Jafar Panahi blocks a scene in It Was Just an Accident (2025)

Just hours before the Gotham Film Awards were to be presented on Monday evening, human-rights lawyer Mostafa Nili announced that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Court had sentenced Jafar Panahi in absentia to one year in prison, a two-year ban on travel outside of Iran, and a prohibition on taking part in any social or political group activities. The charge, as it has been for previous arrests in 2010 and 2022, is “propaganda” against the Republic.

Over the past few weeks, Panahi has been in the U.S. on what Neon, the distributor of his Palme d’Or–winning It Was Just an Accident, has been calling the Accidental Tour. He was in New York for screenings on Saturday and Sunday, and on Monday, It Was Just an Accident won three Gothams: Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best International Feature. In his acceptance speech, Panahi dedicated his wins “to independent filmmakers in Iran and around the world.”

Panahi reportedly plans to remain in the U.S. through awards season—Accident is France’s submission for the Oscar for Best International Feature Film—but then return to Iran. “Iranians are very loyal,” one of Panahi’s producers tells Showbiz411’s Roger Friedman. “Also, his family is there and he wants to be at home.” Mostafa Nili, in the meantime, has said that he and his team “will take the necessary legal steps to appeal this verdict within the legal timeframe.”

Earlier on Monday, Vulture published Bilge Ebiri and Alison Willmore’s ranked and annotated lists of their favorite films of 2025. For Ebiri, It Was Just an Accident “has all the trappings of a good-for-you movie—it’s a searing drama about a group of former political prisoners wrestling with notions of revenge, justice, and guilt while they hold hostage the man they believe tortured them in jail—but on a moment-to-moment basis it’s so surprising, engaging, and even funny that the whole thing goes down with shocking ease. By the time the film’s hellish finale arrives, we realize that the director has expertly placed us in a moral trap, one where all our simplistic notions of right and wrong get a thorough questioning, with no easy answers.”

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Intentionally or not, there is zero overlap between Ebiri’s and Willmore’s top tens, so we have the pleasure of reading brief appreciations of twenty favorites—followed by notes on dozens more. Ebiri’s #1 is Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams, “a deeply moving portrait of an unremarkable life,” while Willmore tops her list with Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as a semi-retired revolutionary who sets out to save his daughter (Chase Infiniti) from the colonel who has kidnapped her (Sean Penn). One Battle won the Gotham for Best Feature, and for Willmore, what makes it “the movie of the year is the way it attests to revolution as something ongoing and endless, a banner to be taken up and carried forward by the young.”

You won’t hear any disagreement from Rolling Stone’s David Fear. PTA’s “thundering, dizzying epic” tops his list of twenty. One Battle, he writes, is “a parable about fathers and daughters, a conspiracy thriller for the ICE age, an ensemble comedy that encourages all-stars to get their best eccentricity on, a take on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland that’s less a straight, VistaVision adaptation than a passing nod to the author on the way to its own profound insights.”

One Battle also tops the list posted by Saïd Ben Saïd, who has produced Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Bacurau (2019), Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta (2021), Catherine Breillat’s Last Summer (2023), and David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds (2024). #2 on Ben Saïd’s list—and #4 on Willmore’s—is Mendonça’s The Secret Agent.

Julia Loktev’s My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow, the winner of the Gotham for Best Documentary Feature, comes in at #6 on Willmore’s list. Loktev began tracking the working lives of independent journalists in Russia when the government was classifying them as “foreign agents.” But “as troubling as that situation is,” writes Willmore, “what begins as a darkly absurd chronicle of bureaucratic oppression gains urgency very quickly as Russia invades Ukraine, and the subjects find themselves in an increasingly dangerous situation as they continue to try to get the facts out. The mundanity of the settings of *My Undesirable Friends, *which frequents house parties and office gatherings, makes the stress of what it’s depicting—as well as its terrifying resonance—even starker.”

The Gothams presented seven special honors, including a Vanguard Tribute to Guillermo del Toro, Oscar Isaac, and Jacob Elordi for Frankenstein, a Spotlight Tribute to Tessa Thompson for her lead performance in Nia DaCosta’s Hedda, and a Director Tribute to Noah Baumbach, whose Jay Kelly is the #1 film of the year for the Wall Street Journal’s Kyle Smith. For Smith, Jay Kelly is a “dramedy in which a dream cast headed by George Clooney and Adam Sandler balances mockery of showbiz follies with a gentle acceptance of the bizarre circumstances that screen superstars must navigate.”

British Independent Film Awards

Akinola Davies Jr. won the Breakthrough Director Gotham for My Father’s Shadow, and Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù, who plays a dad taking his two sons on a trip to Lagos, won the award for Outstanding Lead Performance. My Father’s Shadow had led the nominations for this year’s British Independent Film Awards with twelve, but on Sunday, it won just one, Best Director.

The film takes place on a single day in Nigeria, June 24, 1993, when the military annulled the results of the country’s first presidential election since a coup put an end to the Second Republic in 1983. The Telegraph’s Tim Robey finds My Father’s Shadow “magically nimble, encompassing so much life so pithily in a day.” Davies “dreams of a future—for country and family—and mourns the theft of what might have been, using fiction as a simultaneous wake and séance.”

Back in May, Harry Lighton won the award for Best Screenplay in Cannes for Pillion, his directorial debut, and at the BIFAs on Sunday, he won Best Debut Screenwriter and Pillion won Best Independent British Film. The very next night, Lighton won a Gotham for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Adapting Adam Mars-Jones’s 2020 novel Box Hill, Lighton tells the story of Colin (Harry Melling), a subdued traffic warden in the outer London borough of Bromley who falls for Ray (Alexander Skarsgård), a rough-and-ready biker. “Pillion is less about the shock factor of some very graphic gay kink than the nuances of love, desire, and mutual needs within a sub/dom relationship,” writes the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney. Lighton’s film is “both unsettling and amusing as it nonjudgmentally maps the self-imposed emotional imprisonment of one partner and the liberating self-discovery of the other.”

More Lists

Several scenes in Nouvelle Vague, Richard Linklater’s charming movie about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960), are set in the offices of Cahiers du cinéma, so there’s a certain frisson of delight in seeing that it’s landed a spot on the magazine’s list of the best films of 2025. Topping the Cahiers ten this year is Albert Serra’s Afternoons of Solitude, which for the staff at Les Inrockuptibles, is the second best film of the year after Pedro Pinho’s I Only Rest in the Storm. As it happens, Bozar and Sabzian will present a series of Serra’s films, including Afternoons, along with a few of Serra’s selections (Luis Buñuel, Marco Ferreri) from Saturday through January 4 in Brussels.

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