List | The Best Movies of 2025 – Ritter Fan

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Only: what was OFFICIALLY released in Brazilian cinemas in 2025; what was released in streams and VODs OFFICIALLY accessible in Brazil in 2025; what it was OFFICIALLY shown at Brazilian Festivals in 2025 or festival films that were OFFICIALLY accessible from Brazil.

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Despite the rules for eligible films set out above, I took the liberty of imposing even more restrictions on my list, eliminating (1) all the films that were only released at festivals (which made me leave out the sensational Aquilo que Você Mata, among others) in Brazil, in order to focus on what was more widely accessible on the commercial cinema circuit; (2) the films that were only launched in services streaming (it hurt to delete Train Dreams) in the country, in order to honor the cinematographic release, it is worth noting that films that had limited distribution in cinemas outside of festivals and before their release in streaming were eligible (which happened in 4th and 3rd places); (3) films released on the commercial circuit in 2025, but which were included in my list of the best of 2024, to avoid repetitions (otherwise, Emilia Pérez would enter again, to the dismay of my readers), and, finally, (4) superhero movies, yes, but if I had to list just one, this would be it. Fantastic Four: Getting Started.

Finally, as I did last year, I decided to expand the Top 10 to Top 20, with a list of 10 Honorable Mentions in descending order, from 20th to 11th. Shall we go then?

20. Long March
19. Hedda
18. Sing Sing
17. Parthenope
16. Die, Love
15. Nosferatu
14. Maria Callas
13. Thieves
12. The Ugly Stepsister
11. Flow

Jafar Panahi | Iran and others | 2025

The title accident cuts across a group of people and creates a network of traumatic connections that seek to at least understand who was behind the worst moments of their lives. There is, in fact, no general plan. There is a desire to know. To understand. Because none of these people can deal with what they can’t fix. They don’t know what to do with what can no longer be undone. Why “what was done” is in their bodies, in their memories, in their feelings. How much of this is not contaminated by hatred or the clouds of time, we don’t know. But we are sure that, to transform ordinary people into cruel terrorizers who will use all the gray areas to justify their actions, all it takes is a small accident. And the entire chain of events that arises from there becomes trauma and history.

James Sweeney | USA | 2025

In just his second feature film – and again with a similar central theme, if we think in broad terms – James Sweeney manages to create a captivating love story that addresses loss, grief, friendship and loneliness with a disconcerting authenticity that makes people laugh as much as it moves and builds unforgettable characters in an original and well-connected narrative with Dylan O’Brien and Sweeney himself, in the main roles, immediately establishing an enviable chemistry. The experience of watching Twinless It’s similar to being instantly transported to 100 minutes in the future, such is the fluidity of the story that enchants from the first minute to the last and leaves us wanting more when the credits start to roll.

Joachim Trier | Norway and others | 2025

Em Valor SentimentalJoachim Trier, director of The Worst Person in the Worldpresents us with a family drama in which embarrassment becomes language, tenderness appears as an accident and art appears not as salvation, but as the most sophisticated excuse to continue running away and, perhaps, find redemption in this escape valve. It’s a film about a father who returns too late and tries to buy time with the only currency he knows how to use: cinema. Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård) is a director in decline who reappears in his daughters’ lives after the death of his ex-wife and decides to transform the family home, an old organism, full of memory, nostalgia and noise, into the set of a new work. He wants to film there, and he wants Nora (Renate Reinsve) in the central role. And when she refuses, he does what he’s always done: replaces people with roles, affection with logistics, and hires an international star, Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), because the world (and funding) respects “a name” more than an apology.

Paul Thomas Anderson | USA | 2025

Since its opening, One Battle After Another imposes a restless, almost nervous rhythm. It is not a film that lets the viewer accommodate themselves, pushing, shaking and challenging the audience. This restlessness is not a defect, it is a narrative tool. Paul Thomas Anderson seems to want chaos to be part of the film’s language, and with that, he infiltrates tension into each framein each temporal ellipse and in each action scene. The first act already reveals that he does not simply aim to tell a linear story of revenge or rescue; He wants the emotional journey to be intertwined with the political struggle, for the intimate and public terrain to invade each other in a beautiful story about a father and his daughter.

Gabriel Mascaro | Brazil and others | 2025

Even though the world population is getting older, getting older and showing this aging is still taboo, it is still something that the media and culture pop They go to great lengths to hide, to relativize, with youth being the focus and with “young elderly people” being preferable to elderly people who are not at all ashamed to show their age. In The Last BlueGabriel Mascaro and Tibério Azul took this very true perception of reality to its ultimate consequences, creating a dystopian Brazil in which elderly people over 75 are no longer part of the productive force and are forced by the government to be taken to housing colonies where they will live out their final days to prevent their “uselessness” from hindering the productivity of younger people. But everything, of course, is done in a way that lends a veneer of homage and protection to the elderly that masks the restriction of individual rights in relation to undesirable ones.

Johan Grimonprez | Belgium and others | 2024

Soundtrack for a Coup d’Etat establishes itself as a political and artistic manifesto that exposes, without concessions, the gears of a system that has always sold illusions of progress, while perpetuating structural dominations that shape our world to this day. Johan Grimonprez guides this immense volume of information without ever losing control of the narrative, making the work an enriching and transformative experience. If history is usually told by the victors, this documentary is a rare example of a counter-narrative that seeks to restore silenced voices or visions, as well as offering a new perspective on the events that redefined global politics in the middle of the 20th century. An essential film for everyone who wants to see more clearly the challenges of the present and the battles of the future, not always guided by a pleasant chord or an inspiring improvisation. jazz.

Guillermo del Toro | USA | 2025

Guillermo del Toro has dreamed of an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s gothic literary classic for decades and, if we look at the Mexican filmmaker’s work as a whole, taking into account his aesthetic refinement, his imagination and creativity and his ability to extract beauty from monstrosity, Frankenstein Maybe it’s the film he was born to make. At the very least it was the natural path for his career, something that meshed so well with everything he’s ever put on the big screen that, even if he hadn’t spent years on end planning his version of one of the most famous works of Western literature, he would have ended up getting involved with it sooner or later. And the Frankenstein by Del Toro is truly his, unmistakably his and, at the same time, a careful and very well constructed feature film that knows how to respect the source material in the same way that the director and screenwriter did in his magnificent Pinocchio.

Kelly Reichardt | USA | 2025

There is a charmingly disconcerting atmosphere in The Mastermind. With granular photography and a filter that maintains a light fog throughout the film, Kelly Reichardt creates a “heist film” that is not about the robbery, but rather about the anguish of living, about the labyrinth of a time when the counterculture movement of the 60s was already in decline and the USA was entering the Vietnam War, about a lack of direction, about the emptiness that consumes its protagonist and that makes him run away from himself under the excuse of running away from the police. The filmmaker, as is her trademark, takes her time and takes her time, with an opening sequence almost completely without dialogue in which almost nothing happens, but which establishes the events that follow and carefully characterizes her James Blaine “JB” Mooney, played by Josh O’Connor, the planner of the daring robbery, the mastermind of the title.

Kleber Mendonça Filho | Brazil and others | 2025

Another element, this one little explored – at least with this incisive approach – in Brazilian films that address the Military Dictatorship, is the not only military, but business nature of the regime then in force, something that we choose to forget or, perhaps more precisely, we are manipulated so that this end is achieved. In The Secret Agent, the oppressive state, despite always being present like a heavy cloud on the horizon, almost always remains on the reserve bench, in a more passive role, opening space for the systemic corruption of private interests that benefit from the situation, something that the director brings to his film first as a trickle of water in a forgotten open tap, then as a frightening gush that drowns us with this other side of the coin that is no less frightening. But there is a lot of elegance in what Kleber Mendonça Filho does – one of his hallmarks, it is worth remembering – and the atmosphere of tension is on several occasions cooled by the tenderness of Marcelo’s relationships with his family and neighbors, including and especially Dona Sebastiana, and on many other occasions it takes on a farcical air with characters who, as disgusting as the police chief and his two sons, are true caricatures, even entitled to a comically macabre moment in which that leg is found. in the shark’s belly it “comes to life”.

Ryan Coogler | USA | 2025

It’s not quite a musical, but it has its weight in the genre in some extensive sequences of performances by Sammie and other artists, and it’s worth highlighting the fantastic choreographic work in unison with the rhythm of the film. The sense of communion and camaraderie that Coogler creates in different areas is captivating, not only because of the rich subtext, but because of the sensations of sensuality, mischief, desire and pure fun of a group of people finding an escape valve from the outskirts and cotton money. Ludwig Göransson’s soundtrack is extremely efficient in navigating the melancholic and slow slow blues or the dancing boogie-woogie, finding the right points in the ecstasy of vibrant melodies or in the weight of reality filtered by a harmonica taken from the pocket of an old rag. Thus, the themes of the work are not hammered out through didactic dialogues, with the content and its interpretations arriving through musical dialectics.