Notes on Some 2025 Films

Image Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures

Like (almost) every other year, 2025 was an important year in film. “Important” is a loaded word and should not perhaps be thrown around loosely. In the context of this post, this word means one thing and one thing only – any work that I find appealing enough to think and write about. While the focus of this post is going to be films released this year, I am going to preface the discussion by recalling some films for which this year is a multiple-of-50 anniversary. What follows are personal reflections shaped as much by temperament and viewing circumstances as by the films themselves.

At a century and a few decades, cinema is still a very young medium of art. One of the key works which codified a number of key grammatical rules for this art form in its infancy was Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, released exactly a century ago. The year also saw the release of Chaplin’s Gold Rush. The year 1975 was no less remarkable. With Jaws, it cemented the status of Steven Spielberg as one of the preeminent commercial filmmakers of his time. Miloš Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest combined comedy and tragedy in a breathtaking piece of filmmaking. My favourite Hollywood film from 1975 is Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon. The film can admittedly be very frustrating – but at the same time, it is also equally rewarding. Considering Kubrick’s preoccupation with the essence of human nature, let me be a bit provocative and say that, much like Federico Fellini, he always made the same film over and over again. In my opinion, save for Eyes Wide Shut, Barry Lyndon is the film that comes as close to perfection as possible – it is one of the best treatises on the collision between determinism and free will.

(Top) Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick)
Image Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures
(Bottom) Sholay (Ramesh Sippy)
Image Credit: Sippy Films

For me, the most pleasurable ’75 film to watch actually came from India: Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay is such a mammoth achievement in filmmaking that none associated with its making could ever scale the dizzying heights reached by this film. There is a lot to say about this magnificent film – a lot has been said already – but for now I will just make one observation that connects Sholay to Lyndon. Fate and luck loom large over both films – the obvious aspect in Sholay being the two-headed coin. Less obviously, the character Radha is the most pitiful victim of the machinations of fate.

Coming back to the present, 2025 did offer me several fine examples of filmmaking and film (alas, great filmmaking does not always translate to great films). I have not seen enough films to make a ranked best-and-worst list (which I find pointless and distasteful anyway). I got to see some films in the (un)intended format – i.e., during trans-continental flights and some on the big screen. I will simply write down some of the observations that I had. It turns out that I have one favourite film of the year – I would have said it did not exist until a couple of weeks ago – which I discuss at the end.

Roofman (Derek Cianfrance)
Image Credit: Paramout Pictures

The most surprising film this year for me was Derek Cianfrance’s Roofman. While the film is based on the real-life story of Jeffrey Manchester, what matters to me as a viewer is Cianfrance’s perception of him. Generally speaking, it is somewhat of a paradox that such representations are closer to the truth (I am tempted to use a capital T) than works that claim – principally through aesthetics – to lay claim to an absolute truth. The reason it is  so surprising is that underneath the veneer of comedy, this is a heartbreaking tragedy – detailing the attempt of its titular character to be a good man, in a very wrong way, and ultimately failing spectacularly to escape his destiny, twice over. Cianfrance’s Manchester is not too different from Redmond Barry from Barry Lyndon or Carlito from Brian De Palma’s Carlito’s Way. Channing Tatum’s deeply affecting performance – strongly supported by Kirsten Dunst – is one for the ages. I sat in stunned silence as the credits rolled.

Presence (Steven Soderbergh)
Image Credit: Neon

The horror genre has historically been one of the best arenas for formal inventions in film. A number of films this year were very interesting from the point of view of pure cinematics. The central conceit of Steven Soderbergh’s Presence was drawing attention to its craft – with the whole film presented from the point of view of a ghost that is barely aware that it does not have a corporeal form. The existence of the moving camera as a character in itself is a feature unique to the cinematic art form – some of the thrilling possibilities of which have been explored by Soderbergh himself in previous films. I was struck by the emotional depth in this film, helped in no small measure by David Koepp’s writing.

The Woman in the Yard (Jaume Collet-Serra)
Image Credit: Universal Pictures

Horror films, when not being inventive, are usually mind-numbingly derivative. If I had gone by the description alone, I would never have hit the play button for The Woman in the Yard, given how reliably elevated horror now signals its seriousness through the familiar vocabulary of grief and trauma, often without exploring either meaningfully.  But then I saw that it was directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, a particularly dominant figure in the discourse on “vulgar auteurism”. This is the work of an auteur, all right and there’s nothing vulgar about it.  It was really good filmmaking at the service of a pretty good film. I found a lot to admire in the film – the ending was a welcome departure from films of this sort. To use an example from this year, this is to be contrasted with Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love, where admittedly brilliant skills are used at the service of something quite revolting. It may well be that Ramsay has made a great film which I cannot understand with my current frame of mind. I might end up changing my opinion of the film upon a revisit, which I don’t see happening anytime soon.

Good Boy (Ben Leonberg)
Image Credit: IFC Films

I was fairly impressed with Ben Leonberg’s Good Boy – the performance of its canine lead Indy is in perfect tune with the formal intents of the film. The film that I was reminded of was Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar.  

Weapons (Zach Cregger)
Image Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures

A little more than a decade back, Comedy Central used to air a show called Guys with Kids. One of the goofy guys in question was played by an actor called Zack Cregger, who created the most deliciously entertaining film of this year – Weapons. It did not exactly reinvent the wheel – it was nevertheless a thrilling roller-coaster. What I found most praiseworthy was Cregger’s confidence in his own craft and steadfast refusal to explain its meaning – which should not be mistaken for its non-existence. Cregger’s career trajectory as a comedian-turned-horror-director is somewhat similar to Jordan Peele’s, but at least to me, the knife-edge balance between the comic and horrific is more evocative of M. Night Shyamalan. The explosive climactic set-piece (almost literally) is a tour de force in this regard, with some tender emotions also thrown in for good measure. I look forward to seeing what Cregger does next.

Eddington (Ari Aster)
Image Credit: A24

Ari Aster is another filmmaker who has used his extraordinary skills to craft utterly unpleasant films. It seemed to me that both Hereditary and Midsommar were less about the demons on screen than about those their maker wanted to exorcise (or not). The world, according to both films, is a terrible place and it must be destroyed in a terrible way. When I heard that Aster’s new film (I still have not managed to bring myself to watch Beau is Afraid) was set in the early months of the pandemic, I sort of chuckled to myself – Aster would not have to cook up too many fictional scenarios to make a case for the destruction of the world. I was, however, pleasantly surprised by Eddington. He largely did what I expected. As in his previous works, he does see the world getting destroyed, but no longer seems to revel in it.  There is a surprising amount of empathy in the core of the film – it is almost as if the maker can distance himself from the subjects. The film is perhaps the most formally striking one in Aster’s career, with ace cinematographer Darius Khondji perfectly complementing the twisted vision. We are still not far enough from 2020 to look at it from hindsight, which is precisely what must have interested Aster in this material and led to such a polarising reception.

Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos)
Image Credit: Focus Features

Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia can be regarded as a companion piece to Eddington (Aster is listed as a producer), albeit a less successful one. I have had a somewhat similar reaction to the one other work of Lanthimos I have seen before, Kinds of Kindness, the difference from Aster being that Lanthimos deployed his craft in ways I find punishing for its own sake. (Kinds of Kindness is the closest I have come to walking out of a theatre.) There’s a bit of that in Bugonia, too, but the central performances by Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons (a special shout-out to the outstanding debut by Aidan Delbis) elevate the film considerably. The heart-wrenching scene in which Plemons’ character runs to the hospital injecting antifreeze in his comatose mother’s IV to revive her revealed the beating heart in the film. It is somewhat reminiscent of Death and the Maiden (which also appeared to influence It Was Just An Accident in a much more discernible way), including the last stretch, where the film unravels spectacularly.

Frankenstein (Guillermo Del Toro)
Image Credit: Netflix

Scarlett Johansson’s debut feature Eleanor the Great is a moving, heartfelt piece of work with a nonagenarian at its centre. The film is a beautiful exploration of the question of the authorship of collective stories and the fine line between appropriation and preservation. Noah Baumbach's Jay Kelly could have been an interesting exercise but it is too derivative (I am thinking of Satyajit Ray's Nayak and Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries) to have any dramatic heft of its own. I sort of liked Guillermo Del Toro's Frankenstein when I first watched it in the theatre but nothing from the film apart from its final image has stayed with me. I was pleasantly surprised by Rian Johnson's Wake Up Dead Man which is the first one in the Knives Out series to fully embrace the Golden Age  (I chuckled at a piece of paper mentioning Agatha Christie's Murder of Roger Ackroyd and The Murder at the Vicarage, the former of which is more than a casual reference in the film). The thematic elements and the big statements cohere more nicely and naturally than in the previous films in the series, with the second one being the most jarring one.

Saiyaara (Mohit Suri)
Image Credit: Yash Raj Films

I saw only a few Indian films this year. I was particularly surprised by my own reaction to Mohit Suri’s Saiyaara, a rather old-fashioned Bollywood melodrama – there is nothing quite like old wine in an old bottle if served well.  The charming leads duly aided by a killer of a soundtrack made me look past the inherent silliness of the premise and believe in the all-conquering power of passionate young love. Aanand L. Rai’s Tere Ishk Mein, on the other hand, is an odd beast and rather difficult to classify. Despite what the title claims, it is hardly a love story. Unlike in most Indian films of this kind, the makers maintain a measured distance from the madness, obsession and cruelty which shape the narrative. I think I am one of the only three people on this planet professing their love for Rai’s Zero (I am yet to meet the other two) which is as audacious a film as has ever come out of Bollywood, all the more remarkable because it was commanded by Bollywood's biggest superstar. Here, Rai’s very controlled efforts towards eliciting specific audience reactions is very interesting to observe –  A.R. Rahman's haunting score does help his cause considerably. (Speaking of whom, I feel compelled to mention Mani Ratnam’s Thug Life which must be studied as a prime example of squandered opportunity.)

One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson)
Image Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures

Millions of words have been written about Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another, an overwhelmingly large fraction of which was devoted to dissecting its politics. I find most of the commentary to be misguided. I have my own misguided opinion about the politics of the film but I am not going to explore it in this space. The first thing about the film that springs to mind is not the specifics of its politics, but – dare I say it? -- what an unabashed crowd-pleaser it is. Some commentators have already noted how much this film owes to James Cameron's  Terminator 2: Judgment Day  (right down to the central question of what makes one a parent). Anderson had reportedly quit film school because of the dismissive comments made by an instructor towards this film. (The first blast of music in the film also evokes Handel’s Sarabande which accompanied the opening of Barry Lyndon; fate does show up in the cast of characters in Anderson’s film.) From the beginning to the end this is certainly one of the most entertaining films I have seen in a while. I suspect that some of the most potent aspects in this largely self-parodying film  have as much to do with the leading man Leonardo DiCaprio as with the director as the actor continues his streak of self-deprecatory narratives.

Avatar: Fire and Ash (James Cameron)
Image Credit: 20rh Century Studios

The film of the year for me is Avatar: Fire and Ash which was by no means a foregone conclusion (despite what I said previously about Titanic and Avatar). I admit that I was not overly enamoured of the second entry, The Way of Water.  While there was a lot to admire in the film, I could not submit to it as wholeheartedly as I did for the first one. For all the criticism about the apparent repetitiveness and genericity, I was rather surprised by Cameron's decision to sideline the hero of the saga and focus on the story of the children.  Since I first saw The Way of Water three years ago, I have somewhat warmed towards it, while falling short of loving it fully. Fire and Ash, on the other hand, had me captivated from the get-go. There are many references to earlier Cameron works to give their admirers a chuckle – an early sequence has someone retrieving valuable things from a shipwreck – which were the fodder for some remarkably lazy commentary. To me, it is simply astounding how many narrative strands Cameron weaves together in a mere 197 minutes (not being sarcastic here): a domestic drama with grief threatening to tear a family apart, a coming of age story, many different notions of paternity, teenage rebellion, the passing of the baton of warrior down generations all unfolding over one battle after another. Since the first film, the narrative has expanded in dimensionality. I was impressed with the way the film rejects tribalism. There can never be too many strong women characters in a Cameron film; even so, Varang is a particularly remarkable one. This is the first time I have seen the actress Oona Chaplin, whose last name is not an accident – she has reportedly made many contributions of her own to the physicality of the performance, which does say a lot given that it is a Cameron production.

Avatar: The Way of Water (James Cameron)
Image Credit: 20th Century Studios

Cameron remains unparalleled in constructing heart-pounding action, the sequence of Jake's rescue from the Sky People base being a masterclass in this regard. The scene that follows is no less exemplary, with a visual reference to Macbeth and the tale of Abraham and Isaac. (It's worth recalling that The Way of Water had a similar allusion to Hamlet.) We are living in very interesting times, with hollowness afflicting all spheres of life, including cinema – Cameron’s work, as a coda to all that went by in the months past, inside the dark theatre and outside it, does end the year with a bang rather than a whimper.