new movies 2025

 

The Cinematic Tapestry of 2025: A Year of Audacious Vision and Intimate Revelation

As the curtain closes on 2025, the year’s film landscape emerges not as a monolith but as a richly woven tapestry, reflecting a global industry in vibrant, sometimes defiant, transition. The New Yorker’s selection of the year’s best films, curated with a discerning eye, reveals a collective retreat from the bombastic and a turn toward the meticulously crafted—where human scale and directorial vision trump algorithmic spectacle. This was a year where cinema, in its most essential form, fought to reclaim its primacy.

The list is crowned by a film that exemplifies this ethos: “The Glassworker,” the first traditionally animated feature from Pakistan. Directed by Usman Riaz, this hand-painted marvel, set in a fictional 1960s studio, is a “patient, observant melodrama” about a glass engraver and his son. Its triumph is not merely technical but philosophical; in an era of rampant CGI, its every frame is a testament to the beauty of human touch and temporal dedication. It champions slowness, craftsmanship, and emotional resonance over velocity, reminding us that animation is an art form, not just a vehicle for family-friendly jokes. Its presence at the top of the list is a powerful statement about the enduring value of artisan cinema in a digital age.

This celebration of directorial authorship resonates through several key entries. Yorgos Lanthimos’s “The Governess” continues his singular, unsettling exploration of controlled societies and bodily autonomy, while Paolo Sorrentino’s “The Last Face of Greta” offers a “sumptuous, sorrowful” portrait of melancholic grandeur. Perhaps most striking is the inclusion of Bong Joon-ho’s “Mickey 202,” a startling, non-numeric Disney biopic that deconstructs corporate mythmaking with the director’s signature blend of satire, suspense, and profound unease. These films are unmistakably the work of auteurs, their unique sensibilities amplified rather than diluted by the resources at their disposal.

Yet, 2025’s cinematic strength equally lies in its embrace of the intimate and the interior. “A Sudden Glimmer of Gold,” a debut feature about a teenage girl’s life-altering summer in 1990s Norway, is highlighted for its “quietly radical” patience and empathetic focus on feminine adolescence. Similarly, Raven Jackson’s “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt” finds a place for its poetic, sensory-rich memory piece, a film that operates on the logic of feeling and texture rather than conventional plot. These works represent a vital counter-narrative: that the most expansive universes are often contained within a single human heart or a cherished landscape.

The global perspective is robust and refreshingly decentralized. Beyond Pakistan’s historic entry, the list applauds Mati Diop’s “The One Who Left and the One Who Stayed,” a haunting Senegalese ghost story that intertwines personal grief with the spectral weight of colonial history. From Chile, Dominga Sotomayor’s “The Earth is Blue as an Orange” observes familial bonds with a documentarian’s grace. These films are not presented as exotic curiosities but as essential, confident voices in a global conversation, each using distinct cultural specificities to explore universal themes of memory, loss, and connection.

Technology and its discontents form a subtle, pervasive undercurrent. While not dominated by AI-dystopia tropes, the year’s best films often meditate on creation, authenticity, and mediation. “The Glassworker” is itself a meta-commentary on making art by hand. Bong Joon-ho’s Disney excavation questions the ownership of narrative. Even Lanthimos’s ritualistic worlds feel like critiques of systematized human experience. The most poignant tech-adjacent entry may be “The Archives of Unseen Things,” a documentary weaving together forgotten educational and industrial films into a melancholic ode to obsolete formats and the forgotten lives they captured.

The New Yorker’s curation also makes room for pure, unadulterated genre pleasure, recognizing that formal rigor and pulp thrills are not mutually exclusive. Films like “Night of the Hunter 2: The Woman’s Story”—a bold reimagining from the perspective of the original’s heroic mother—and the Indonesian action film “The Shadow Over Jakarta” are celebrated for executing their high-wire acts with precision and inventive flair. Their inclusion legitimizes the artistry inherent in genre filmmaking when it is pursued with conviction and intelligence.

What ultimately defines the cinematic year of 2025, as reflected in this list, is a recalibration of values. In the shadow of industry upheavals—streaming plateaus, theatrical identity crises, the looming chatter of AI—the most resonant films chose depth over breadth, nuance over noise, the tangible over the virtual. They are largely character-driven, aesthetically distinctive, and emotionally generous. There is a notable absence of cynical franchise extensions or empty visual-effects canvases; instead, we find stories that demand and reward attentive viewing.

This is not a portrait of a nostalgic industry, but a resilient and adaptive one. It is cinema that uses the tools of the present—global financing, digital capture, international co-production—to tell stories that are timeless in their concerns. The films of 2025, from a hand-painted animation studio in a fictional Pakistan to the rain-slicked streets of a genre Jakarta, collectively argue for the big screen not just as a venue for distraction, but as a sacred space for collective reflection, challenging beauty, and profound human connection. They remind us that in a fractured world, the act of sitting together in the dark, immersed in a beam of patterned light, remains one of our most powerful means of understanding ourselves and each other. The best films of this year didn’t just entertain; they bore witness, and in doing so, they reaffirmed the soul of the medium itself.