The Best Films of 2025: What Actually Worked
2025 wasn’t short on films. What it lacked was the kind of cinema that made you want to ring someone afterwards. Or text them at midnight because you’d just walked out of the theatre still processing what you’d seen. The blockbusters arrived, performed their function, collected their box office. Fine. But the films that actually mattered? They worked harder. Took risks. Trusted you to keep up.
These are the ones that rated four stars or higher in my reviews this year. The ones still occupying mental real estate months later.
Note: “Where to watch” information may be incomplete. Check your local cinemas and streaming providers for the most current availability.
Bring Her Back (2025) ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Danny and Michael Philippou could have played it safe after their first film. Delivered something comfortable and commercial. Instead they made Bring Her Back, which worked on me in ways I’m still unpacking. Not through jump scares or gore (though both are present). Through grief observed closely, then twisted into something genuinely unsettling.
Sally Hawkins played Laura, the foster mother who takes in siblings Andy and Piper after their father’s death. Extraordinary work. She lets you watch someone whose sorrow has curdled into obsession without ever announcing it with big gestures. Just small movements, careful words, longing bleeding through the cracks. Billy Barratt and Sora Wong understood something crucial: play real kids in an impossible situation, not horror movie archetypes making stupid decisions.
What separates this from routine horror? How it handles loss. No redemption. No noble suffering. Just what happens when love gets warped by denial. That’s the real horror.
Where to watch: Streaming on Prime Video and Prime Video with Ads; also available to rent or purchase on Apple TV, Amazon Video, and Fetch TV
My Brother’s Band (2024) ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Emmanuel Courcol handed us a premise ripe for manipulation: two brothers, separated by adoption, reunited because one needs a bone marrow donor. I sat down expecting tears being systematically extracted. Got something sharper instead.
Thibaut conducted orchestras. International career, prestigious stages. Then leukaemia revealed he’d been adopted, leading him to Jimmy, his biological brother working in a school canteen and playing trombone in the local brass band. It’s about class, really. Two people with identical genetics ending up in completely different worlds. One got conservatory training and concert halls. The other got factory closures and community music.
Benjamin Lavernhe and Pierre Lottin played them as wary strangers, not instant family. The film treated classical music and brass bands with equal seriousness. Excellence lives everywhere. The rewards? Different distribution pattern entirely.
Where to watch: Now playing in Australian cinemas including Palace Cinemas, HOYTS, and Palace Nova; not yet available on streaming services
28 Years Later (2025) ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Danny Boyle and Alex Garland making another rage virus film nearly two decades after the last one? I had questions. Would they play it safe? Lean on nostalgia? Deliver fan service?
None of that happened. 28 Years Later barely registers as a zombie film. Boyle transformed it into a dark fairy tale about growing up after the world’s ended. Spike, twelve years old, lived on a fortified island. The coming-of-age ritual: cross to the mainland, kill your first infected. Everything that followed challenged basic assumptions about survival.
Anthony Dod Mantle shot most of this on iPhones. Somehow made post-apocalyptic Britain look genuinely stunning. Alfie Williams, making his major film debut, carried scenes opposite seasoned actors like he’d been doing it for years. Ralph Fiennes appeared as an eccentric doctor delivering exposition about viral evolution like he’s discussing the weather. Masterful.
The film had problems. Middle section wandered. Ambitious themes got raised, then abandoned. But it took genuine risks with the genre.
Where to watch: Streaming on Prime Video and Prime Video with Ads; also available to rent or purchase on Apple TV, Amazon Video, and Fetch TV
Wicked: For Good (2025) ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Jon M. Chu did something increasingly rare with Wicked: For Good. He trusted the audience to think. Not constantly, understand. Still enough CGI flourishes to satisfy that crowd. But underneath all the emerald glitter sat a film genuinely interested in how people become villains through small compromises rather than grand evil schemes.
Elphaba fled into exile, officially branded an enemy. Glinda found herself trapped in gilded complicity, slowly recognising the regime she’d been propping up. Cynthia Erivo brought something fierce and wounded to Elphaba. Ariana Grande matched her, finding unexpected depths in Glinda’s moral awakening.
Some musical numbers felt choreographed into submission. At two hours and twenty-something minutes, the middle dragged. But the finale earned its emotional weight honestly. Left moral ambiguity intact rather than tidying everything into neat resolutions. That takes nerve.
Where to watch: Now showing in Australian cinemas including HOYTS, Palace Cinemas, Village Cinemas, Event Cinemas, Reading Cinemas, Dendy Cinemas, and Cineplex Australia; also available to rent on Amazon Video
Frankenstein (2025) ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Guillermo del Toro spent decades trying to make Frankenstein. When it finally happened, you could feel those years in every frame.
Jacob Elordi played the creature. Career-defining work. He evolved from wordless beast to something startlingly intelligent, capable of profound sensitivity and crushing self-awareness. Watching him discover language, then literature, then the full weight of his own abandonment? Affecting stuff.
Oscar Isaac’s Victor Frankenstein proved divisive. Critics found him histrionic, one-note. At 149 minutes with the creature not gaining consciousness until well past the first hour, that’s asking a lot. Visually, though? Never faltered. Del Toro’s production design created drawing rooms that vanished into shadow, landscapes vast enough to swallow their inhabitants.
Questions about what we owe our creations felt particularly sharp in 2025.
Where to watch: Streaming now on Netflix Australia
A House of Dynamite (2025) ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Eight years between films. Long enough to wonder if Kathryn Bigelow had decided fiction couldn’t compete with reality anymore. Then she returned with A House of Dynamite, a nuclear thriller that managed to be both deeply unsettling and, oddly enough, quite watchable.
An intercontinental ballistic missile appeared on American radar screens. Origin unknown. Destination unknown. Twenty minutes until impact. Rebecca Ferguson played a White House official whose professional composure cracked incrementally as the situation revealed itself. Restrained work that trusted you to read between the lines.
Bigelow revisited the same twenty-minute window through different perspectives. Brilliant initially, showing how incomplete everyone’s picture actually was. Third repetition? Felt mechanical. The film succeeded most in dismantling comfortable illusions about preparedness. All those elaborate defence protocols? Psychological comfort more than genuine security.
Where to watch: Streaming now on Netflix and Netflix Standard with Ads
Relay (2024) ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Corporate malfeasance as routine as the morning news cycle. Into that landscape arrived David Mackenzie’s Relay, a paranoid thriller offering a refreshingly analogue approach to digital-age anxieties.
Riz Ahmed played Ash, a shadowy fixer who brokered deals between whistleblowers and corporations. Operated exclusively through a telecommunications relay service designed for the deaf community. Clever conceit. Turned routine exposition into genuinely tense sequences.
Mackenzie and cinematographer Giles Nuttgens treated mundane actions with surgical precision. New York became a labyrinth of potential surveillance. Then, after expertly building tension, Relay stumbled badly in its final movements. Precise choreography gave way to conventional thriller mechanics. Car chases, gunplay. Characters who’d been scrupulously methodical suddenly made baffling decisions for plot convenience.
Still succeeded as both throwback and surprisingly relevant commentary. In a world of comprehensive monitoring, the most radical act might be maintaining the ability to speak privately.
Where to watch: Available to rent or purchase on Apple TV, Amazon Video, and Fetch TV
Flow (2024) ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Gints Zilbalodis made an animated film with no dialogue whatsoever. Not a single word. Somehow it communicated more than most films do with pages of carefully crafted script.
Post-apocalyptic world, swallowed by rising waters. A black cat survived on a makeshift sailboat, joined by a Labrador, a lemur, a capybara, a secretary bird. This oddball group faced the new world with little more than each other. No talking, no exposition. Just body language and shared determination.
The lack of human presence functioned as quiet reflection on what happens when nature reclaims everything. Created using Blender, it achieved a unique, painterly quality. The water practically became a character itself. Pacing was deliberately slow. Asked for patience, rewarded those willing to settle into its rhythm. Despite being animated and wordless, the characters felt genuinely alive.
Where to watch: Now showing in select Australian cinemas; check local listings for availability
I’m Still Here (2024) ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Brazil’s military dictatorship, early 1970s. When authorities detained Rubens Paiva, a former congressman, his wife Eunice and their five children were thrown into a world where fear replaced certainty.
Fernanda Torres played Eunice. Extraordinary work. Captured vulnerability without sacrificing strength, balanced grief against stubborn determination. Walter Salles directed with sensitivity and remarkable precision, blending intimate family moments with larger political context. Let the story breathe. Allowed us time to sit with the grief, the uncertainty, the specific pain inflicted by systems designed to dehumanise.
Deliberate pacing won’t suit everyone. It lingered, no rushing through moments. But that slow unfolding served the material perfectly. What distinguished I’m Still Here was how it focused on the human dimension of history, asking difficult questions about hope and justice without providing easy answers.
Where to watch: Now showing in select Australian cinemas; also available to rent or purchase on Apple TV and Prime Video
Looking Back
Nine films. That’s what rose above the noise in 2025. Not a massive haul, granted. But quality matters more than quantity, or so I keep telling myself.
What linked them? Not genre. Not budget or star power or marketing reach. If anything, their willingness to leave breathing room. To trust audiences could fill in gaps themselves, make connections without having everything underlined, sit with ambiguity rather than demanding neat resolutions.
Bring Her Back let grief speak for itself without redemption. My Brother’s Band explored class divides without lecturing. 28 Years Later reimagined zombie cinema entirely, turned it into something stranger. Wicked: For Good grappled with complicity and power in genuinely uncomfortable ways. Frankenstein asked difficult questions about responsibility towards our creations. A House of Dynamite stripped away comfortable illusions about security. Relay reminded us privacy actually matters. Flow found profound meaning in total silence. I’m Still Here honoured the human cost of authoritarianism without flinching.
Different films. Wildly different approaches. But each made space for thought rather than drowning you in spectacle. (Spectacle has its place, understand. I’m not completely joyless about blockbusters.) They earned their stars honestly, through genuine craft and insight rather than marketing budgets and franchise recognition.
2025 delivered plenty of disappointments. More than plenty, if we’re being honest. Films that promised much, delivered little. Franchises limping along on fumes. Algorithms masquerading as creative choices. But it also gave us these nine. That counts for something substantial.
So if you missed any, or if this year’s general chaos meant you didn’t get to the cinema as much as you’d planned (no judgment there), there’s still time. Most are streaming now, a few still in theatres. Give them a chance. See what you think. Then come back and tell me I’m completely wrong about something. I can take it.
Steve Parker
Your On the Run Movies reviewer
Thanks Steve. I’ll be watching a few that I missed in 2025. Great recommendations. Happy New Year.
Thanks, Deb. I look forward to hearing what you think of the ones you watch! Have a great year of watching!