We’re past the halfway mark of 2025 so it’s time to look back at the movies which have already made our year.

So far, we’ve been treated to a wide variety of big screen offerings: body horror to make gorehounds wince; sprawling dramas; spy thrillers featuring Michael Fassbender sporting George Smiley glasses; and blues loving vampires.

The criterion for this list is as follows: the movies need to have been released in European cinemas - or online - from January 2025 onwards – regardless of whether some titles came out in the US at the tail end of 2024.   

Before we start our countdown to the best movie of the year so far, don’t be surprised if you don’t see the likes of , or – they featured in our list, as they were released in mainland Europe last year.

Without further ado, here are the highlights you should cross off your watchlist if you haven’t already.

It’s easy to lose yourself in the artificial glow of nostalgia. Who we were, the promises life once held - it all flickers so invitingly, like the neon lights of Las Vegas. This makes it the perfect setting for Gia Coppola’s pastel-hazed third feature, a contemplation on female aging that follows sweet, feather-headed showgirl Shelly Gardner (Pamela Anderson) as her 30-year Vegas residency comes to an end. Anchored by a dazzling and delicate performance from Anderson, the film is a fever dream of faded glamour and feminine aesthetics without much narrative depth. But within its ephemeral structure, there’s a genuine tenderness that glimmers with hope and truths. In a stand-out moment, Shelly’s croupier friend Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis) defiantly dances on a casino table to ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart.’ No one is watching, but she doesn’t care. In letting go of the need to be seen by others, she can finally see herself - and it's more magical than any razzle dazzle show.  

Written, directed by and starring Jesse Eisenberg, A Real Pain sees two Jewish-American cousins head to Poland on a memorial tour to honour their recently deceased Holocaust-survivor grandmother. There’s David (Eisenberg), an anxious, neurotic family man, and Benji (Kieran Culkin), a human firecracker of charm, chaos, and inappropriate one-liners. Their bond is the heart of the film: loving, complicated, and clearly fraying at the edges. What begins as a mismatched buddy comedy soon deepens into a moving exploration of grief, inherited trauma and the complexities of family relationships. Culkin is extraordinary - disarming, infuriating, heartbreaking - and his was no fluke. Eisenberg wisely steps back and lets his co-star shine, but he too is phenomenal throughout. All together it makes for a funny, poignant and quietly profound film that proves Eisenberg is a filmmaker well worth watching.  

It’s been a solid year for horror so far, with the likes of Dangerous Animals, and Companion delivering the goods, while Presence, 28 Years Later and Sinners... Well, more on those three in a bit. Then there's this duo of indie sleepers which deserve to be singled out – chiefly due to two brilliant performances by Danielle Deadwyler and Sally Hawkins.  

The Woman In The Yard - which isn’t a sequel to The Woman In The Window - is an unnerving movie that takes place in the wake of a fatal car crash. Deadwyler shines as a grieving mother trying to hold her family together when a shrouded lady (Okwui Okpokwasili) pitches up outside her house. Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra (Orphan, The Shallows), it is undeniably flawed in parts, with the third act failing to live up to the film’s ambitious themes. And while the central metaphor is a little heavy-handed, The Woman In The Yard remains an effective chiller that tries to do something different. Kudos for that.  

Bring Her Back is the stronger (and significantly more intense) of the two, and confirms that Danny and Michael Philippou’s was no fluke. For their second feature, the Australian directors tell the story of how two orphaned siblings (Billy Barratt, Sora Wong) are placed in the middle of an occult ritual to bring their foster mother’s daughter back to life. Hawkins is genuinely disturbing as the grinning matriarch from hell, and anchors this nauseatingly textured tale. Moreover, the way the Philippous grapple with domestic trauma ensures that their sophomore effort truly gets under the skin. Motherly love hasn't been this terrifying since Carrie.  

The  this year went to Drømmer (Dreams (Sex Love)) by Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud. It is the third chapter in his thematic trilogy Sex / Love / Dreams, which deals with emotional and physical intimacy. The first chapter, Sex, focused on two straight married men discovering the elasticity of their sexuality; Love followed two colleagues – a heterosexual woman and a gay man – seeking a romantic connection in the new world of dating apps. The closing film, Dreams, follows 17-year-old Johanne (Ella Øverbye), who falls head over heels for her new art teacher Johanna (Selome Emnetu). It’s a gently captivating and very talky queer coming-of-age story that accurately captures the overwhelming intensity of first love and deals with the importance of perspective when it comes to longing. Specifically, how the boundaries between reality and fiction tend to blur when perspectives aren’t acknowledged. Superbly acted and often very funny, it’s a terrific capper to a compelling trilogy. The fact that it features a fantastic feminist takedown of the film Flashdance doesn’t hurt either.  

The , better known by his stage name Sly Stone, brings added poignancy to Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius), a deeply compelling documentary from Summer of Soul director and drummer extraordinaire Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson. As the frontman of Sly and the Family Stone, Stone revolutionised music in the late ’60s and early ’70s, fusing soul, rock, funk, and social consciousness into electrifying anthems like 'Everyday People' and 'Family Affair'. But as swiftly as he ascended, he withdrew - into drugs, silence, and near-total disappearance. Through intimate interviews and rich archival footage, Questlove examines the genius and the burden of being a trailblazing, immensely talented Black artist. Music legends like André 3000, Q-Tip, and D’Angelo appear as what producer Joseph Patel calls “proxies for Sly” - fellow visionaries who, like Stone, experienced lonely and unpredictable paths through fame. Particularly moving are interviews with Stone’s children, who reflect on his absence growing up and the pain of understanding it even as young kids. It makes for essential viewing: a celebration and an elegy to a once-in-a-generation talent.  

Steven Soderbergh is no good at retirement. Having bowed out of the directing game several times, the American filmmaker returned this year with not one but two films – both written by David Koepp.

The first is Presence, a haunted house story told from the ghost’s perspective. We follow, from the specter's POV, a fractured family moving into a new home. Chloe (Callina Liang) is the neglected child of Rebekah (Lucy Liu); she lives in the shadow of her brother Tyler (Eddy Maday) and explores the house as the titular presence follows her. No more shall be spoiled here. Safe to say that Soderbergh crafts a stripped-down supernatural chiller that isn’t so much about scaring the audience but more about offering an unsettling ghost story. The POV conceit, which allows for some terrific single takes, never feels gimmicky as it builds to a tragic twist that holds up. Wraped up by a chilling final shot, it’s a tragic horror film with emotion to spare.

Soderbergh's second offering allows Koepp to flex a bit more. Leaving formally daring horror behind, Black Bag is a straightforward and sharply scripted espionage thriller that doubles as a marital drama. Think John le Carré meets Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It centers on two married MI6 agents (Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett) who are unwaveringly committed to each other. But what happens when one of them is suspected of being a mole? Tense and ruthless, this is a taut thriller and a marriage case study on the importance of trust. And those dinner scenes... Oh, boy, those dinner scenes...  

From the trailer alone, this "dating is tough” romantic comedy and its starry cast gave the impression that Celine Song could be selling out and going mainstream for her second feature. It goes to show that promotional material can be wildly misleading and that A-list casting needn’t be feared... Written and directed by Song, who wowed us with her 2023 debut Past Lives – – Materialists focuses on that tropiest of romantic comedy tropes: the love triangle. Failed actress turned matchmaker Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is stuck between John (Chris Evans), who could be her soulmate, and “unicorn” Harry (Pedro Pascal), who is better for her on paper. Instead of falling into conventional genre developments, however, Song continues to deftly explore modern relationships in an emotionally resonant and mature way. Here, through the prism of everyday troubles, financial strain and ambitions, and the elements that can erode one’s self-worth. Materialists may not be the modern-day classic that is Past Lives, but it’s another confirmation that Celine Song is the real deal.  

After a 12-year absence from the big screen and for his first Brazil-set feature since Linha De Passe in 2008, celebrated Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles (Central Station, The Motorcycle Diaries) made quite the splash with his return. I’m Still Here, a fact-based story of loss and resilience, set against a dark chapter in Brazil’s history, won  at this year's Oscars and became the first-ever Brazilian-produced film to win an Academy Award. No small feat. And it was richly deserved. His film features a superb performance from the great Fernanda Torres, who plays housewife who is forced to reinvent herself as an activist when her ex-congressman husband becomes a desaparecido – one of the many who were taken into custody, interrogated, tortured and never heard from again during military-ruled Brazil in the 70s. It’s a no-frills drama that plunges the audience into the insidious nature of state-sanctioned abductions and examines the personal toll of authoritarianism. Historic and present.  

When 28 Days Later first hit big screens in 2002, it redefined the zombie genre. Shot on a grainy-looking digital camera, its raw, frenzied footage felt terrifyingly real. That same edge-of-seat energy pulses through 28 Years Later, the third instalment in Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s rage virus franchise. But this time, the visceral horror of the infected - their twisted shapes and rippling mouldy skin - provides an unsettling backdrop for a strangely magical coming-of-age story. Set on the now-quarantined British Isles, the film follows a boy named Spike (Alfie Williams) as he ventures across the mainland with his ailing mother (Jodie Comer), in search of a reclusive (and skull-collecting) doctor (Ralph Fiennes). Elevated by richly drawn characters and a transcendent Young Fathers soundtrack, any spine-severing brutality by the big bad Alpha zombies is tempered by surprising moments of tenderness. It’s a comforting reminder that even in a world ruled by rage, there’s still space for love.  

The sophomore feature from award-winning Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili, April is an unflinching portrait of a troubled ob-gyn named Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili) who moonlights performing illegal abortions across rural Georgia. Clinical and claustrophobic, each scene lingers in a tactile mood and prolonged stillness that offers no reprieve - from the cold glare of hospital rooms to the naked silhouette of sagging skin and the slow snarl of storm clouds. It’s intensely disquieting cinema, but necessarily so, as Kulumbegashvili captures with surgical precision and brazen vision the dehumanisation of women’s bodies - and the cost of attempting to reclaim control within systems designed to see us fail.  

This confident and memorable debut feature from Norwegian filmmaker reimagines the fairy tale Cinderella through the eyes of Elvira (Lea Myren), who will go to any lengths to compete with her beautiful stepsister Agnes for the affections of the prince. This involves gnarly surgeries, tapeworms and some Brothers Grimm-accurate toe cutting. Tempting though it is to draw a comparison with Coralie Fargeat’s  (both films anchor themselves in the New Wave Feminist Horror movement and comment on  through squirm-inducing body horror and plenty of dark humour), Blichfeldt’s film shouldn’t be eclipsed by its genre neighbour. It’s a fully-formed and ambitious knockout that heralds an ambitious new cinematic voice.  

The Brutalist is LONG - like 3 and a half hours long (mercifully broken up by a bladder-friendly intermission) - but not a second of screen time is wasted by director Brady Corbet. Adrien Brody delivers an astounding (and ) performance as a Bauhaus-trained Jewish architect attempting to build a new life for himself and his family in postwar America. But he soon discovers the so-called “land of opportunity” isn’t quite what it promises. What sounds like a simple immigrant story becomes a powerful, slow-burning epic about trauma, cultural gatekeeping, and the ways personal and collective histories shape not just the psyche, but the very environments we create and inhabit. The film is backed by incredible production design that honours modernist architecture, a hauntingly booming score from Daniel Blumberg and brilliant supporting performances from Felicity Jones and Guy Pearce. It’s one of the most ambitious films in years and it completely sticks the landing. A colossal cinematic monument in its own right.  

A blaze of bloody, blues-soaked catharsis, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners soars with supernatural flair and the spellbinding power of music. Set in Jim Crow-era Mississippi, twin brothers Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan) return home after a stint with the mob, opening a juke joint on land once owned by a Klansman. But when gifted musician Sammie (Miles Caton) performs his first set there, a much older evil is stirred: white vampires, led by the sly-tongued Remmick (Jack O’Connell). The first half simmers, like the wail of guitar strings, before erupting into a furious, fang-baring confrontation with cultural appropriation. By using genre to bridge the past and present, Coogler reimagines horror as historical reckoning. It’s daring, dizzying, gut-punch cinema that, unlike racist vampires, deserves to be let in. Just don’t switch it off before the end credits!  

Like Sinners, Nickel Boys is set during the Jim Crow era - but trades the guns-blazing supernatural theatrics for something far more sobering and historically grounded. Based on the real-life horrors of the Dozier School for Boys, the film follows two African-American teens, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson), who are sent to a brutal reform school in 1960s Florida. What unfolds is a devastating portrait of systemic abuse, racial injustice, and the resilience of friendship. Director RaMell Ross, working with cinematographer Jomo Fray, makes the audacious choice to shoot the majority of the film from a first-person point of view - a visceral, destabilising perspective that places the viewer directly inside the boys’ experience. It’s a risky move, but it pays off massively. The result is raw, immersive, incredibly intimate, and will leave you shaken long after the credits roll.  

Sorda (Deaf) is the heart-poundingly beautiful second feature from Spanish filmmaker Eva Libertad. It tells the story of an inter-abled couple: a deaf woman, Ángela (Miriam Garlo), and her hearing partner, Héctor (Álvaro Cervantes). They are expecting a child and don’t know whether the baby will be deaf or hearing. Each possibility could affect them as a couple, as future parents, and as individuals wishing to share their perspectives of the world. Deaf deals with parenthood and the trials of motherhood, and stands out through its depiction of love. By taking the time to introduce the audience to a loving couple and their supportive network of friends, Libertad ensures that the audience are completely invested in the wellbeing of this unit. Her film gloriously grapples with complex emotions and the isolation that decries from institutional discrimination. Above all, it does justice to a specific community while still managing to make its themes about the importance communication and finding your community feel universal. Having premiered at the earlier this year and already released in Spain, here’s hoping that Deaf finds distribution in other European territories soon, as it is one of those rare films that manages to fill your heart, break it, and then put it back together again – all without toppling into melodrama. A triumph.

There we have it.   

What? No , or ? Yeah, we weren’t huge fans...  

However, these are our honourable mentions – the ones that very nearly made the cut (in alphabetical order): Armand, Bring Them Down, Broken Rage, Companion, Freaky Tales, and Warfare.

Looking ahead to the second half of 2025, it's looking mighty promising.

We're currently in blockbuster season, with DC's about to square off against Marvel's at the box office - we'll keep you updated on how that showdown goes.

We've seen several upcoming releases already, so keep your eyes peeled for two stunning Brazilian films - and O Agente Secreto (The Secret Agent) - which are unmissable; and Lucile Hadžihalolović's are definitely ones to look out for; Julia Ducournau's is on its way to cinemas alongside this year's Palme d'Or winner, Jafar Panahi's terrific ; Kristen Stewart's The Chronology Of Water is a hard-hitting directorial debut; and Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value is a mixed bag but features some excellent performances.

And the sooner we get our eyeballs on Paul Thomas Anderson's Thomas Pynchon adaptation One Battle After Another and Yorgos Lanthimos' Bugonia, the English-language remake of the 2003 South Korean film Save The Green Planet!, the better we'll feel.

For the time being, check out  for more reviews of recent releases, let us know what you make of our , and stay tuned to Euronews Culture to see how many halfway mark titles remain in our end of year Best Movies of 2025.

Happy screenings!