Steve

10 Best Films of 2025

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Ellen looking to the heavens

In a year packed with 1990s revivalism, noir resuscitation and franchise exhaustion, these are the films I liked the most in 2025. I’ve attempted to avoid the obvious but not be wilfully obscure and have probably succeeded at neither. Without further ado, with links to full reviews, here goes – in 1-10 order. Dying (dir: Matthias Glasner) A German black comedy so bleak you might laugh out of desperation, following a pair of oldsters as they reach the end of the road, and their two appalling adult children. Superbly underplayed by a top-notch cast, it’s a novelistic, dense, all-enveloping wallow in human misery, three hours long and worth every minute of the grief. … Read more

High Wall

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Steven Kenet and Dr Lorison in the asylum

One for lovers of noirish movies with twisty plots, High Wall doesn’t in the end quite add up emotionally, but its serpentine bends make it an enjoyable crime thriller asking us to reconsider an open-and-shut case once any number of impediments have been thrown in the way. The opening scene – a man is driving his car with his wife in the passenger seat. She’s dead, it seems, and in a few seconds he’ll be dead too, if his plan to crash his car off a bridge succeeds. That seems to be the story anyway. His plan doesn’t quite succeed. He survives the crash and has soon been arrested. He admits to killing … Read more

The Universal Theory

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Jan Bülow as Johannes Leinert

If Alfred Hitchcock, Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka made a multiverse movie it might look like The Universal Theory, a fabulous and madly forensic undertaking by Timm Kröger, who gets just about all of it right and tells a really good story. You don’t need to be well versed in the works of any of the above to be well entertained but it really adds to the enjoyment. Kröger opens his story in a TV studio in the 1970s, where an author is bristling at his interviewer’s description of his book as fiction. It’s true, all true, the author says, causing the interviewer and fellow guests to smirk and titter. As Johannes Leinert … Read more

100 Years of… Battleship Potemkin

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A woman injured by a bullet

Imagine that, one of the best movies ever made is only 75 minutes long. All those epics striving for significance with buttock-flattening running times outdone by Battleship Potemkin, a century-old silent movie lasting only one hour and 15 minutes. Sight and Sound in their latest poll of the all-time greats currently have Potemkin in joint 54th place (alongside Blade Runner, Le Mépris, The Apartment and Sherlock Jr). Cahiers du Cinéma rate it highly. It’s one of the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. At breakneck speed it tells the story of a failed revolution, the one in 1905 when the Russian navy mutinied and, for a brief moment, the possibility of … Read more

Blue Moon

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Elizabeth and Lorenz

The crappier sort of biopic tries to get the whole life into a couple of hours’ running time. The better ones seize on a moment or a few moments in the life of Famous Person X and make it/them emblematic. That’s what Blue Moon does, in spades. This is the story of the life and, in a way, the death of Lorenz Hart, the lyricist known for his sad, sad songs – My Funny Valentine is one of his. So is Glad to Be Unhappy. Blue Moon too. Difficult to work with, Hart had had a fruitful relationship with Richard Rodgers until Rodgers broke it off and went off to work with another … Read more

Joyless Street

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Greta Garbo close up

There’s a lot going on in Joyless Street (Die freudlose Gasse), GW Pabst’s epic “Straßenfilm” about the Weimar era in Germany, made during the Weimer era in Germany. Greta Garbo is in it, which tends to draw a lot of attention, and because the film survives only in a print with a good half hour missing, it’s often described as her film. It certainly looks that way from the 150 or so minutes now available. But Asta Nielsen was top-billed when it came out and she thought she was the star. So spare a thought for poor old Asta as you watch a tale of two impoverished young women doing what they have … Read more

Twinless

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Dylan O'Brien and James Sweeney

The reinvention of Dylan O’Brien continues with Twinless, a tale of fruitless love and stalkerish obsession aimed at the mopey Gen Z contingent but with enough meat and thrillerish darkness to satisfy most tastes. It’s billed as a black comedy on Wikipedia (all the research I did before watching it) which seems like a bit of a stretch. Mournful, creepy and tense, I thought, especially once it gets into its stride and starts working up a sense of doomed tragic love that cannot go anywhere except to the bad. O’Brien plays two roles – the gay, popular and dead Rocky and his twin brother, the straight, withdrawn and alive Roman – who meets … Read more

100 Years of… Visages d’enfants

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Jean Forest as Jean

If you’ve heard the name Jacques Feyder but never seen any of his films, Visages d’enfants is a prime place to start. A beautiful example of simple and direct storytelling done with more technique than you’d expect for a film from 1925, it demonstrates what a master Feyder was, particularly of the language of film – in fact he’s creating some of it as this film is running through his camera’s sprockets. The title translates into English as either Mother or Faces of Children and that difference of emphasis sums up the plot. A young boy is orphaned and his father remarries – how does little Jean fit in now, with the new … Read more

Rumours

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Cate Blanchett as the German Chancellor

The opening credits of Rumours formally thank the leaders of the G7. Which must be some kind of joke, because none of them emerges reputationally intact from this very weird film. Though getting a precise bead on the type of humour in play is tricky. Is it political satire? Cultural satire? Surreal japery? Guy Maddin is involved – co-writing and directing with brothers Evan and Galen Johnson – so who honestly knows. Maddin’s films don’t make money but he has fans in the right places, often managing to snag the sort of actor audiences might not expect, playing the sort of role the actor probably didn’t expect. Isabella Rossellini as a beer heiress … Read more

Deadline at Dawn

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Taxi driver Gus, June and Alex

A romance, a noir and a whodunit all in one, Deadline at Dawn is the only film Harold Clurman ever directed. A theatre director by background, Clurman wisely keeps it between the rails here with solid functionality. He shows us the stuff we need to see and nothing more. There’s no flash, no tricksiness. The same cannot be said for the timeline, which is jumbled about a fair bit. A smalltown soldier boy on leave in the big city wakes up with the mother of all hangovers and a pocketful of money. He has no idea where the loot came from, nor what he was doing the night before, beyond a hazy memory … Read more