As the New Year dawns, the Emerging Artist and I are drawing up our Best of 2025 lists. Movies first.
We saw about 65 movies, including streaming and TV. Here are the ones we both put at the top of our viewing year.
The image captions are linked to either an IMDB page or a review by my favourite movie critic, Mark Kermode.
Five documentaries, one from the Antenna Documentary Film Festival, three from the Sydney Film Festival, and one from Apple TV+. They come from Russia, Kenya, Afghanistan and the USA, and deal with a poet with terminal cancer, a filmmaker who donates a kidney, domestic life when the Taliban take over, the restoration of a municipal library, and a small heroic act in Putin’s Russia.
- Come See Me in the Good Light (Ryan White 2025)
- Confessions of a Good Samaritan (Penny Lane 2023)
- Writing Hawa (Najiba Noori & Rasul Noori 2024)
- How to Build a Library (Maia Lekow & Christopher King 2025)
- Mr Nobody against Putin (David Borenstein & Pavel Talankin 2025)
We had trouble whittling our list of features down to size, so here are our top ten (three of which we saw at the SFF) in alphabetical order of titles:
- A Complete Unknown (James Mangold 2024) – Bob Dylan
- A House of Dynamite (Cathryn Bigelow 2025) – nuclear disaster
- All That’s Left of You (Cherien Dabis 2025) – Palestine, the naqba
- Goodbye June (Kate Winslet 2025) – death of a matriarch
- Hard Truths (Mike Leigh 2025) – top-drawer Mike Leigh
- It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi 2025) – Iran and the Taliban
- Oslo (Bartlett Sher 2022) – Israel–Palestine diplomacy
- Rental Family (Hikari 2025) – feelgood Japanese ethical dilemmas
- Small Things Like These (Tim Mielants 2025) – Claire Keegan
- The President’s Cake (Hasan Hadi 2025) – Iraq under Saddam Hussein
Not a lot of laughs in that lot. Sorry!
Me fail? I fly! 
Great to have these recommendations! Happy New Year to you and P!! Xxx
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Enjoyed your list … of the features have only seen A complete unknown and Small things like these. Both great but I particularly loved the latter.
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Me too!
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Interesting lists. Three points:
1 Eddington and One Battle after Another would both be on my list – complementary deep dives into the current American madness.
2 Ellis Park is not on the doco list. Without doubt the best doco I have watched in a long time. Rated 100% by the critics on Rotten Tomatoes. Watch it to see a story that involves a troubled Ballarat childhood, amazing musical virtuosity, worldwide fame, and the evils of the illegal wild animal trade in Sumatra.
3 Perhaps you were a little harsh on A Land in Winter a couple of weeks ago? I am enjoying it immensely and hugely impressed with a book where 1962 is the major character as much as any person! Larkin’s Annus Mirabilis is its obvious companion piece.
Happy New Year Jonathan!
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Thanks for the film recommendations Jonathan – I haven’t seen many of those. I also want to comment on A Land in Winter – I’m not finished yet but I’m finding it absolutely compelling. Such sustained melancholy! And such gems within the writing! I’ll wait until I’m finished but for now – I’m fascinated by it.
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I’m glad to be disagreed with on that book, but I’d take some converting!
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Nearly finished … I don’t think I’m going to be as happy with it at the end as I was halfway through!
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