Roe McDermott's Top Films of 2025

10. I SWEAR

Sometimes you need a crowd-pleasing tale with both deep emotion and belly laughs, and I Swear delivers in spades. In this tender, funny and deeply empathetic portrait of Tourette’s campaigner John Davidson, director Kirk Jones avoids biopic clichés, showing the cruelty and isolation John faced in 1980s Scotland while honouring his humour and resilience.

Robert Aramayo gives a remarkable performance, capturing both the physical unpredictability of Tourette’s and the emotional toll of constant misunderstanding. The film finds warmth and grace in John’s relationships with Maxine Peake’s wry, big-hearted Dottie and Peter Mullan’s quietly compassionate Tommy.

I Swear balances pain and wit with rare sensitivity, offering an illuminating, humane story about dignity, acceptance and the fight to be seen.

Robert Aramayo in I Swear (2025). Copyright: Bankside Films

9. SINNERS

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is a wild, intoxicating blend of Southern gothic horror, musical mythmaking and cultural critique. Set in 1930s Mississippi, it follows twin brothers Smoke and Stack, played in a terrific dual turn by Michael B. Jordan, as they build a juke joint meant to be refuge, rebellion and resurrection for their Black community.

When their gifted cousin Sammie unleashes music powerful enough to stir ancestral memory, the club becomes both sanctuary and battleground. Vampires arrive as metaphors for cultural theft, assimilation and erasure, and though not every idea lands, Sinners remains a bold, soulful, fiercely imaginative film about joy worth fighting for.

Sinners

8. ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER

One Battle After Another is Paul Thomas Anderson’s most urgent film, a propulsive, politically charged thriller set in an America sliding into authoritarianism. Anderson grounds the dystopia in chilling plausibility, following a merged police-military state, immigrant camps, and white nationalist power brokers who scheme behind closed doors.

Into this world crash revolutionary group the French 75, led by Teyana Taylor’s magnetic Perfidia and Leonardo DiCaprio’s frazzled revolutionary Bob. Sean Penn is riveting as Colonel Lockjaw, a man carved from repression and curdled desire. Lean, kinetic and darkly funny, the film hums with paranoia, action and heart. It is Anderson at his most alive and contemporary.

One Battle After Another

7. PILLION

A fiercely original queer drama, Pillion journeys from suburban quiet to mythic biker romance. Set in everyday Bromley, it follows Colin, beautifully played by Harry Melling, a gentle soul who finds unexpected belonging and self-possession when he meets the captivating Ray, embodied with quiet charisma by Alexander Skarsgård.

Director Harry Lighton treats alternative queer intimacy with sincerity and craft, turning contrast into character evolution. Anchored by the warm portrayals of Peggy and Pete by Lesley Sharp and Douglas Hodge, Pillion stands as a soulful, compassionate story about chosen family, consent, and confidence found in unexpected places.

Pillion

6. SEPTEMBER 5

September 5 is a gripping, sharply acted look at the ethical dangers of live journalism. Revisiting the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, Tim Fehlbaum follows ABC’s sports reporters as they are thrust into a hostage crisis they are unprepared to cover.

John Magaro anchors the film as a producer struggling to balance accuracy, responsibility and the pressure to deliver breaking news, while Peter Sarsgaard, Leonie Benesch, and Ben Chaplin add emotional and political depth. Blending archival footage with tense newsroom drama, the film probes how live reporting can inform or endanger, illuminate or sensationalise.

September 5 becomes a timely reminder that media power is never neutral.

September 5

5. FLOW

Flow, Gints Zilbalodis’ Oscar-winning animated marvel, is a wordless, luminous fable about connection, vulnerability, and the quiet power of empathy. Following a sleek black cat drifting through a post-human world, the film unfolds as a visually spellbinding journey from solitude to community.

Its exquisitely animated animals, each rendered with striking nuance, navigate danger, loss and fragile hope, as nature reclaims the remnants of civilisation. With its fluid camerawork, painterly landscapes, and a serene, tidal score, Flow becomes a gentle allegory for resilience and solidarity.

It’s a breathtaking, deeply felt masterpiece, one that lingers long after its final, reflective frame.

Flow

4. THE BRUTALIST

In a year when Trump threatened birthright citizenship and has used ICE to target the immigrants who built America, The Brutalist feels brutally, urgently relevant. Brady Corbet’s near four hour epic follows Hungarian-Jewish architect László Tóth (played with raw, volatile intensity by Adrien Brody), whose pursuit of the American Dream exposes its violent, corrosive underbelly.

From its staggering opening image of an inverted Statue of Liberty to its chilling portrait of exploitation embodied by Guy Pearce’s magnetic benefactor, the film becomes a fierce meditation on art, ambition and assimilation. Visually audacious and thematically unflinching, The Brutalist stands as a towering, necessary indictment of America’s seductive mythmaking.

Adrien Brody in the Brutalist.

3. BLUE ROAD: THE EDNA O’BRIEN STORY

Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story is a vivid, fiercely compassionate portrait of a writer who refused to be quiet. Sinéad O’Shea weaves archival footage, interviews and O’Brien’s own diaries into a film that captures her brilliance, defiance and the wounds inflicted by misogyny.

From the banning of The Country Girls to her turbulent marriage to Ernest Gébler and the loneliness beneath her London glamour, the documentary reveals a woman shaped by trauma, yet propelled by creative fire. O’Brien’s sharp wit and unwavering courage shine throughout.

Edna O'Brien

2. A REAL PAIN

A Real Pain navigates the uneasy space between ordinary hurt and historic atrocity with wit, warmth and the sting of truth. Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin play estranged cousins who travel to Poland to confront family history and their own unresolved grief.

Eisenberg’s anxious, tightly wound David contrasts beautifully with Culkin’s volatile, magnetic Benji, whose impulsive sensitivity both bridges and deepens the rift between them. The film balances tragic history with sharp humour, thoughtful character work and a keen understanding of how people grieve differently.

Trim, tender and quietly profound, A Real Pain becomes a moving reminder that connection matters even when pain cannot be measured.

Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg in A Real Pain.
© Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved.

1. SORRY, BABY

Sorry, Baby is a quiet revelation, a warm and witty film about the long, uneven work of surviving a bad thing. Written, directed by and starring Eva Victor, it follows Agnes, a literature professor living with the aftermath of sexual assault, not through dramatised flashbacks, but through the small, ordinary moments that accumulate into a life.

Told out of chronological order, the film opens on an intimate reunion between Agnes and her closest friend Lydie, played with luminous warmth by Naomi Ackie. Their easy shorthand and fierce loyalty set the tone for a story that treats survival with softness, humour and honesty. Victor plays Agnes with wry intelligence and quiet ache, her pain never flattened into a symbol, her personality never reduced to her trauma.

Sorry, Baby never promises neat healing, but instead offers something truer: you can still love, laugh, rage and keep going. A small, stunning triumph.

Sorry, Baby