The best films of 2025: From gory horror to sugar-rush animation

Two years on from the industry-shaking SAG-AFTRA/Writer's Guild strikes and Hollywood remains on unsteady ground. 

Out of the three highest-grossing films for the year, and the only movies to hit the fabled $US1 billion, two were animated sequels and one was a reboot. Many films were prescribed "flops" for not reaching the supposed monetary heights of a pre-pandemic industry. 

The potential of legacy studio Warner Bros most likely being absorbed into streaming monolith Netflix flung up further worries of the future of the movie theatre. 

But dig past the fear-mongering headlines and you'll find 2025 provided absorbing, effective and original stories in every genre from drama to comedy to horror.

Ryan Coogler's Sinners pulled off one of the most successful genre fusion projects in recent memory; first-time director Eva Victor delivered an grounded reflection on what it means to go through trauma; The Lonely Island's Akiva Shaffer proved reboots don't have to be pandering slop with The Naked Gun and, closer to home, YouTube exports Philippou Brothers and Michael Shanks kept the Australian horror industry pumping.

Here are the films that had our critics seated at the cinema this year.

• Bring Her Back
• Bugonia
• Eddington
• KPop Demon Hunters
• One Battle After Another
• Sinners
• Sorry, Baby
• The Naked Gun
• Together
• Weapons

Bring Her Back

The Oscars has beef with horror, often overlooking frightful gems, having happily feted the likes of The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby in the past.

Guillermo del Toro's dark and fishy fairy tale, The Shape of Water, is a recent exception, winning four golden statuettes in 2018, including Best Picture and Best Director. Sally Hawkins, nominated for Best Actress, lost out to Frances McDormand for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

If there were any justice, Hawkins would bring one home for her infinitely superior turn in ace Adelaide filmmakers Danny and Michael Philippou's devastating Bring Her Back.

She plays Laura, a foster carer in dire need of a background check, broken by the unimaginable grief of losing a child. Charged with recently orphaned Andy (Billy Barratt) and his younger, blind sister, Piper (Sora Wong), there's something not quite right about her hippie-dip persona.

Plying them with alcohol after their dad's funeral may have cool aunt energy, but it's not exactly responsible adulting. Neither is her obsessive watching of an arcane ritual captured on scuzzy VHS tape.

Then there's the other kid in her care, a magnificent wig-out performance from Jonah Wren Phillips as Oliver, a boy of no words who'd rather chew kitchen benches and blades than lollies. What horrible design connects him to Piper via Laura's tragedy?

The answers will wreck you in this brutal chiller that eschews Talk to Me's sassy teen spirit in favour of something much more fearsome, scarring your soul, as with the very best horror.

• Stephen A Russell

Bugonia

Has cinema finally caught up to our current moment, or has the universe aligned itself with the off-kilter cruelty of Yorgos Lanthimos's films? Either way, the celebrated Greek director's latest feature – a remake of Jang Joon-hwan's Save the Green Planet! – was his most satisfying satire in years. 

A bald Emma Stone was pitted against a bedraggled Jesse Plemons in the film's tightly-wound narrative, in which a pharmaceutical CEO is locked up by conspiracy theorists who believe her to be an alien wreaking havoc on humanity. 

Stone's gimlet-eyed girl-boss attempts to condescend her way out of her predicament; Plemons's aggrieved factory worker (with assistance from his loyal, suggestible cousin [Aidan Delbis]) favours more direct methods of coercion in his aim to contact extraterrestrial royalty.

The ensuing chaos is told like a sick cosmic joke, with a profound sadness bubbling beneath Lanthimos's deadpan wit. Extreme as Bugonia's goons are, their motives and beliefs are far from inscrutable.

So determined to wrestle control over their lives, they even subject themselves to chemical castration in a bid to clear their of head of "psychic compulsions". Riddled with brain worms and without a single thing — not even their balls — to lose, they're a disturbingly familiar threat.

• Jamie Tram

Eddington

Not just the year's most exquisitely unhinged movie, Ari Aster's sinister pandemic satire might also be its sharpest.

Nominally a darkly comic period piece about a small American town in the grip of COVID-19, the Midsommar and Hereditary director's latest (and scariest) horror movie dared to diagnose the world's current collective psychosis, unravelling a future historian's nightmare of dipshit political squabbling, virtue signalling madness, and wild, woolly conspiracy theories that just might turn out to be true.

It all begins with a gnarly vagrant marching upon town, like some spooky prehistoric doomsayer, and ends with the kind of illuminati checkmate that makes the far-right cretins of One Battle After Another look like the local chapter of the Rotary Club. 

In between, we get Joaquin Phoenix's libertarian sheriff and Pedro Pascal's shifty progressive mayor squaring off like a pair of mythic gunfighters at high noon, Emma Stone communing with tchotchkes and conspiracy nuts, and Austin Butler swaggering into town as a swarthy cult leader connected — like the film itself — to something far wider and weirder than anyone could imagine.

Because it's Aster, it's also ghoulishly funny — the film's bleak kiss-off is one of the great cosmic punchlines in modern cinema — and rife with unforgettable imagery, even (and especially) when his button-pushing tendencies stray toward the discomfiting. 

Contrary to the accusations of shit-posting misanthropy, this deeply empathetic, if unsettling movie proves — in what might turn out to be its most unexpected twist — that Aster is a humanist after all.

• Luke Goodsell

KPop Demon Hunters

By now you're probably sick of hearing monolith hit single Golden blasting from every supermarket speaker and toddler mouth around you. But there was a time where Sony couldn't wait to offload the now mega-hit animated musical film, KPop Demon Hunters.

Made by Sony for $US100 million, the studio baulked at the possibility of a pandemic-era flop, leading them to sell the sugar rush flick to Netflix who quietly released it on-platform in June.

The story of Huntrix, a KPop trio who must defeat a demonic boy band with just their pitch-perfect vocals and killer choruses took a couple months to catch its audience.

But when it rained it poured.

By August, KPop Demon Hunters was Netflix's most-watched film, clocking 236 million viewings worldwide. It entered cinemas internationally (including Australia!) in October making a cool $US25 million at the box office. 

The multi-hit soundtrack has sold more than 1 million copies, topped the Billboard 100 AND shone a well-deserved light on the storied career of South Korean musician Ejae who shaped KPDH's musical direction and provides the singing voice of Huntrix lead Rumi.

Possibly the craziest part about this story is that all of this praise and attention is 100 per cent deserved. 

Swipe aside the under-10's fanaticism and you'll find an original, engaging and tight narrative which makes the 2D/3D animation mash up popularised by Spiderman: Into The Spiderverse look fresh. Co-writer and director Maggie Kang infuses the story with both Korean folklore and modern KPop culture to connect the past and the present nation (so it's basically educational).

KPop Demon Hunters is a rollercoaster ride of a film and a cautionary tale for studios to believe in their art.

• Velvet Winter

One Battle After Another

In a year where so many auteur-driven projects failed to connect with audiences, major studios recycled franchise IP to ever diminishing returns, and the creative industry barrelled toward the precipice of AI slop, Paul Thomas Anderson's rollicking action thriller — loosely derived from Thomas Pynchon's Vineland — reminded us of just how exhilarating cinema can be at its best.

As much a requiem for the revolutionary ideals of one generation as it is a rallying call for the potential of the next, One Battle After Another lit the fuse on a national powder keg, pitting an underground network of scrappy outsiders against a comically shady cabal of white supremacists.

It then sits back — a few small beers in hand — to watch the fireworks explode.

Still, for all its charismatic performances and bravura sequences — including a vertiginous desert car chase that put every 2025 blockbuster set-piece to shame — the beating heart of Anderson's film is its story of an absent dad trying to connect with his daughter, and the anxiety over the passing of the torch (or the vape) from one generation to another. 

In a career filled with highs, it felt like the writer-director's most personal — and most moving — work.

• Luke Goodsell

Sinners

Ryan Coogler's steamy southern gothic is the stuff vampire legends are made of. Not that the Black Panther director is in a hurry to tip his hat.

Brothers Smoke and Stack, both played by Coogler's Creed star Michael B. Jordan, dallied with gangsters in Chicago. But they've ditched Al Capone's too-hot scene, returning to a Deep South rancid with Klansmen.

They'll be damned if they'll give up their patch to a white robe-wearing lynch mob. Opening a prohibition-style, whisky-soaked 'Juke' joint, they recruit blues singers, a band and immigrant Chinese grocers (Li Jun Li and Yao) to get the joint jumping.

Stack's snacking after True Grit actor Hailee Steinfeld's spiky Mary, while Smoke reignites his flame with left-behind love Annie (Loki star Wunmi Mosaku). The latter keeps the home fires burning, casting old spells to keep evil spirits at bay.

It's to no avail. Recalling, though far surpassing, Robert Rodriguez's delayed reveal in From Dusk Till Dawn, there's vamps in them thar no hills (actually, it's the Mississippi Delta). 

'71 star Jack O'Connell's undead Irish ghoul, Remmick, leads a hunt of baleful ancient bloodsuckers drawn out by the Juke's soulful sounds.

With muscle memory for Black brilliance across the ages, writer/director Coogler delivers the year's finest scene, abetted by gifted cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw and Swedish composer Ludwig Göransson, as musical history once and future folds in on the dance floor.

When the monsters bring mayhem to the merry-makers' door, Sinners proves it's a film with bite, leaving a mark forevermore.

• Stephen A Russell

Sorry, Baby

Sorry, Baby shouldn't be as funny as it is, given the logline: A promising literature graduate is sexually assaulted by her professor and quietly moves forward in her life.

But this warm, tender film — the debut by writer-director Eva Victor, who also stars in the lead role — is a remarkable balance of light and dark. Pointedly understated, Sorry, Baby sidesteps the manipulative practices of many post-#MeToo films that tie their intrigue to revealing an assault.

 The audience doesn't see the 'bad thing', as Agnes (Victor) often calls it, but instead a static shot of the house which contains Agnes and her professor as day turns to evening, then night.

While the film's camera almost exclusively follows Agnes throughout, here the distance is dissociative. It both proves that you don't need to see something to believe it, and portrays just how abstracting violence can be.

None of this sounds funny. But Agnes is a funny person — an awkward, witty figure who remains so in trauma, itself a confusing experience. Her relationships — especially with her best friend (Naomi Ackie) and neighbour (Lucas Hedges) — are charming, quirky and lived-in.

It's an immensely impressive and gorgeous debut, making great use of New England's sparse, ominous beauty and has connected deeply with survivors. It leads by example, with a patience towards Agnes's pain that lets her breathe, ache and continue on.

• Jared Richards

The Naked Gun

With more punchlines than minutes, The Naked Gun is a rare beast in 2025 — it's both a reboot that doesn't land like a cynical cash grab, and an unashamed comedy overflowing with pratfalls, puns, sight gags and delightfully silly jokes.

Created by comedy trio ZAZ, the original Naked Gun trilogy of the '80s and '90s sent up the era's overblown action films, starring the late Leslie Nielsen as slightly daft Lieutenant Frank Drebin. Here, Liam Neeson plays Drebin Jr — a genius casting that plays off the actor's grizzled tough-guy persona, with Drebin Jr a resentful cop who longs for the good old days. 

By treating The Naked Gun as if it was Taken 4, Neeson makes it all the more ridiculous.

After failing to stop a bank heist where a villain captures a powerful device called 'P.L.O.T Device', Drebin Jr uncovers a huge, silly conspiracy. He teams up with the smoky-voiced Pamela Anderson, finally in a role that matches her cultural renaissance.

Thankfully, this spoof isn't laboured with current pop-culture references to appeal to new audiences, instead focusing on unapologetically stupid, absurd gags. No, not every joke will make you laugh. But they come so quick there's no space for a thud to echo out.

• Jared Richards

Together 

Relationships can be a horror show, and no other movie articulated this concept better than Australian filmmaker Michael Shanks.

Born from the YouTube set of the mid-20s, Shanks spent 10 years perfecting his script for this twisted feature, based partly on his own long-term relationship (don't worry, she's cool with it). 

After landing on The Black List (Hollywood's annual list of hottest unproduced screenplays), Shanks caught the eye of Hollywood power couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie, who lend their starpower as the film's two protagonists.

Tim (Franco) and Millie (Brie) have been together for more than a decade but their relationship is fragmenting. A move to the countryside to support Millie's teaching career (at the detriment of Tim's musical aspirations) pushes them closer to the edge — and this is before they both fall into a mysterious, throbbing hole in the forest.

Post-hole-falling, things start to get weird for Tim and Millie as an invisible force sees them physically dragged together with horrific results. Together is as much an unflinching body horror as it is a rumination on the co-dependency of long term relationships, with Brie and Franco's real-life marriage adding extra validity to the on-screen performances.

But what really sets Together apart from the rest, in what was a very good year for horror, is the care that oozes out of every shot. Shanks wrote, directed and created many of the film's stunning special effects and the passion for his project is undeniable.

• Velvet Winter

Weapons

No matter who wins the bidding war over Warner Brothers, the outlook for one of Hollywood's oldest institutions feels undeniably bleak.

Nonetheless, 2025 will be remembered as a year where the studio set multiplexes alight with a slate of audacious original films.

Weapons was the kind of go-for-broke sophomore feature made by a director with something to prove.

Against the odds, Zach Cregger exceeded the promise of his 2022 debut, Barbarian, with this bedevilling urban legend told through the eyes of a small Pennsylvanian community.

Two years on from the shocking exodus of seventeen third-graders from their bedrooms, suspicion still lingers around their young teacher Justine (Julia Garner).

There is a tangible malevolent force at play — mercifully, humankind is not revealed as the real monsters — but Weapons cannily exposes the ruptures of grief through a tight-knit town, as well as the obsessive paranoia that can follow in its wake. It's also a deeply funny film.

Cregger mines memorable visual gags from the pin prick of a used needle, a generous platter of hotdogs, and a gargantuan assault rifle towering over a house. After the previous decade of horror films leaning on trauma as a thematic crutch, it's satisfying to watch Weapons rip the bandaid off its festering wound.

• Jamie Tram