the editorial team’s top films

Taking stock of a year of cinema is a bit like trying to fit a 3-hour sequence shot into an Instagram story: it’s heartbreaking… but you have to give in to it. 2025 will have been a particularly generous cinema year.

This year, the cinemas vibrated to the rhythm of a rare eclecticism. Strolling seamlessly from the segregationist Louisiana of Ryan Coogler to the Polish plains of Jesse Eisenberg, from the roads of Paul Thomas Anderson’s divided America to the Moroccan mountains of Sirat, 2025 offered us a cinematic world tour that was as radical as it was moving.

Here are the Top 2025 movie favorites from the L’Eclaireur team.

Cry by Oliver Laxe

It begins with a sonic deluge and ends with a sledgehammer. Cry is what we call an “experience”, the kind that disconcerts, stuns and overwhelms. By following the desperate quest of a father (Sergi Lopez) and his son in the heart of the Moroccan mountains, escorted by a band of perched ravers, the young Franco-Spanish director Oliver Laxe signs a psychedelic road movie which turns into a nihilistic drama. A visual and visceral shock, which literally nails you to your seat.

One battle after another by Paul Thomas Anderson

With One battle after anotherthe brilliant Paul Thomas Anderson joyfully interweaves comedy, action and political satire in a frenetic journey through divided America. The casting is Dantesque – an avalanche of trophies announced for Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn and Benicio del Toro -, the dialogues jubilant and the words acidic. The virtuoso staging serves the big screen, offering a pure moment of cinema – the final, masterful chase has already established itself as an anthology moment. New proof that “PTA” is one of the biggest.

Black Dog de Guan Hu

Far from its blockbuster The Brigade of 800 – one of the biggest hits in Chinese cinema of all time – director Guan Hu picked us up with Black Dog. Because this very beautiful story of friendship between an ex-convict (Eddie Peng) and an abandoned dog touches the heart.

Both a contemplative western and a political tale, the film examines the margins of a disoriented country that vacillates between traditions and all-consuming modernity. A sensitive ode to those left behind and to damaged existences.

The Brutalist de Brady Corbet

Brady Corbet signs with The Brutalist a monumental film about the weight of art and the disillusionment of the American dream after World War II. Carried by a trio of remarkable actors (Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones and Guy Pearce), the film stands out today as a masterpiece of contemporary cinema.

3h35 film-film with an intermission, The Brutalist is a true cinematic experience and a feature film as radical as it is beautiful in which we follow László Tóth, a Hungarian architect and survivor of the Shoah, who comes to try his luck in the United States.

One battle after another by Paul Thomas Anderson

One battle after another created an event at the time of its release. While marking the return of Leonardo DiCaprio to the cinema, in front of the camera of Paul Thomas Anderson, the film presents an incredible American adventure in which Bob Ferguson – a disillusioned former revolutionary, incarnation of the modern Dude of The Big Lebowski – tries to find his daughter Willa while his sworn enemy, Colonel Lockjaw (the impeccable Sean Penn) is back.

Both an action film and an intimate feature film about transmission, One battle after another is a modern work about a fractured America. A committed, moving and funny road trip.

Hind Rajab’s voice de Kaouther Ben Hania

Definitely one of the most notable films of 2025. After winning the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, Hind Rajab’s voice shook the whole world. We follow Palestinian Red Crescent volunteers when they receive a call from a six-year-old girl caught under Israeli fire in Gaza.

Based on the real calls of little Hind, now deceased, the film immerses the viewer in an intense closed session without directly showing the violence in Gaza. A docu-fiction that mixes anger and helplessness; a committed work which above all allows us to fight against forgetting at a time of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Sinners deRyan Coogler

In segregationist America in the 1930s, two twin brothers return to their hometown in the Deep South to start over. Seeking to escape their troubled past, they will see their new beginnings slowed down by an ancestral threat that no one seems to be able to control.

A true cinematographic gem, where photography transforms the Louisiana countryside into a suffocating closed-door, Sinners shines with his formal mastery. Headlining, Michael B. Jordan delivers a visceral double performance, navigating between vulnerability and pure rage. An incandescent game like that of the magnetic Hailee Steinfeld. A cinematic slap in the face that brings the myth of the vampire back to life.

Memoirs of a snail by Adam Elliot

Grace Pudel, compulsive snail collector, finds refuge in her shell in the face of the tragedies of her life. Separated from her twin brother since childhood, she navigates a gray Canberra until she meets Pinky, an eccentric octogenarian who allows her to embrace existence.

It’s rare that an animated film touches you so deeply. Dealing with grief and loneliness with infinite tenderness, Memoirs of a snail is disarmingly human. Adam Elliot signs here a stop-motion work of artisanal meticulousness. Its “plasticine” aesthetic reinforces the tangible and fragile aspect of emotions. A work that reminds us that animated cinema can also move adults.

Bugonia by Yórgos Lánthimos

Two young men – including a feverish Jesse Plemons – convinced that the CEO of a large company is in reality an alien coming to destroy the Earth, decide to kidnap her to save humanity. A conspiratorial rescue mission that quickly slides into a psychological closed-door where the line between paranoid madness and reality becomes increasingly blurred.

With this remake of the South Korean film Save the Green Planet!Yórgos Lánthimos confirms that he is the undisputed master of jubilant unease. His fable, half funny, half confusing, leaves us no respite – as evidenced by its grand finale. Emma Stone, oscillating between victim and predator, gives us, for her fifth collaboration with the filmmaker, a performance that is both physical and cerebral. Bugonia : great auteur cinema, strange, radical and absolutely fascinating.

Touch – Our past embraces Baltasar Kormákur

At 73, Kristofer, a widowed chef, remembers his past. In particular, memories of his childhood sweetheart, Miko, come back to him. Determined to find this woman, he braves the pandemic raging around the world and flies to London, where he had met her fifty years earlier, in a small Japanese restaurant.

Freely adapted from a novel by Olafur Johann Olafsson, Touch is a marvel of sensitivity that has unfairly gone unnoticed. This romantic drama takes us on a sublime journey through time and places, from 1960s London to Covid-era Japan, via Iceland. Carried by luminous photography enhancing the contrasts between cold tones and brown nuances, this quest for lost loves is reminiscent of the nostalgia of Past Lives by Celine Song (2023). An infinitely delicate work on intimate as well as historical memory.

Leave one day by Amélie Bonnin

As she prepares to make her dream come true by opening a gourmet restaurant in Paris, Cécile is forced to return to her native village to the bedside of her father, who has suffered a heart attack. In this familiar world, once her own, everything changes when she meets Raphaël again. This teenage crush awakens buried feelings, making her certainties waver and question her life choices.

Adapting her own short film, Amélie Bonnin delivers with Leave one day a bittersweet quest for identity. We find a charming Juliette Armanet, confronting her doubts, and a rightly melancholy Bastien Bouillon. Great classics of French song, skillfully covered, brilliantly illustrate the unsaid and the complexity of human relationships, both passionate and familial. A cleverly thought-out and touching musical film.

The Real Pain Jesse Eisenberg

To pay tribute to their deceased Jewish grandmother, David and Benji, two American cousins, travel to Poland. If they learn more about their common past, this family pilgrimage turns into an ordeal: to the tensions of their diametrically opposed temperaments is added the gravity of the historical sites they survey.

Both in front of and behind the camera, Jesse Eisenberg leaves plenty of room here for an exuberant Kieran Culkin, as funny as he is sensitive. In the guise of a road movie, A Real Pain brings together an antithetical duo around a shared grief, but felt and expressed differently. A poignant dramatic comedy which, although it sometimes makes you smile, questions the duty of memory, heritage and transgenerational trauma.