The 10 best films of 2025

This year’s best films did not offer escape so much as confrontation. Across genres, budgets and continents, they asked difficult questions about power, belief, responsibility and survival – and trusted audiences to sit with the answers, or lack thereof.

From intimate stories shaped by memory and trauma to blockbusters operating at the outer limits of scale, these are works that took cinema seriously as both an art form and a moral instrument.

What follows are the ten films that, in very different ways, understood what cinema can still be for.

10. The President’s Cake

The President's Cake is directed by Hasan Hadi. Photo: Maiden Voyage Pictures

The President’s Cake, the debut feature of director Hasan Hadi, echoes his own childhood in southern Iraq under Saddam Hussein.

At a time of severe scarcity – when sugar and flour were outright banned – children were still tasked with baking a cake in honour of the former leader’s birthday, with failure carrying real and lasting consequences. One of Hadi’s friends was expelled from school, conscripted into Saddam’s children’s army and later died.

The film draws on that memory without retelling it literally. Instead, it follows nine-year-old Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef) as she moves through her town in search of ingredients, navigating empty shelves and adults both kind and predatory, never quite sure who can be trusted. Shot with restrained naturalism and anchored by Nayyef’s unsentimental performance, the film captures the quiet fear and warped logic of everyday life without spelling it out.

Hadi resists explanation or moral instruction. He isn’t translating Iraq’s past for outsiders so much as remembering it, allowing politics to surface through detail and texture. The result is a film that builds gently but inexorably, before landing on an ending whose force comes not from shock, but from recognition – a reminder of how easily childhood can be shaped, and damaged, by the systems that surround it.

9. The Secret Agent

Wagner Moura, Fafá Dantas, Buda Lira, Suzy Lopes, and Geane Albuquerque in The Secret Agent (2025). photo: MK Productions

This isn’t a spy film – it’s something much richer. In it, Wagner Moura (Narcos) plays a man forced into hiding during the Brazilian military dictatorship of the 1970s. And as he traverses the country in an attempt to escape to safety with the help of other political refugees, a teeming, intricate portrait of the country’s past and present emerges.

Part of why it works so well is that director Kleber Mendonca Filho is never afraid to indulge the film’s many corners – full of asides and occasional surreal diversions that lend it a novelistic breadth. It’s funny, pensive and then suddenly will push you to the edge of your seat.