?

Jesse Eisenberg explores these questions with curiosity, humour and insight in the lightly plotted, semi-road movie, A Real Pain.

Benji (Kieran Culkin) and David Kaplan in A Real Pain. Searchlight Pictures

David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin) are 40-something cousins, who are reunited for a trip to Poland in memory of their recently deceased grandmother, a Holocaust survivor with whom both, especially Benji, were very close.

The tourist group perform their Jewishness within unstated yet acknowledged limits to their engagement– with Poland, with Jewish history, with each other and indeed with themselves. Within this muted, routinised remembrance culture, Benji’s unpredictable behaviour starts to detonate small outbreaks of “real pain”, which are annoying and upsetting in equal measure.

What “pain” should take precedence? That of the violently amputated cultural history to which its inheritors feel a moral duty of remembrance? Or the ongoing needs and demands of the present, which cannot linger indefinitely in history’s dark shadow. The great strength of Eisenberg’s subtle, understated film is to pose such questions without suggesting, let alone imposing, facile answers.

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• ** Read more: A Real Pain is a subtle but powerful exploration of remembrance culture and personal trauma ** *

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By Barry Langford, Professor of Film Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London

4. Sorry, Baby

Sorry, Baby is the directorial debut of its writer and star, Eva Victor. The film follows Agnes (Victor), an English professor at a small American college, in the aftermath of a sexual assault by one of her teachers when she was a student there.

The story, based on Victor’s own experience of trauma, is structured in non-linear chapters encompassing the time after, before and during the assault. The result is a raw and unflinching, yet nuanced, depiction of trauma’s aftermath, which presents Agnes as a fully rounded and complex character.

Writer/director Eva Victor as Agnes in Sorry, Baby. A24

Sorry, Baby resists the idea that trauma must define a character’s identity. Instead, the film explores how people live with, around and beyond painful experiences. Agnes carries trauma with her, but moves forward with hurt, joy, and desire - alive with humour and contradiction.

This debut marks Victor as a distinctive voice in contemporary cinema, one who trusts her characters and her audience alike. With Sorry, Baby, Victor shows us a new way to tell stories about trauma, healing, and the small, vital moments in between. This is a filmmaker to watch.

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• ** Read more: Sorry, Baby: a sad, funny, profound film about life after trauma ** *

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Laura O’Flanagan, PhD Candidate in the School of English at Dublin City University

5. Weapons

The film opens with the chilling premise of 17 children from the same classroom vanishing without a trace, leaving behind only grainy security footage of them running with their arms outstretched, like little planes. However, the true horror unfolds as the community of Maybrook – a small town in Pennsylvania – spirals into chaos instead of unity.

Parents accuse teachers, neighbours distrust one another and innocent lives are upended in the search for a culprit. This breakdown is grounded in psychological research, showcasing how human behaviour can deteriorate under pressure.

Julia Garner as teacher Justine Gandy in Weapons. Warner Brothers.

Social identity theory is a scientific concept that theorises that your brain is wired to compartmentalise the world into “us” (those we consider good) and “them” (those perceived as threats). This process intensifies when people face fear or stress.

In Weapons, we see this theory in action as the community dismantles itself. Teacher Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) becomes an easy target, not due to concrete evidence, but because she fits neatly into the role of the other – “them”. The parents of the missing children seek someone to vilify, and she becomes the scapegoat of their fears.

Weapons succeeds as horror because it doesn’t rely on supernatural monsters or gore. Instead, it shows us the real monsters – the ones we become when our psychology works exactly the way evolution has led it to.

Edward White, PhD Candidate in Psychology at Kingston University

Honourable mentions go to Pillion, Frankenstein, The Ballad of Wallis Island and Companion.

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