One Battle After Another – Director: Paul Thomas Anderson (Warner Bros.)
While other celebrated directors of his generation are content to stay in their lane (Wes Anderson has more or less made the same two films for the past 25 years), Paul Thomas Anderson has taken big swing after big swing, writing and directing films with a personal scale that tackle the stuff of life–the victors and casualties of American society, the search for romantic relationships, the lure of those who claim to have The Answer, and the need to create family when blood relations betray.
For two hours and 40 minutes, One Battle After Another zips along, sustaining a sense of tension, punctuated by several stellar set pieces and shot through with laugh-out-loud moments that ease the relentlessness of the story. The film incorporates elements from films like John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild (1986), and Sidney Lumet’s Running on Empty (1988), and weds them to multiple action sequences that are genuinely exciting. One Batter After Another, however, it has much more on its mind than thrills.
One Battle After Another’s opening sequence, an assault on an internment camp, delivers an extra sting in 2025, as does an extended sequence of ICE raids and the protest response. Anderson, applying his considerable talent to action sequences, creates thrilling moments that share the off-kilter tension found in some of the most inspired sequences in his 1999 psychological drama, Magnolia, and his 2002 dark comedy, Punch Drunk Love.
Where an action-minded director might play these sequences for cheap thrills or sensationalized violence, Anderson focuses on the human stakes. He knows that, in the words of Brian Cox’s portrayal of screenwriting guru Jack McKee in Spike Jonze’s Adaptation (2002), “Wow them in the end and you’ve got a hit.” The climactic chase sequence in One Battle After Another is thrilling, and the film ends on a hopeful note. – Brian Stout
See also “One Battle After Another’s Appealing Radical Heart“, by Brian Stout.
The Perfect Neighbor – Director: Geeta Gandbhir (Netflix)
A standout at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Geeta Gandbhir’s film is a riveting reconstruction of an infamous Florida “Stand Your Ground” case that touches on everything from race to anti-social behavior to mental illness and access to firearms. Gandbhir uses an artfully edited stream of body camera footage to show how a typical “get off my lawn” neighborhood dispute too easily turns murderous.
Almost unwatchable in its intensity, The Perfect Neighbor eschews talking heads and instead illustrates the escalating conflict from multiple perspectives. Gandbhir presents a deeply tragic story without losing sight of the humanity of everyone involved. – Chris Barsanti
See also “Sundance Film Festival 2025 Is at a Crossroads“, by Chris Barsanti.
Peter Hujar’s Day – Director: Ira Sachs (Janus Films)
On 19 December 1974, photographer Peter Hujar told his friend, author Linda Rosenkrantz, what he had done the day prior; she recorded him, and the result became Peter Hujar’s Day. Ira Sach’s film works on multiple levels: It’s a tribute to a great but still underrated artist; it’s a paean to the bohemian scene of 1970s New York; it’s a meditation on monotony and an ode to the ordinary; it’s a tone poem about art’s relationship to life, death, and time.
Ben Whishaw achieves something close to dialectical mesmerism in his paradoxical performance, one that is simultaneously monumental (his dialogue comprises 55 of the script’s 58 pages, according to the film’s press notes) and mundane. It’s a tightrope walk of contradictions, managed masterfully. There are no flashy emotional pirouettes or dramatic revelations, no manipulation or Oscar-bait. Instead, Whishaw embodies the artist at his most quotidian.
Peter Hujar’s Day is a rare opportunity for Hollywood talent to have some fun with a genuine art film, a conceptual project that somehow slipped past the mainstream gatekeepers. It is also a rare opportunity for Hollywood talent to have some fun with a genuine art film, a conceptual project that somehow slipped past the mainstream gatekeepers. Indeed, Peter Hujar’s Day is one of the most succinct examples of how the specific can become the universal, how details can tell the whole story, and how meaning can be created from scraps. – Matt Mahler
See also “‘Peter Hujar’s Day’ Finds and Makes Meaning in the Mundane“, by Matt Mahler.
The Secret Agent – Director: Kleber Mendonça Filho (MUBI)
Like Korea, Latin America sports a long tradition of excellent, politically charged filmmaking that aims to make sense of the horrors of its contemporary history. In 2024, Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here made waves with a brutal real-life account of the disappearances of left-wing opposition during the last years of the US-backed military dictatorship in Brazil.
This year, former critic Kleber Mendonça Filho delivers the most decorated film of the season so far with The Secret Agent, another shocking story of how the lives of honest people are destroyed by the ambitions of degenerates. Wagner Moura is spellbinding as Armando, a widowed former professor trapped by the calamitous dictatorship of the 1970s, desperately attempting to flee persecution and save what’s left of his identity from a ruinous regime.
Over two and a half hours long but without a single minute of fluff, The Secret Agent is a thematically layered political thriller with an expectation-defying ending. It reads both as a diary of defiance in the face of senseless peril and a love letter to Filho’s hometown of Recife and the people of Brazil, whose intergenerational trauma persists.
The standout in the sea of strong features, however, is the absurdist, continuously shifting plot and several subplots that will take you truly bizarre places and leave you guessing until the end. It would be a crime to spoil anything, but if you think you’re prepared for the messiness of what Filho ironically calls “a period of great mischief” from the first scene, think again. One of the major subplots involves a severed leg found inside a captured tiger shark.
Nevertheless, it’s the potency of the real-life inspiration and Filho’s vision that hold The Secret Agent together despite digressions, coupled with Moura’s quiet and commanding performance as the man who tries hard to, but cannot truly comprehend the strange condition of his life. Despite the film’s many stylistic oddities, you will likely find yourself relating to its protagonist more than you’d expect. – Ana Yorke
Sentimental Value – Director: Joachim Trier (MUBI)
With Sentimental Value, Joachim Trier is once again exploring human nature, again — it’s what drives him as a filmmaker. Unlike delving into the extremes of The Worst Person in the World‘s unsympathetic protagonist, here Trier nestles into a character whose flaws can compel questions of likability.Stellan Skarsgård plays celebrated director Gustav Borg, and father to his two daughters, Nora (Renata Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas). The father who prioritised his art over his family is one of the film’s inevitable clichés, which is not a criticism, because clichés are part of the cinematic language.
Sentimental Value is a film at odds with our present-day society that is moving at a breakneck pace, even in the formation of opinions and seeking clarity. It is patient in building up to its point, letting the characters gradually reveal themselves. Trier attempts to represent that quiet moment when the individual experiences a revelatory insight into themselves and their world. He’s also asking deeper questions about the selfishness of human beings, who want everything – a family and a career – but are unwilling to sacrifice one for the other.
As Borg has told stories that have touched generations of people, including a famous American actress played by Elle Fanning, he has also created pain and suffering. Sentimental Value is about how we make a mess of the lives of those we love and spend a lifetime trying to fix the resulting emotional and psychological problems. It’s also about the inevitability of reckoning with the fallout of our choices. – Paul Risker
Sinners – Director: Ryan Coogler (Warner Bros.)
When the first ads for Ryan Coogler’s Sinners appeared in the fall of 2024, it was both exciting and disappointing. On the one hand, seeing Coogler getting out of the IP mines and back to original material for the first time since his 2013 debut, Fruitvale Station, was a cheer-worthy moment. On the other hand, did it have to be a monster movie (zombie, vampire, or other, the ads hinted but didn’t reveal)?
When the film was released in April 2025, it disproved the need for such worries. Yes, the story about a pair of war-vet Chicago gangsters who are also twin brothers (Coogler’s De Niro, Michael B. Jordan, playing both) returning to their segregated Mississippi home town to start up a nightclub is stocked full of pulp tropes and leaves no room for subtlety. Yet even when Sinners pivots from a story about family, shame, economic self-determination, religion, and the transformative power of music to a vampire siege and a Götterdämmerung-like showdown with the Ku Klux Klan, Coogler never hits a false note.
Stacked with spectacular secondary players, from Delroy Lindo’s broken-down bluesman (a cliché trap of a character he invests with majesty and humor) to Jack O’Connell’s centuries-old undead seducer, the Sinners might be pulp, but it is supremely elevated pulp. – Chris Barsanti
Sirat – Director: Oliver Laxe (Neon)
At the start of Oliver Laxe’s haunting Sirat, a gaggle of scruffy travelers stack and bungee cord together towers of giant speakers in a wide desert plain. When assembled, they are photographed in reverential silence, like monuments to a fallen alien civilization. Then the music comes in at a low thrumming register rather than the sharp rise-and-fall of club EDM, dozens of dusty, enraptured dancers swaying on the sandy ad hoc dance floor, their nearby vans and trucks denoting a nomadic culture that drifts from one rave to the next.
A middle-aged man (Sergi Lopez) wanders awkwardly through the dancers with his wide-eyed son (Bruno Nunez Arjona), asking if anybody has seen his daughter, a traveling raver who went missing months ago. With no clues, he tags along with a group traveling to another rave further in the desert, where she might be. This sets off an eerie, poorly thought-out journey to the edge of nowhere, where unexpected bonds form in this ad hoc tribe even as the territory becomes increasingly hostile and alien.
Shot mostly in Morocco but never identified as such, Sirat (Arabic for path) presents a mysterious world teetering on the edge of chaos; news reports reference an incipient world war, people desperately crowd a gas station for fuel, and columns of soldiers menacingly crisscross the empty desert. Part Mad Max adventure (trucks roaring across the sandy flats), the film is also a darkly comic and ultimately tragic Herzogian investigation of man’s inability to comprehend nature’s elemental forces. – Chris Barsanti
Sorry, Baby – Director: Eva Victor (A24)
Director Ava Victor’s first feature brims with that assured confidence that still surprises. The way in which Victor takes the difficult subject matter of depression and sexual assault and puts it within the context of a story that finds reasons to laugh at its characters’ absurd and quirky moments creates these complementary tones.
It’s jarring how the darker aspects of the story don’t dominate, yet herein Victor makes a compelling observation. Life goes on, and a person’s trauma will endure, splitting them between the past and the present. It’s an experience that’s hard to articulate, but Sorry, Baby does it well. It’s these tonal nuances that mean the film is as striking as it is sensitive.
Sorry, Baby is also a technically accomplished film. Patient and unbroken takes emphasize the passage of time, and Victor understands that it’s not about what she shows but about what can be inferred from the action offscreen. Then there’s the piano in the score, whose lightness contrasts with the story’s darker aspects. Throughout, there are incisive juxtapositions, and none more so powerful than how we can still laugh and joke even when we’re hurting.
Victor never pretends to have answers to Agnes’ situation. Instead, Sorry, Baby is about the audience being present with the character, and embracing the experience, not a complete journey. – Paul Risker
Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake) – Director: Sierra Falconer (The Future of Film Is Female)
There’s joy in experiencing an anthology film like Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake), as the four stories brim with self-confidence, albeit with a gentle energy that echoes the quiet, scenic setting. Look closely enough at this collection of stories about a group of residents of a small American town on Green Lake, and there’s the semblance of a conversation between narrative and setting.
We must surrender ourselves to Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake) because Falconer doesn’t entertain grand or complicated thematic overtures. It’s an example of workmanlike storytelling — the graft of honing precise themes and ideas that give each story purpose. The film is, first and foremost, an emotional experience from which the themes and ideas emerge. Falconer’s focus, however, is to put the characters front and center so the stories emerge naturally from them rather than the characters arduously working to deliver a thematic message.
The titular story “Sunfish” carries a specific feeling that is difficult to express matter-of-factly. I daresay it is like the gentle breeze that grazes our skin, ruffles our hair, or the curtains by the open window, or the warmth of a summer’s day. – Paul Risker
See also “‘Sunfish’ Is a Near-Perfect Anthology Film“, by Paul Risker.
Warfare – Director: Alex Garland (A24)
A tight and terrifying docudrama combat procedural, Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland’s Warfare tracks just one engagement in the Iraq War. The firefight was unremarkable enough to have almost certainly been forgotten by anybody not there.
Mendoza and Garland do nothing to burden their story with external meaning. That scarcity of framing gives the film a timeless, nearly abstract sensation at certain moments when having the characters consider anything beyond the immediate need for survival would be beside the point. That said, Warfare still vividly grounds itself in time and place. Based on Ray Mendoza’s recollections, an ex-Navy SEAL who advised Alex Garland on last year’s Civil War, the film’s on-screen text introduction explains that the story takes place on one day in November 2006, during the Second Battle of Ramadi.
Warfare moves ahead in real time, steadily elevating chaos and compounding stakes that have nothing to do with the prosecution of a war and everything to do with the squad’s survival. Some might find Warfare’s unfamiliar structure and lack of closure frustrating. While filled with gunfire, it nevertheless contains few moments of satisfyingly cathartic violence. The film closes on the action without any pretense that what happened on that Ramadi street mattered beyond how successful the men there were in trying to kill those on the other side. – Chris Barsanti
See also “‘Warfare’ Tells a Brutally Universal Story Through a Narrow Lens“, by Chris Barsanti.
Weapons – Director: Zach Cregger (Warner Bros.)
A small town character study wrapped inside a horror shell, Zach Cregger’s sly and surprising Weapons has enough characters and subplots to drive an entire season’s worth of prestige TV. Finding a niche between the deeper personal stories of elevated horror and the don’t go in there! scares of the Blumhouse factory, the film is simultaneously a fascinatingly novelistic portrait of linked characters and a gripping mystery (why did all those children disappear into the night at the same moment?) which is tied together through a surprise introduction of a terrifying villain (Amy Madigan, who viewers will want to forget but won’t be able to) who comes across like Pennywise at a PTA meeting.
Underhandedly sinister but richly textured and shot through with humor, Weapons suggests that Cregger is just getting started. – Chris Barsanti