The best movies of 2025

This year has been a stinker, but when it comes to the movies, not all hope should be abandoned just yet.

Many of the year’s best films were only briefly on big screens in cinemas in South Africa, screened once or twice as part of festival programmes, or went straight to streaming, and many of the films you’ll see on international publications’ end-of-year lists may never reach these shores.

Here, in no particular order, are some of the year’s best films. If there’s one thing they have in common, it’s that most of them don’t let you laugh the real world away.

April

In the beautiful natural landscape of rural Georgia in the Caucasus, the life of protagonist Nina offers a sharp contrast to the beauty of the world around here. As the dedicated obstetrician-gynaecologist for the region, she faces tough decisions about whether to do what’s best for her female patients or subject them to the oppressive patriarchal laws of a country that seeks to control their reproductive rights and bodily autonomy.

As she becomes a vessel for the supposed sins of teen mothers looking for secret abortions and women who are the victims of domestic sexual assault, Nina has visions of herself as a lonely monster burdened with the consequences of doing the right thing, despite its emotional cost to her and the danger it poses to her position.

Director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s unsparing and difficult film asks big questions about what we should do when faced with brutal oppression that echoes far beyond the confines of its specific, beautifully rendered Georgian setting.

Grand Theft Hamlet

This is ostensibly a documentary, but it is really a darkly comic examination of online gaming and its untapped potential and limitations. Directors Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls’ audacious experiment of a film is set entirely in the world of the smash-hit video game Grand Theft Auto Online, where criminals roam, police are on their tails and everyone moves and talks with a jerkiness and gait that’s become much-loved fodder for internet mockery.

Crane and his gaming mate Mark Oosterveen are out-of-work actors facing the bleak future of life under lockdown in 2021 during the Covid-19 pandemic. During a moment of desperation, they find themselves in an empty Grand Theft Auto arena reciting lines from Hamlet and sparking the idea to try and stage a production of the Bard’s masterpiece within the world of the game.

What follows is a madcap, often very funny and sometimes touching adventure that ultimately offers a tribute to the powers of necessity as the mother of invention and hope for the digital world as a means of connection and storytelling.

Bugonia

Greek master of the modern surreal Yorgos Lanthimos reteamed with stars Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone for a dark and timely, conspiracy-fuelled dystopian tale. The film features some of the year’s most striking visuals and stellar performances from its leads, though some of its plotting could have used a polish.

Plemons plays a conspiracy theorist who becomes convinced that the girl-boss CEO of a major pharmaceutical firm (Stone) is an alien bent on global destruction. He and his bumbling sidekick hatch a plan to kidnap her, and the results are expectedly dark, twisted, gruesome and uncomfortable.

Sirāt

Director Oliver Laxe’s eerie, tense fever dream of a film may remind you of something you think you’ve seen before but is quite unlike anything out there. In the deserts of Morocco, European techno devotees travel to raves in search of the transformative power of the beat to help them dance their troubles away.

An older man and his young son, desperately searching for his missing daughter, who was last known to have joined the ranks of the techno faithful, find themselves in this strange world trying to communicate with ravers who have more important things on their minds.

After attaching themselves to a group of diehard devotees, the man and boy follow them on a perilous trip through the desert towards the next event, only to find that the real world has tragic surprises in store that will burst through the techno bubble and leave them all scarred.

One Battle After Another

Paul Thomas Anderson’s political satire, inspired by but not quite adapted from the 1980s novel Vineland by Thomas Pynchon, resets the action firmly in the present and the anxiety and desperation felt by many due to the second coming of Donald J Trump.

The frenetic, paranoid comedy car chase political thriller, set against the background of immigration detention centres, white patriarchal nationalism and military deployment in cities, has a top-tier cast, including Leonardo DiCaprio, Teyana Taylor, Sean Penn and Benicio Del Toro. The film offers hope to those who know that keeping the fight against the man alive may be more important than winning it.

The Brutalist

Keeping hope alive is also a theme at the centre of director Brady Corbet epic post-war drama starring Adrien Brody in an Oscar-winning turn as a Hungarian architect, who has fled the horrors of World War 2.

He finds himself toiling at the bottom of American society until he’s chosen by Guy Pearce’s sly, privileged tycoon to build him a monumental structure that will last as a legacy to his family’s influence.

Shot in VistaVision and featuring a jarring score by Daniel Blumberg, it’s a bleak and unrelenting portrait of the struggle to make art under the yoke of capitalist reality that’s one of the year’s most ambitious and imaginatively realised works of cinematic art.

Warfare

Alex Garland’s intense and unrelenting portrait of the realities of combat in the Iraq War, co-directed with Iraq veteran Ray Mendoza, is based on Mendoza and his fellow soldiers’ actual experiences as Navy Seals.

It is short but brutal in its faithful depiction of the fear, adrenaline and chaos that lie behind the empty cheers of jingoist patriotism. Arguably the loudest, most realistic and most traumatic portrayal of the realities of war yet put on screen.

Nickel Boys

RaMell Ross’ adaptation of the novel by Colson Whitehead about the horrors of life in a pre-civil rights US reform school is daringly conceived through the conceit of a first-person point of view that heightens the intense emotions experienced by its central pair of young, black teens thrown into the hellish jaws of a system designed to break them.

Train Dreams

Director Clint Bentley’s adaptation of the novella by Denis Johnson is a heartbreaking story set against the large canvas of fast-disappearing forms of rural life in the early 20th century as railways and technology transform America into a society in the grip of machines.

Starring Joel Edgerton in a career-best performance as an itinerant lumberjack and occasional railway crew worker whose life is upended after a tragedy, it’s a beautifully realised paean to the resilience of ordinary people and the payment we endure for the sins we commit against the natural world in service of progress.