2025 in Review: Cinema
A year packed with fantastic new titles and must-see vintage classics.
2025 was a brilliant year for cinema, and we loved welcoming thousands of film fans through our doors to enjoy everything from Oscar-winners The Brutalist, Anora, and I'm Still Here to international titles like The Seed of the Sacred Fig and The Last Journey, to those big screen blockbusters that sold out over and over again – who can forget Frankenstein and Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale?
We asked the DCA team for their favourite films of 2025, and here's what they had to say…
Published
David Nixon, DCA's Head of Cinema, shares his top five films of the year with us:
Nickel Boys Despite it coming out right at the very start of 2025, RaMell Ross’ adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel moved me and stayed with me more than any other film this year. Difficult subject matter told through refreshingly innovative filmmaking.
Die My Love Lynne Ramsay is one of my favourite filmmakers, so my anticipation was sky high for this one and it did not disappoint. Showing off Ramsay’s expert use of visual texture, colour and sound, Die My Love was both exhilarating and overwhelming - in a good way.
One Battle After Another Another highly anticipated film by another auteur which I loved this year was Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. At once thrilling, poignant and funny, the film also featured one of the most unique car chases I’ve seen on screen.
Sentimental Value A nuanced exploration of family, memory, and art, Sentimental Value will be on our screens in a couple of weeks' time and will no doubt be nominated for all sorts of awards in the new year - don’t miss it.
28 Years Later Being from Newcastle myself, it was a surreal experience seeing the infected zombie-like beings roaming places I visited often as a child, but it was cinematic experience that I adored and will live long in my memory.
Shoutouts to: Vermiglio, Sinners, The Brutalist, Pillion, and The Ballad of Wallis Island.
Cinema Programmer Michael Coull says
I have a top three films of the year, but I first want to give two honourable mentions. I loved Presence, innovative, technically experimental, propulsive film-making from Steven Soderbergh, and Sorry, Baby, a warm, funny and human story about the aftermath of sexual assault.
For my top three films – in third place is The Girl with the Needle, Magnus van Horn’s haunting black and white psychodrama. Loosely based on a true story, it’s a fearless thing of a film, a bottomless well that tackles grisly subject matter with sensitivity and poise and no shortage of heart-stopping imagery.
My second-favourite was Julia Ducournau’s Alpha. Critics and festival audiences hated it, but for me it was another peerlessly explorative piece of filmmaking from a filmmaker who refuses to cow to popular opinion or ideas of good taste (though she does have unequivocally good taste). Moving, breathtakingly cinematic, utterly unique, it stands head and shoulders above most of the year’s releases to me.
But my favourite film of the year has to be Sinners. Just as everyone is proclaiming the death of the Hollywood blockbuster, here comes Ryan Coogler to whack a pair of fangs on it and resurrect it from its crypt. He makes films like each one could be his last, packing them with so much ambition, wit, invention and life that they are positively bursting at the seams.
The big musical centrepiece of this film, for which the film positively stops for an extended period, is a scene so audacious I could barely believe what I was seeing. In a period action/horror capital-M Movie about vampires in the deep south that openly reckons with America’s racist history, no less. Add in a stellar cast doing some career-best work and this is an extravaganza of outrageous proportions. A thrill.
More DCA staff favourites…
A Real Pain - laugh-out-loud funny and touching. A must for anyone who loves Kieran Culkin.
I Swear – Laughed, cried and gasped in equal measure.
3000 Feet, a documentary from Kevin Woods and Lindsay Hall also delivered fantastic events in two sold out shows. It was a pleasure to meet so many enthusiastic hill walkers and climbers and work with the team from Dundee Mountain Film Festival.
NT Live: The Importance of Being Earnest. Fabulous cast, gorgeous costumes and set design. It was hilarious, I absolutely loved it!
Lots of great picks from the team; which were your favourites? Have we forgotten any? Be sure to tag us in your 2025 film reviews over on Letterboxd, we'd love to read them.
There's lots more to look forward to in 2026 – we can't wait to see you at DCA Cinema soon.