Bandwagon's Top 10 Movies of 2025

Whether you saw them in cinemas or on your laptops, this has been a standout year for film. These are our picks for the 10 best movies of 2025.

(Note: The following picks were released in Singapore in theaters, streaming, VOD or on physical media within this calendar year.)

Honourable Mention: Frankenstein

Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein arrives as a lavish, melancholic reimagining of a story retold for centuries, grounding its horror in longing rather than shock. Del Toro leans into the emotional tragedy at the heart of the tale, rendering the Creature’s existence with devastating tenderness. The film’s gothic atmosphere is rich and textured, filled with moody interiors and aching stillness. It feels both mythic and intimate, a work shaped by grief, beauty, and the fragile desire to be seen. A near-miss for the Top 10, but one of the year’s most striking visions.

10. Sinners

Sinners, led by Michael B. Jordan, is a genre cocktail that shouldn’t work but absolutely does — a feverish blend of revenge thriller, horror, romance, and musical swagger. Jordan brings a volatile, hypnotic energy to a film that moves with reckless confidence. Its bold visual style — sweeping colour, kinetic camerawork, operatic set pieces — gives every scene a sense of danger and heat. Beneath the spectacle lies a surprisingly emotional story about transformation and desire. Chaotic, stylish, and impossible to ignore, it’s one of the year’s most distinctive rides.

9. No Other Choice

No Other Choice, directed by Park Chan-wook, is a razor-edged dark comedy about a man pushed to the brink by economic desperation. Park’s unmistakable style turns each escalation into something playful, violent, and unnervingly beautiful. The film moves with his signature tonal elasticity — one moment absurd, the next chilling — while burrowing into themes of survival, work, and moral collapse. Every frame feels deliberate, every twist lands with a mix of horror and grim humour. It’s sharp, provocative filmmaking that transforms a personal crisis into something operatic.

8. Wake Up Dead Man

Wake Up Dead Man, directed by Rian Johnson, is another Benoit Blanc mystery that balances sincerity, humour, and intricate plotting with enviable ease. Relocating the whodunnit to a small-town church gives the film a fresh texture — a setting steeped in secrets, guilt, and shifting moral codes. Johnson’s ensemble moves with his signature rhythm, each performance adding misdirection or heart at precisely the right moment. The finale clicks into place with satisfying clarity, reaffirming this series as the gold standard for modern mystery storytelling. Clever, warm, and effortlessly propulsive.

7. The Secret Agent

The Secret Agent, from Kleber Mendonça Filho, unfolds during Brazil’s military dictatorship, following an academic forced into exile as paranoia closes in. The film’s strength is its quietness — humid interiors, shadow-filled alleys, and stretches of tension built from what isn’t said. This is a character-driven political thriller that trades spectacle for atmosphere, relying on subtle gestures and shifting trust. With its emotional texture and deliberate pacing, it becomes a study of displacement and longing that lingers long after its final moments.

6. It Was Just An Accident

It Was Just An Accident, by Jafar Panahi, begins with a minor mishap — a night-time car breakdown — and spirals into a chaotic, wrenching road-trip thriller. Vahid, an ex-political prisoner convinced the man who stumbles into his garage might be his old torturer, kidnaps him and drags a ragtag, distrustful group of former inmates into a mobile tribunal. As paranoia collides with grief, revenge fantasies lean into the absurd: a bride in a wedding dress pushing the getaway van, absurd bribe-cash-card scenes, frantic debates about justice and vengeance. Panahi balances horror with bitter laughs, turning violence into something uncomfortably close to farce — and forcing viewers to ask not only “who should be punished?” but “who still remembers how to feel?” The result is a moral fable drenched in dark humour, dread, and heartbreak.

5. Weapons

Weapons, from Zach Cregger, is a tense, interlocking horror that keeps slipping into pitch-black comedy — the kind that makes you laugh a second before realising you probably shouldn’t have. Jumping between timelines and characters, the film threads absurd humour through scenes of dread, turning accidental chaos and panicked decision-making into something uncomfortably funny. Its sleek cinematography and sharp editing give the story real propulsion, but the satire underneath is what sticks. Bold, unnerving, and slyly hilarious, it’s a thriller that knows exactly when to crack a grin.

4. Sentimental Value

Sentimental Value, directed by Joachim Trier, follows Gustav Borg, a once-celebrated filmmaker who returns home after his ex-wife’s death and re-enters the lives of his estranged daughters, Nora and Agnes. Hoping to revive his fading career, Gustav asks Nora to star in his new autobiographical film, reopening wounds the family has spent years trying to manage. As the three circle one another with a mix of resentment, longing, and guarded affection, the film becomes a study of the stories parents pass down and the ones children must unlearn. Intimate, sharply observed, and quietly bruising, it’s a moving portrait of a family trying to rewrite its own history.

3. Hamnet

Hamnet, directed by Chloé Zhao, adapts Maggie O’Farrell’s novel into a quiet, devastating portrait of William Shakespeare’s family in the aftermath of his young son Hamnet’s death. Rather than centring the playwright, the film follows Agnes — played with luminous restraint by Jessie Buckley — as she navigates grief, distance, and the strain of a marriage pulled apart by absent ambitions and unspoken sorrow. Zhao strips away period drama excess, grounding the story in natural light, tactile spaces, and intimate performances that make the loss feel immediate. A gentle, poetic film about mourning, creation, and the emotional cost of genius.

2. No Other Land

No Other Land is a stark, deeply personal documentary created by Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers documenting life in Masafer Yatta, where Palestinian communities face displacement, demolitions, and escalating pressure from Israeli authorities. The film’s power comes from its intimacy — everyday conversations, grief, stand-offs, and fleeting moments of joy captured with unfiltered honesty. Its collaborative nature adds emotional depth, showing both solidarity and tension in the face of occupation. Urgent, humane, and clear-eyed, it is a vital piece of political filmmaking and one of the year’s defining documentaries.

1. One Battle After Another

One Battle After Another, from Paul Thomas Anderson, is a wild, exhilarating sprint through American counterculture — a film that barrels forward with breathtaking momentum and startling emotional clarity. Anderson blends raucous humour with contemplative detours, creating a rhythm that feels alive, restless, and unpredictable. Characters collide and drift in scenes stitched together with the looseness of memory and the force of myth. It’s a film about movement — through eras, through identities, through upheaval — delivered with a filmmaker’s full confidence. Bold, strange, and uncontainably alive, it’s the most thrilling film of the year.