ScreenAnarchy's Top 10 Films Of The First Half Of 2025

Runners up:

11: Presence
12: Havoc
13: Friendship
14: On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
15: Eephus 16: Sentimental Value
17: Corina
18: I'm Still Here
19: Magellan
20: The Monkey (pictured above)

10: Warfare

The time period of 2024-2025 turns out to be quite the productive one for writer/director Alex Garland. Not only did he release Civil War, he also joined up with Danny Boyle for 28 Years Later AND, together with Iraq veteran Ray Mensoza, made this gruelling real-time look into a moment of extreme stress for a group of soldiers. Easy viewing this is not, but with Garland co-helming, what would you expect?
Olga Artemyeva reviewed the film and said:

The narrative here is as fragmented and sparse as human memory itself. The shadows move behind the barred windows. The finger falters on a trigger. The fully diegetic sound can go mute for minutes after the soldiers have been dazed by an explosion and then burst into a torturous, desperate wail of a wounded man whose legs are on fire. Mendoza and Garland purposefully ignore the classic narrative conventions of the genre; there is no clear goal in sight, no glorification, and no pacifist rhetoric. “Just follow the blood and smoke,” says a character at one point, no longer able to provide coherent information. There is no making sense of anything in the belly of the war beast.

9: Bring Her Back

How do you follow up a global surprise hit like Talk To Me? Well, making another excellent emotion-based horror is one way to do it, and Once-Upon-A-Time-YouTubers Danny Philippou and Michael Philippou just did exactly that.
Mel Valentin says the following in his review:

If we’re moved by Andy, Piper, and even Laura’s fates before the end credits roll, it’s because the Philippou brothers and their on- and off-screen collaborators make us care for them as fully realized, multi-dimensional characters with interior lives of their own. And those characters and their individual journeys, more than Bring Her Back's supernatural angle in the plot or the gnarly practical effects, will linger with audiences long after the screen fades to black and the overhead lights flicker back on.

8: Sorry Baby

In his review, Mel Valentin calls Sorry Baby "...one of the most remarkable, quite possibly extraordinary feature-film debuts in recent festival history." Wowzers! Not bad for a film which is fun yet has something serious to say about trauma. In that article, Mel also says:

Whatever lessons Victor learned through Jenkins' dedicated mentorship and shadowing Schoenbrun, they were put to excellent use in Sorry, Baby, a non-chronological exploration of a singular woman's years-long recovery from a life-upending trauma.

7: Materialists

Back in 2023, Celine Song's Past Lives made a tremendous splash, earning her success, Oscar-nominations and huge acclaim. Her follow-up to that film is about people with a questionable look at relationships. Many here at ScreenAnarchy love it (heck, it made it into this list!) but our reviewer Barbara Goslawski was less enamoured. In her review, she says:

In Materialists, Song does play with rom-com conventions, but she traps her own efforts in the genre's very conventions. It's a pretty standard love story about deciding who is right for you, as in choosing between your head and your heart. But when she throws in a serious plot twist to set the conventional happy ending in motion, the film becomes a jarring mix of the comedic and the dramatic.

6: The Phoenician Scheme

Wes Anderson's style is so typical that people are making A.I.-memes about it. Just look at the meticulously organized pastel-tinted screenshot here and think who else would put that in his film like this. And generally, we love that about him. However, our reviewer Olga Artemyeva wasn't seduced at all by this. As she states in her review:

Celebrating the concept of a found family that sometimes can turn out to be your actual family, with some side digs at capitalistic practices, is always welcome. But is it too much to ask that this worthy cause be supported with an actual story, characters, and aesthetics that can be watched rather than “read’ through a myriad of references, codes, and zings?

5: Companion

A nice trip by a young couple to meet friends at a cabin in the woods turns... well, unexpectedly and science-fictiony DIFFERENT from what was initially planned in this fun thriller.
J. Hurtado reviewed the film and he said the following:

Though Companion doesn’t quite do enough to hide its first big twist, it’s the fun that follows that really seals the deal. Just when you think you’ve got the movie figured out, and the movie seems to tell you where it’s going, Hancock pulls the rug out from under us all and throws in new, delightfully unexpected twists to keep the audience at the edge of our collective seats. Companion is an impressive first feature from Drew Hancock, a remarkably fun techno-thriller that takes every opportunity to zig when you’re expecting a zag. Well done.

4: The Ugly Stepsister

Having made a Norwegian fairy-tale film that goes Cronenbergian into very uncomfortable body-horror territory, filmmaker Emilie Blichfeldt turns out to be one the year's biggest surprises.
Mel Valentin reviewed her film and says:

By any standard or measure, The Ugly Stepsister qualifies as the the work of a bold, fearless filmmaker, one willing to explore the grimmest, most disturbing aspects of Western beauty standards, what they mean literally and figuratively, who those standards benefit, and how they're weaponized to oppress and repress women, to serve patriarchal ends. Whatever Blichfeldt makes next belongs at or near the top of any must-see list.

3: Black Bag

Steven Soderbergh making a spy thriller with Cate Blanchett, Michael Fassbender and Pierce Brosnan sounds great on paper, and thankfully, the end result matches the expectations. In Kyle Logan's review, he states:

Viewers will never doubt that they're in the hands of a master, as Black Bag is another home run from one of our finest filmmakers. And yes, while his Magic Mike films certainly offer joyous titillation, there's a beauty in making one of the sexiest movies in years without a sex scene in sight.

2: 28 Years Later

Boots! Boots! Boots! What a great trailer! Danny Boyle and Alex Garland return to the apocalyptic zombie franchise they made great (and Juan Carlos Fresnadillo kept great) with this third outing, itself allegedly the first of three. Did we need more zombie films? Well, judging from its place on the list, we did...
In his review, Mel Valentin writes the following:

Relying on relatively state-of-the-art digital tech (Apple iPhones rather than generic mini-DV cameras Doyle used to disorienting effect two decades ago), Doyle upgrades the original’s deliberately anti-beautiful sheen while retaining its hyperreal feel and tone. In an effort to add additional thematic heft to 28 Years Later beyond the usual post-apocalyptic ideas (rebuilding after the collapse of society, xenophobia/anti-outsiderism, the inevitable clash between selfishness and altruism), Boyle splices in archival footage of territorial wars for land, resources, and/or pride, suggesting that the conflict between the survivors and the Infected isn’t new. It’s just another chapter in a never-ending book about the circular rise and fall of humanity and its offshoots.

1: Sinners

A few years back when Thomas Vinterberg's Another Round was doing the, eh... rounds, one of us here commented that while it wasn't the best film of the year, its final minutes were the best bit cinema had to offer that year. I hear several people now saying the same thing about Ryan Coogler's Sinners. The film itself is a pretty solid period horror about vampires, but there is one bit, about an hour in, which is so jawdroppingly perfect in its intent and execution, that it makes history all by itself.

Sinners dominated the lists I got. It received more points than the numbers two, three (and nearly four) combined. It's the undisputed winner. Even some those who didn't have it in their top 5 asked me to give it a special mention.

In Mel Valentin's review, he wrote the following:

Sinners, an indisputably superb entry in the Southern Gothic horror sub-genre, narratively and thematically connects to Coogler’s long-held, deeply personal preoccupations with African and African-American culture, art, and history (among others).

BITING YOUR NAILS BECAUSE YOUR FAVORITE FILM HASN'T BEEN MENTIONED?

Don't fret: check the entire list below! In alphabetical order, here are all the titles mentioned by our writers:

28 Years Later
All We Imagine as Light
Andre is an Idiot
Ash
The Assessment
Better Man
Black Bag
Blue Trail
Brand New Landscape
Bring Her Back
Bullet Train Explosion
Caught By the Tides Companion
Corina
Creation of the Gods II: Demon Force
Dangerous Animals
Darkest Miriam
Dog Man
Eephus
Fiume o Morte!
Friendship
From the World of John Wick: Ballerina
The Gorge
Grand Tour
Havoc
The Hedonist
Ick
I'm Still Here
Kontinental 25
Lesbian Space Princess
The Life of Chuck
Lilim (pictured above)
Magellan
Materialists
Memoir of a Snail
Mickey 17
Mission Impossible - The Final Reckoning
The Monkey
Novocaine
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
One of Them Days
The Phoenician Scheme
Predator: Killer of Killers
Presence
Sentimental Value
Seven Veils
The Shrouds
Sinners
Sorry Baby
Straw
The Things You Kill
Together
Transcending Dimensions
Twinless
The Ugly Stepsister
Universal Language
Vulcanizadora
Warfare
The Wolf, the Fox, and the Leopard
A Working Man
Yoyogi Johnny

And that concludes the first half of 2025! Let's see what the second half brings...