Please note:
- this page contains charts, for which I’m using Javascript libraries (d3 and chartjs);
- on mobile, it is recommended to view in landscape orientation;
- there might be issues when reading the post via RSS; in that case, please read it in a browser;
- photos, posters and data come from The Movie DB;
Like I did for 2024, I’ll close my summary of 2025 with one last post about the films I have watched during the year. I realise the title is not really accurate because I also watched… two or three TV series maybe? One of them is Adolescence, which is a masterpiece, and another one is no-longer-adolescents-faking-they-are aka Stranger Things, that didn’t end in 2025 technically, so it can’t be included anyway.
The structure and technical aspects of the post are exactly like the post from last year, because I didn’t have the time or energy to improve on them. Sorry about that.
Table of contents
Overall statistics for 2025
Before getting to the inevitable ‘Top’ charts of the year, let’s have a look at some general data.
2025 has provided me with 251 films, meaning 75% of my 2024 count. There are a few reasons for this decrease, especially some life changes I have hinted at here and there, pushing me, in general, to spend less time in front of a screen.
I also have a higher percentage of rewatches (23% compared to last year’s 17%) - I guess due to seeking certainties in films I liked, combined with the smaller availability of unwatched films on the usual platforms (I think I have also decreased the number of streaming services I’m subscribed to).
Almost half (45%) of the movies were released in the 2020s: a higher percentage than in 2024, but fewer overall. No film at all is from the 1940s.
Films by Genre
No change in the distribution of genres - the first six genres are exactly the same. In 2024 I watched almost as many horror films as my overall total for this year!
Films by Country of Origin
A big surprise for me, despite being aware of my increased fascination with Japan, is that it’s the second most frequent country of origin for my 2025 films, jumping ahead of the UK. Again, it’s all relative because I’ve seen fewer Japanese films this year.
France is also bumped up to fourth place, clearly due to my resolution to improve my French.
Films by Production Company
Now, this is interesting. Production companies appear and disappear, and while Blumhouse takes the lead, the surprise is to find Domain Entertainment in third place. Surprise for me, who didn’t pay attention to their logo popping up in so many films this year, including my favourite two. Somehow I got to eight New Line Cinema films (half from this year, half from the past - but I didn’t rewatch any of their old franchises); TSG Entertainment, Columbia Pictures and Vertigo appear mostly due to the same co-productions, Marvel, of course, had three new films out this year (plus I think I rewatched the last two Avengers). The fact I also have Hammer Films - the only non-US company as far as I can tell - is quite funny.
No Japanese production house this year.
Top released in 2025
The institutional part of this kind of post is the Top Ten of films released in 2025, with the caveat that ‘released’ is a concept that applies to the publication schedule in Belgium, so there will be movies that in other countries (such as the US) were released last year.
Top Ten Films
A necessary disclaimer is that I didn’t have the opportunity to go to a cinema at all in December, and not much as I would have liked in the previous months. I’m sure there are plenty of great films that were released in the latter part of the year (as usual), and I might sneakily change the post later on… will I? Really? It doesn’t seem fair.
(Fast forward sixteen days later… I managed to see It Was Just an Accident, and it sneaked in at fourth place, kicking The Roses out of the Top Ten)
My Top Two films could probably be seen as a joint first position, as they were both great. One Battle After Another ‘reconciled’ me with Paul Thomas Anderson in the sense that I didn’t love any of his films after Magnolia (that’s quite some time ago), and I had lost faith that I would enjoy his work again. The only negative for me is the car chase everyone keeps gushing over, so that’s another disclaimer for you.
I haven’t rewatched Sinners since it came out earlier in the year, but I remember having such a complete experience - captured by the images, the sound, and invaded by feelings - with it, that I couldn’t be farther from the top.
Bring Her Back is the only horror film I watched this year that made me curl into a ball, and it was in public (although in the dark of the cinema).
Top Actors
These are the actors appearing in more than one film and whose work I appreciated the most.
Nobody broke the record of four films (released in the past year) established last year by Margaret Qualley and Willem Dafoe.
This has effectively been the breakout year of Julia Garner, with three top-tier movies released; Silver Surfer is quite a peculiar character to play, but I’m not sure her other two roles, in Weapons and Wolf Man, allow her to showcase the full range of her acting skills. Anyway, she was, for me, the best part of both those films.
With the same number of roles, Josh Brolin, mostly lending his well-known menacing attitude to villainous or just unpleasant characters. In this sense, his part in Weapons is a welcome change.
Benicio del Toro was great for both major Andersons, and it’s nice to see Benedict Cumberbatch embrace some funnier than usual roles.
Jack O’Connell shouldn’t really be on this list because of how brief his appearance is in 28 Years Later, but this is what you get when you use data.
For non-lead actors, this has been the year of Mark Hamill, with two very different performances. Rupert Friend is also a well-known face, and his role in Companion was obnoxious but quite fun; I have no recollection at all of his part in The Phoenician Scheme. I hadn’t met Jonah Hauer-King before this year (and I doubt I would be able to recognise him if I saw him again), while I should have paid more attention to Jayme Lawson, who was also in The Batman and The Woman King. Dan Chariton has a familiar face for sure, but I wouldn’t have been able to tell you that he was in both Rian Johnson and Paul Thomas Anderson’s previous films.
Top watched in 2025
Everyone saw the films I mentioned above in 2025 (maybe some of them in 2024, depending on where you live). But the collection of films that I saw in 2025 are different from anyone else’s, so let’s get some information about them.
Top Films
I’ve watched around 200 films released before 2025, and of those I watched for the first time, I rated 13 with four stars or more. A special mention goes to Damien McCarthy’s Oddity, which I liked so much that I watched it twice - on two consecutive days. The two other movies I watched twice this year were John Hsu’s Dead Talents Society, incredibly funny and sweet, and the Cairnes Brother’s Late Night With The Devil, not a new discovery but I couldn’t resist watching it two more times.
Top Directors and Writers
This is the section about the directors and writers who provided me with at least three films during 2025, excluding rewatches.
For the second year in a row, the top spot goes to Kiyoshi Kurosawa, contributing seven ’new’ films (Seventh Code, Real, Cloud and Sweet Home, in addition to the ones shown below).
Takashi Shimizu was also present last year, and he returns with even more Grudges, a Retribution, and the (bad) Netflix film Homunculus.
A new entry this year is Stephen Cognetti, with his Hell House LLC sequels. I can’t say I really love this series, but apparently there was no other director whose work I explored more.
When taking a look at screenwriters, the only difference - like last year - would be a top spot for Hiroshi Takahashi, writing for Kurosawa’s Serpent’s Path (he’s credited for the French version too), Hideo Nakata’s Curse, Death & Spirit and Don’t Look Up, as well as providing the screenplay for his own directorial effort, The Sylvian Experiments.
Top Actors
The criteria for this section include, again, actors appearing in at least three films I watched for the first time in 2025. I define ’lead actors’ as those appearing within the first four places in the cast list.
The lead ones are exactly my top choices for 2025 films: Julia Garner (replacing her secondary role in Fantastic Four with higher-ranked roles in an older film, Grandma, and Apartment 7A), and Josh Brolin.
In the non-lead category, we find Mark Hamill again (his third film being a vocal performance in The Wild Robot). I didn’t expect to see Alicia Silverstone in this list: my generation is reminded of time passing, as the person we met as the sexy girl in Aerosmith’s videos from the Get a Grip album now plays exclusively small mother roles - almost cameos, either in Yorgos Lanthimos’ films (Bugonia, but also The Killing of a Sacred Deer years ago), or for movies with Jaeden Martell. Wouldn’t she deserve more screen time?
Then we have two Japanese character actors: the super-recognisable Tarō Suwa (who somehow seems to be the only bald Japanese performer working), and Yutaka Matsushige, another staple of cinema from that country, but one I fail to identify.
Finally, an evil-character actor whose face is rarely seen, but who’s behind most of the tall, gangling creatures in horror films not directed by James Wan: James Swanton, a name I know because he sometimes guest stars in The Evolution of Horror, one of my favourite podcasts.
Conclusion
2025 was a weird and complicated year for me, and this is witnessed by the sharp drop in my film-watching rhythm.
But an even stronger factor for this change is also the disappointing fragmentation in film availability across streaming platforms, and geographical restrictions: good luck with legally finding most non-mainstream movies if you’re outside the US and the UK. The result is a lot of time spent looking for something new to watch - across apps and Apple accounts - only to find out that the film I was curious about is not available, or is only available in a dubbed version (welcome to Italian platforms), or in the original version in a language I don’t know, but with subtitles in another language I don’t know (welcome to Belgian platforms). So I end up just going to bed, or starting some film I don’t care about, just to leave it halfway through because I really don’t care about it. Habits have to change, one way or another, but I haven’t found the ‘other’ one yet.