What a year in movies! Is the kind of thing I would say if it had been a good year in movies. Not that it was an especially bad year unless you paid money to see Bride Hard, which starred Rebel Wilson so you only have yourself to blame there.
It's not exactly new news to point out that all taste is subjective, and it only takes a handful of films you really connect with to turn an average year in movies into a great one. Would I have been hailing 2025 as a triumphant return to form on the silver screen if I'd enjoyed The Order, a film seemingly tailor-made for my tastes but which I found generic and uninspired? I'm going to go with "perhaps".
(to be fair, Sovereign covered much of the same ground in a more thoughtful fashion, so it wasn't exactly a bad year for fans of US rural nutcases coming up with wackjob beliefs to justify messing around with lethal weapons. Which also kind of describes Wicked: For Good if you think about it)
Then again, what do I know? Four of my best films of the year were sequels or installments in a series, which isn't usually seen as a sign of quality. And a few of the best were more like "best of" in various categories; I saw a lot of dirtbag noir out of the US, often with female leads, and Night Always Comes was easily the best of a relatively bad bunch; at least Scott Adkins' Diablo was a return to arse-kicking form.
One way in which 2025 was undeniably sub-par was in the world of criticism, as once again the already tiny number of paid outlets for Australian reviews and film writing shrank. RIP the review pages in The Big Issue, though as they refused to put any reviews online they kind of cut their own throat there.
The result of all these cutbacks is that if you want any kind of status (let alone money) as a reviewer these days then you basically have to write as much as possible for as many outlets as possible. It's a requirement that doesn't automatically lend itself to sharp insight and thoughtful discussion.
The dwindling market for local film coverage, combined with increasingly patchy distribution for anything that's not a mainstream blockbuster - let's not even get started on Netflix putting a random few of their films in cinemas for a few weeks - made it difficult to even know when a lot of decent films became available to watch out here. Some of the best films I saw this year I stumbled across by accident; some of the worst ones were heavily promoted (and sometimes heavily praised).
There's also a number of supposedly decent films coming up that I haven't yet seen, whether through laziness or lack of opportunity. Am I ready for Marty Supreme? Are any of us? All I can say was that I was not ready for Hamnet, and not in a good way.
In no particular order, here's twenty films from 2025 I liked:
*Conclave
*The Brutalist
*Companion
*Sinners
*Dangerous Animals
*Ballerina: From the World of John Wick
*28 Years Later
*One Battle After Another
*Sisu 2
*Happyend
*Lurker
*The Lost Bus
*Night Always Comes
*Sovereign
*K-Pop Demon Hunters
*Friendship
*Julie Keeps Quiet
*Last Bullet 3 (it’s titled Last Bullet 3!)
*Tornado
*Diablo
And here's ten films I did not:
*Mickey 17
*Snow White
*Bride Hard
*Ella McCay
*Ice Road: Vengeance
*A Big Bold Beautiful Journey
*Spinal Tap 2
*The Electric State
*The Gorge
*Play Dirty
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