With a production cost of $40 million, and a combined marketing release of $75 million, Melania is certainly the most expensive documentary of all time, an extraordinary fact when one sees the finished result: an inane endeavor, guaranteed to loose money but buy Amazon political influence from the most disturbing and powerful American family of the last hundred years.

Finally it’s time to look back and break down the 10 best movies of 2025. Gari looks back at cinema from the year that was and picks his favorite films that shouldn’t be missed.

In Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, it’s with the delicate beauty of blue-collar guilt and unspoken depression that Scott Copper paints a film so brimming with addictive humility and emotional introspection that it completely surpasses the hideously mundane insinuation that we’re due another droll rock-star biopic

Drenched in ho-hum reviews and a tepid marketing campaign, it’s worth knowing Jurassic World Rebirth is a distinctly old-fashioned slice of 90s action-adventure pie, the kind of re-watchable cinema that would be completely at home on a video store shelf next to Anaconda (1997) and Congo (1996)

23 years after establishing that zombies could not only shuffle but sprint at high speed, director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland return to reestablish their horror credentials by leaving behind the transitional shock of seeing normality destroyed and instead embracing the cold, wet, post-apocalyptic bleakness of British weather and flesh-hungry beasts.

It's a movie that peaks behind the curtain into the domain of a world renowned ballet company, Ballet Lermontov. Fiction of course, which is just as well as it allows its audience to escape into a world of beauty, art and heartache. 

If the prospect of Len Wiseman directing and Keanu Reeves being retained in a supporting role inspires little confidence, the collaborative oversight of producer Chad Stahelski ensures that the high water mark for John Wick’s standard of visual quality is thankfully maintained.

You have to admire Wes Anderson’s steadfast artistic principles, prolific and yet wholly dedicated to a type of sly, cute, irony-laden, self-conscious aesthetic that comments on filmmaking itself as a form, as a deconstruction.

With the eighth entry, Mission Impossible – The Final Reckoning, the franchise has unfortunately decided to fully commit to romanticizing its own mythology, providing us a film that feels weighed down by self-serious grand-standing and a retconned story that’s only interested in looking to its previous entries with rose-tinted glasses.

Adding to the growing list of art about tempestuous chefs in the trenches of the service industry, La Concina, within its stark black and white framing, speaks righteously to those of us disillusioned and chewed up by the gears of capitalistic greed.

In a movie pining to celebrate independent journalism, Kriv Stenders’ The Correspondent straddles the line between award-baiting sincerity and unsettling docudrama, managing to be both convincing in its need to exist but also unconvincing in its emotional execution.

For the scores of films claiming to be ‘anti-war’ films, Ray Mendoza’s and Alex Garland’s Warfare has a strong argument, not least because it is a film I don’t particularly want to experience a second time.

For over two hours, Coogler transfixes us, hypnotises us with the exuberant energy of black culture under fire from the social forces of Jim Crow-era Mississippi and the insatiable blood lust of vampires.

When the Iranian government decided the endeavour of making The Seed of the Scared Fig was worthy of sentencing it’s director, Mohammad Rasoulof, to 8 years in prison, the irony was that this was the kind of endorsement that makes the world take notice.

If there is an indulgence to Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here, it’s an indulgence of an emotional kind. Salles channels such intense love and empathy towards his character’s, he simply cannot bear to part with them until he must.

When the Palestinian militants Black September took Israeli hostages at the 1972 Munich Olympics, the ABC studio that covered the event was close enough to hear the gunfire. By checking maps and directories, dialling rotary phones, bathing 16mm film, translating German radio, they managed to broadcast one of television’s most tragic stories as it happened.

Since James Mangold’s conventional and sincere Walk the Line graced cinemas in 2005 and the appropriately insincere spoof of the same, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, released 2 years later, it’s a wonder Mangold still has the confidence in 2025 to serve the same biographical mush in his new Bob Dylan picture.

This immigrant drama about the fictitious Hungarian architect László Tóth has the impression of real history burnt into its bones. Tóth’s story feels like a comes from a biographical tome by someone like Robert Caro, such is the richness of this type of seldom seen literary-cinema.

No Other Land proves the emotional power of visual evidence – of shaking phones running from gunfire, of cameras filming the discriminate destruction of small farming communities. It’s one thing to fight against the forces that mean you harm, but filmmakers Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor show us the heartless consequences of occupation upon those least equipped to fight against it.

The story of Lee Miller’s unbridled need to seek the truth through photography may be conventional in the spectrum of other biographies, but the substantive weight of its truth-seeking convictions provide it an importance we seem to have lost sight of, one that stares toward the specter of death.