The best movies of 2025 (so far) – the new films that are making our year at the cinema

Dav Pilkey’s illustrated novels are a smash hit with kids and the wackadoodle energy of Dog Man translates just as enjoyably to the screen as Captain Underpants eight years ago. Hectic, yes, but nicely out-there and consistently sparky, the canine crimefighter’s debut adventure is an origin story (recap: diligent cop and trusty hound come a cropper, get bolted together in alarmingly Frankenstein-ian fashion, fight crime) and an action-comedy with a solid voice cast (Pete Davidson, Lil Rel Howery, Isla Fisher) and plenty of daft gags. Animations saved the day in 2024. Dog Man is back on the case in time for half-term.

The latest film from anime great Naoko Yamada is a joyous tale about three teenagers using music to explore their next steps in life. Full of flighty fantasy and mind-expanding abstractions, but never disloyal to the inner life of young high-schooler Totsuko, a girl who can see people’s ‘colours’, the A Silent Voice director has conjured up a beautiful, deeply sensitive coming-of-age animation. It’s early to say it but it might even be the year’s best.

Robert Eggers’ world-building breathes (or rather, bites) new life into one of the oldest tales in the horror canon. While faithful to FW Murnau’s original 1922 Dracula riff, the production design puts the ‘grand’ in Grand Guignol, masterfully using light, shadow and jaw-dropping set pieces to pull audiences under its spell. Speaking of trancelike states, Lily-Rose Depp delivers a remarkably physical performance as a possessed woman torn between her husband and her psychic demon lover. And though there’s no usurping Max Shreck for creepiness, Bill Skarsgård’s mustachioed Count Orlok is at once the most human and most repulsive the character has ever looked.

Steven Soderbergh fails at retirement once again, returning as his own cinematographer, cameraman and – sort of – lead actor in this haunted house story told from the ghost’s point of view. This silent presence watches a new family move in, led by Lucy Liu’s hard-charging mother, and sees a drama play around daughter Chloe (Callina Liang). It’s not about scaring so much as witnessing, but it makes for an effective twist on the ghost story.

We’re happy to report that Aussie animation wizard Adam Elliot has finally followed up 2009’s Mary and Max with another sallow-eyed stop-motion yarn. This one, a more-than-slightly autobiographical story of a kid who wants to make stop-motion animations that look a lot like Memoir of a Snail, is full of the pains and sorrows of growing up neglected and downtrodden in 1970s Melbourne. But Elliot’s greatest skill, apart from crafting a world gnarled with a sense of the macabre, is sweetening the morbidness with dark wit, heart and hopefulness. The result is like Aardman for weirdos – in the best way possible.

Though the Scandi noir era was over? Magnus von Horn’s gripping period thriller turns the clock back to 1919 for a half-forgotten true-crime story with shades of Wiene and Murnau. Godland’s Vic Carmen Sonne is a dogged guide to a weary post-war Copenhagen where slipping through the cracks means falling into a​n underworld full of horrors straight out of a Grimm brothers’ tale. Cinematographer Michał Dymek’s expressionist black-and-white lighting provides plenty of shadows for monsters to lurk in. 

Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s irascible Pansy may have been overlooked by the Academy Awards and, honestly, it just saves her having to clear a bloody space on the mantlepiece thanks very much anyway. A woman who can’t enter a public car park or sofa retailer without it all kicking off, she’s a Mike Leigh character for the ages: a stewing mass of complications and frustrations that she can’t begin to articulate, whose self-loathing seals her off from those who love her despite it all. Bittersweet and tragic, Hard Truths sits alongside Another Year in the Mike Leigh-iverse as a character study of endless insight and sympathy.

A political thriller that crash lands into a domestic drama, Walter Salles’ true-life tragedy, set during Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s, examines the personal toll of authoritarianism to devastating effect. Fernanda Torres is spectacularly stoic as Eunice Paiva, whose husband, a former congressman, is taken in by police for ‘routine questioning’ and never returns. It’s a moving performance, but the film isn’t weepy. As the title implies, it’s ultimately about a matriarch’s resolve – even if justice remains frustratingly elusive, even decades later.

Is it possible to enjoy a biopic that, a) is about a pop star you’ve never heard of, and b) has that same pop star played by a CGI chimp? While American moviegoers argued about the validity of seeing a film about someone they needed to Google, this Robbie Williams biopic entertained the rest of us royally with its confessional look back at a troubled life beset by drugs, dad issues, more, stronger drugs, and the discovery that being in a boy band is basically a toxic relationship. The chimp conceit pays off royally, lending feral energy and a clever metaphor for imposter syndrome and the inner wildness of a man whose boyhood dream came true in all sorts of terrible ways.

It’s vanishingly rare that the fourth film in a series is the best one – with apologies to die hard Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol fans – but that’s what Renée Zellweger and co have pulled off with a delightful, consistently funny and occasionally ugly-cry-inducing romcom that picks up with a fiftysomething Bridge picking herself up after the death of Mark Darcy (Colin Firth). Newbie director Michael Morris nails the delicate tone of slapstick silliness and genuine pathos, and the new additions – Leo Woodall and Chiwetel Ejiofor as the two studly love interests – match up to the returning faves. Hugh Grant, almost inevitably, stuffs every scene he’s in into a swag bag and makes off with it as the still-caddish but increasingly loveable Daniel Cleaver. V v good. 

Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin are odd-couple cousins who embark on a Holocaust tour to their Jewish grandma’s old Polish roots in Eisenberg’s brilliantly observed and astute road-trip gem. The film itself has made a journey of its own from Sundance to the Oscars – a much smoother one than that undertaken by two estranged relatives half-reconnecting within an often funny-awkward group dynamic. Simple on the surface – Planes, Trains and Automobiles with those fortysomething actors you like – it reveals additional depths with every watch. A low-key modern masterpiece.

Go big or go home, right? With only his third feature, Brady Corbet makes a bid for the canon, an ambition reflected in his protagonist, Hungarian architect László Toth, played with passion and pathos by Adrien Brody. Escaping the Holocaust, he lands in rural Pennsylvania and, under the patronage of Guy Pearce’s industrialist, embarks on a project that’ll consume him for years. The grand themes, wide-scale vision and mammoth runtime are grasping at the capes of masters from Francis Ford Coppola to Paul Thomas Anderson. Will it place Corbet among them? For now, it’s impressive enough just to see a young auteur making the reach – and, truth be told, getting pretty damn close.