The best films of 2025 at a glance: From Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” to the jazz drama “Köln 75” – all the favorites.
The year 2025 is coming to an end. Reason enough to look back a bit. We have chosen our cinema film favorites and would like to share them with you here.
1. One Battle After Another
If American cinema was good in 2025, it either delivered escapist entertainment (“Weapons”) or caustic criticism (“Eddington,” “Bugonia”). When it was very good, it combined both to create electrifying cinema. Like number one on our list (and number two), Paul Thomas Anderson’s very loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, a reckoning with both revolution and reaction, a revealing action satire about a country that has lost its inner compass. What remains is a father and his daughter and their love for each other. And a chase through the California desert that you see once and never forget.
2. Blood & Sinners
Almost as good as No. 1: Ryan Coogler’s new film, which you can just watch as a wild vampire film, the story of a siege. But if you look into it, it is more than that, a story of black existence on the North American continent, with the blues as the blood that flows through your veins, a film in whose chest two hearts literally beat, embodied by Michael B. Jordan in an epochal double role.
3. Weapons
Is it the most profound, threatening horror film of the year or just a pitch-black comedy? Everyone has to decide for themselves. In any case, Zach Cregger’s second film is a masterpiece of sophisticated storytelling that combines five stories from different perspectives to create a horror story that you won’t soon forget.
4. Sentimental value
It is one thing to always point out the healing power of art with a clear conscience. It’s something completely different to make a film that tells exactly that, virtuoso, confident, deeply human. Of course, we’ve known that Joachim Trier has what it takes since “The Worst Man in the World”. The fact that he can do it so well just makes you happy.
5. Oslo Trilogy (Longing, Love, Dreams)
Even more masterful things from Norway, a trilogy that has probably never existed before: In three different films, Dag Johan Haugerud illuminates the topics of sex, love and dreams in a new way. “Dreams” won the Golden Bear in Berlin.
6. Sirât
A road movie supposedly to the end of the world that feels like “Waiting for Godot” in techno rhythm and has a final half hour in which the audience at the screening where I saw the film repeatedly screamed out loud. Crazy part.
7. Here forever
Walter Salles hadn’t made a film for eleven years. To then return with a work that makes the horror of the military dictatorship in Brazil tangible – and at the same time is a love letter to life in Rio at the beginning of the 1970s. Oscar for best international film.
8. Look at the sun
A film cannot be more German. And yet Mascha Schilinski’s second directorial effort is a film like no one has ever seen before, a tour de force through 100 years of history, held together by the horror that a group of women had to experience in a farm over the decades.
9. Therapy for Vikings
Different. Thomas. Jensen. Every new film is more crazy. This time a road movie with two very different brothers who set off for their parents’ house to find loot hidden 15 years ago and to confront old traumas. As always with Mads Mikkelsen and Nikolaj Lie Kaas.
10. Cologne 75
No film in 2025 was more fun. And better understood why there is nothing better in the world than music and how to tell it like a jazz improvisation. Mala Emde is a stunner as Vera Brandes, who organized Keith Jarrett’s legendary Cologne concert in January 1975.