Top 15 Films of 2025

 

Fifteen Favourite 
First Release Films of 2025

Now then, more than the usual caveats apply to my list this year... 

My father got very sick in September and then passed away at the end of October. Consequently, the blog was shut down for over a month and, another knock on effect was that I haven’t, so far, been able to get to the cinema since September. So I’ve missed loads of potential films which might well have made it into my top ten and perhaps even my number one spot (though, that movie is pretty much ‘in the bag’, so to speak). This perhaps also partially explains why this year’s list is only 15 films as opposed to last year’s 30.

So possible contenders I didn’t see were... Now You See Me Now You Don’t, Good Boy, The Running Man and Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein. Along with a whole host of others I’ve probably forgotten about. So please bear with me on this stuff. Also, the list is pretty much all American movies again... it’s not that I didn’t see many foreign language films, just that I didn’t really rate the ones I saw as being special enough to make the list so... yeah, it is what it is, I’m afraid. 

Anyway, here’s the list with the usual link to the full review on the title... so just click each title to get to the review. Please remember, the UK release dates on some of these are for this year, although at least one of them was 2024 in the US. In ascending order they are...

15. A Working Man
Just scraping into my top fifteen is this trusty, tried formula action flick to the tune of  ‘Jason Statham goes up to eleven on the bad guys!’. A more serious brand of The Stath this time around and it keeps me going until The Beekeeper 2 gets released. 

14. Novocaine
Absolute silliness with a ‘what if the ‘no pain’ villain from The World Is Not Enough used his powers for good in a mild mannered way’ kind of premise. There’s absolutely no way the main protagonist could actually survive what happens to him in this film but, I dunno, Hollywoodland seems to think that not feeling pain is somehow synonymous with not having the lasting effects of the accompanying injury. Still, unbridled silliness does count for a lot so, on the list it goes. 

13. Ballerina
What if John Wick was a hot female? Well, here’s the answer, where she’s somehow shoehorned into a gap between John Wick films which, once Keanu shows up, makes no sense in terms of the continuity. Still, since when did that spoil my appetite for a sexy woman jumping around and beating everybody up (well, okay, a few times but not here, I can forgive it somewhat). 

12. Nobody 2
Okay, so this wasn’t nearly as good as the first movie but, it’s just nice catching up with the main protagonist and also seeing a little more of his wife in action for this one.

11. Jurassic World Rebirth
If you’d have told me a year ago a Jurassic World movie would be on my top fifteen list, well... let’s just say that nobody had any right, after the fiasco of the last three movies, to expect anything decent from this one at all but, nope, this was a much more fun movie than I’d expected. Completely took me by surprise.

10. Superman
Okay, I hate the fact that the DC cinematic universe has already been rebooted and it just makes no sense to me after all that hard work of the previous films in the series. However, I didn’t hate this and, well, in a word... Krypto. A live action movie with Superman’s dog (even though the reveal at the end shows it’s not actually his dog) was always going to hit big with me. I can live with it... so far.

9. The Last Showgirl
Finally, people are taking Pamela Anderson seriously as an actress... and good for her. This heartbreaking portrait of a woman trying to keep herself afloat is amazing and the great Dave Bautista is equally fantastic as her leading man. 

8. Bridget Jones - Mad About The Boy
Well, I loved the first movie when it came out all those years ago but was left rather lukewarm by the two sequels. This one, however, brings Bridget back with a bang and it’s a satisfying conclusion to the franchise, for sure. 

7. Drop 
Okay, a clichéd old plot is this time set mostly in a restaurant. I wasn’t expecting a lot from this tired old premise but, honestly, it was so well filmed and performed that it won me over in no time. The Bear McCreary score helped a lot too.

6. M3GAN 2.0
Wow, a sequel to one of the most popular horror movies in years completely underperformed at the box office and was almost universally hated. I guess I’m out of tune with the times again because, although I loved the first one, I also thought this was a great move to keep the franchise fresh. They ditched the horror and turned it into M3GAN meets Mission Impossible meets Charlie’s Angels. Worked for me... loved it.

5. Tornado 
Well, I certainly didn’t expect to have ‘Scottish female samurai movie’ on my ‘top films which somehow managed to get released in UK cinemas’ Bingo card but, here it is and it was truly wonderful.

4. The Long Walk
Read this over 40 years ago and wondered why nobody had made a movie of it. Well, it’s finally here and it’s a pretty intense take on the original Stephen King (or rather Richard Bachman) novel. The ending is, I believe, not what it seems... and is all the better for it.

3. Presence
Steven Soderbergh brought out two films in UK cinemas this year, both within six weeks of each other. And they both made my top three! With one of them snagging my number one spot, no less. This one is him doing something slightly different with what could have been a traditional ghost story.

2. The Phoenician Scheme
And once again, Wes Anderson brings out a movie which shows why he’s one of the greatest of the living American directors. Another brilliant, funny and witty movie with some wonderfully fun performances. 

1. Black Bag
Soderbergh’s second film of the year is his take on the cold war spy novel as popularised by such writers and John Le Carre and Len Deighton back in the 1960s. Indeed, his main protagonist here is named George (presumably after George Smiley) and wears Michael Caine’s Harry Palmer NHS glasses. So a film which very much wears its influences on its sleeve but then takes us into more intimate territory. An absolutely fantastic piece of cinema.

The Long Walk

No Golden Wonders

The Long Walk
Directed by Francis Lawrence
USA 2025
Lionsgate
UK cinema release print

Warning: I originally intended to write this review without spoilers but, so many thick headed websites have completely failed to catch on to anything but the lowest common denominator, surface interpretation of the ending that I’m going to have to address it here in a special spoiler section at the end... so don’t read past that if you don’t want to know. Watch the movie first and then, maybe, come back to me. 

I first read The Long Walk in a collection of four novels called The Bachman Books back in 1985. I would have been 17 years old and I remember thinking to myself that, now that Richard Bachman had just been outed as being a pen name of Stephen King, then somebody’s bound to make this one into a movie soon, right? It was a nice little story and I knew it would surely lend itself to a decent, cinematic interpretation.

Well, it looks like I had to wait 40 years for that to happen but it’s finally here. And I was already going to see this but, about a month ago, I was fortunate enough to be sitting in a screening of a movie at FrightFest (I forget which one), when they did a sneak preview of the first reel of this movie. Basically the first 22 minutes or so... up to and including the first ‘kill’ of the movie. Bad for the movie this preview played with because, it blew the other movie out of the water. So I was definitely up for seeing this as soon as it hit my local cinema.

And, yes, the wait was worth it because director Francis Lawrence has brought one of the year’s best movies to the screen. It deviates very slightly from what I can remember of the novel but, it makes a beautiful companion piece and the ending, which people seem to be almost deliberately misinterpreting on professional websites, is absolutely brilliant. I mean, come on guys... sometimes a film isn’t about what’s immediately on the surface. I’ll get to that in a minute.

Okay, so the basic premise of The Long Walk is this. In a dystopian future, young male adults all sign up for The Long Walk once a year and, by lottery, 50 people are selected. It’s a public demonstration of giving a devastated population a regard for a good work ethic and to give people a chance of hope, if they happen to survive. They then have to walk for as long as they can, not letting their speed drop below three miles an hour over a number of days. If they drop the speed they are given a ten second warning, then two more whereby, if they still can’t carry on at that speed (due to thier foot being broken or some other issue, plus of course exhaustion), they are shot in the head. When there is only one survivor left, the walk stops and they are given a huge, life changing cash prize and are granted one wish. 

The film follows the walkers (not the crisps) as they talk and discuss and just walk for almost two hours of movie, periodically getting shot dead and going through all kinds of harsh weather without once being allowed to rest. 

There are two male leads in this. Cooper Hoffman (son of Philip Seymour) plays Raymond Garraty, contestant number 47 and the always brilliant David Jonsson plays Peter McVries, contestant number 23, with the film focussing on their growing friendship and revealing background on their characters as the walk progresses. Egged on by the human representation of the villainy of the piece, The Major, played chillingly by the great Mark Hamill.

And it’s brilliant and, maybe not quite brutal as many critics have called it but certainly a little gruelling (and occasionally gory, such as a scene involving some tank tracks from the vehicles which constantly follow the walkers, carrying the military who are going to pop out and shoot them dead when the time comes). The whole thing is very suspenseful and I can’t help but think that Alfred Hitchcock would even have appreciated this one, to an extent. 

All this and a really great score by composer Jeremiah Fraites which helps build the tension nicely, using almost minimalist ostinatos interspersed with beautiful, poignant melodies at key points... so of course there’s no proper CD release of this at time of writing. And then there’s the ending...

Okay, this is spoilers now, don’t read past here until you’ve seen the movie...

The final two left in the walk by the end of the tale are Garraty and McVries, who have built a solid friendship and are moved by each other’s stories of why they want to win the money and the wish for and what they would do with said wish once they get it. Garraty wants to ask for one of the carbines the military are carrying as his wish, so he can shoot The Major dead there and then because of something which has happened to him in his past. So McVries deliberately stops so Garraty can win but, Garraty goes back for him and gets him moving again, with the two of them both on their final warning (next stop is instant death)... and once Garraty gets McVries interested in carrying on, he lets him get ahead and just stops so that McVries can win... without him at first realising what has happened. So he makes Garraty’s wish come true, gets the carbine and kills The Major for him. Then, with the crowd of spectators and all the military just suddenly vanished for no apparent reason, he just carries on walking into the sunset (so to speak). And people have been reporting this as some kind of demonstration that Garraty is the one actually left standing. 

Because that’s what they see without thinking about why they are seeing the ending done in this poetic, almost dream like manner, I guess. 

Um... nope. 

I don’t think McVries survived at all. It’s made pretty clear that if he kills the major, he’ll be shot dead by the military looking on in front of the huge crowd of walk supporters gathered to see the finish. And then they just all are suddenly not there? No, I think it’s obvious by this point that McVries is already dead and this is what happened in his dead mind’s view of events. I think that he either didn’t get successfully saved by Garraty when he tried to sacrifice himself or... maybe he did but as soon as he killed The Major he was shot dead too. He may not realise it yet but, either way, he’s dead. It’s the only explanation for the way the last shot of the movie plays out, I reckon.

Does this make The Long Walk this year’s Saint Maud (reviewed here) in terms of ending interpretations... well, yeah, maybe. I don’t know why people aren’t picking up on this stuff because, to me it’s obvious but, either way, there are no happy endings here. The film is a relentless machine of suspense and so earns my respect and admiration, with that dream state ending just being the cherry on top of the cake, as far as I’m concerned. 

And if that isn’t a recommendation for The Long Walk then I don’t know what is. This one is absolutely phenomenal and I hope it does huge at the box office (although my local Cineworld stupidly showed it in the smallest screen they had... that’s just silly). Definitely catch this one with a cinema full of people... you will, eventually, hear more than just a pin drop.