Globes, Lists, and Polls

“It’s hard to remember a year when there was such consensus,” write the editors of Reverse Shot, where contributors have voted One Battle to the top of their annotated list. “Debate its efficacy as a political object all you want—the jazzy boost it gave us during this very, very bleak time cannot be discounted. We wonder how the film will look five years from now. If we’re lucky, it will seem like a relic. Or maybe this is where we live now.”

For the fifteenth edition of his International Cinephilia poll, critic Roger Koza—who, by the way, appears as a conquistador in Lav Diaz’s Magellan—has tallied ballots from 207 critics (including Nicole Brenez, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and Adrian Martin) and filmmakers (Sofia Bohdanowicz, Alain Guiraudie, and Matías Piñeiro, for example). Scoring more votes than any other film is Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent, now the winner of two Golden Globes, Best Motion Picture: Non-English Language and Best Male Actor in a Motion Picture: Drama for Wagner Moura.

Variety has asked several directors for a few words on their favorite films of 2025, and Kenneth Lonergan writes that while The Secret Agent, set in 1970s Recife, is a love letter to cinema, it is “also a love letter to Brazil. A strange and brave love letter to ordinary people for whom the ambition to live an ordinary life means danger, anxiety, and a continual vigilance against the traps waiting for them everywhere—behind every door, around every corner, at their work, their homes, and on the other end of every telephone call. But it’s a love letter all the same.”

Stellan Skarsgård won the Globe for Best Supporting Male Actor for his performance as a once-renowned director and still-negligent father in Sentimental Value. For Paul Thomas Anderson, watching Joachim Trier’s film is “like being gently grabbed by the most tender filmmaker working today; you don’t know he’s got you by the throat—he’s just creating people and images you cannot look away from for fear of missing a single frame.” For more lists and commentary from filmmakers, see IndieWire (Pedro Almodóvar, Olivier Assayas, Payal Kapadia) and Filmmaker (Fabrice Aragno, Radu Jude, Sharon Lockhart).

Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, the winner of the Globes for Best Motion Picture: Drama and, for Jessie Buckley, Best Female Actor in a Motion Picture: Drama, hasn’t topped many lists lately, but it comes in at #3 in Scott Tobias’s rankings at the Reveal. Paul Mescal and Buckley star as William Shakespeare and his wife, Agnes, and Hamnet’s “imagining of their marriage and the loss that seems to have, at the least, inspired the name of the protagonist of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy is, of course, fanciful, but the cast (Buckley above all) and Zhao’s commitment to pulling back and considering the wider world surrounding her characters make it feel heartbreakingly real.”

Keith Phipps, the other cofounding writer at the Reveal, gives a shout-out to Rose Byrne, the winner of the Globe for Best Female Actor in a Motion Picture: Musical or Comedy, for “brilliantly” portraying a strung-out therapist and mother in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You: “The SCU (Safdie Cinematic Universe) exploded in 2025 with Josh and Benny Safdie splitting up to make Marty Supreme and The Smashing Machine, respectively, and Mary Bronstein, wife and collaborator of frequent Safdie screenwriter Ronald Bronstein, making this bleeding ulcer of a movie in the same heightened style.”

In Marty Supreme, Timothée Chalamet, who won Best Male Actor in a Motion Picture: Musical or Comedy, “plays a ping-pong prodigy and gigantic pain in the ass Marty Mauser, a showman who believes he can bring table tennis to the masses in 1950s America,” writes the Observer’s Wendy Ide. “Even the most Timbivalent viewers will be won over by Chalamet’s rattling, reckless energy.” Marty Supreme is Ide’s #2; her #1 is RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys, which was released in the UK last January.

The Globes for Cinematic and Box Office Achievement and, for Ludwig Göransson, Best Original Score, went to Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, the #1 film on Ty Burr’s list. Burr calls Sinners “a history lesson, a horror movie, a musical, a sociocultural essay, a blockbuster smash—and the only one of the year’s top ten box office champs to work from an original screenplay, unbeholden to any franchise except the ongoing American experiment in all its disasters and joys.”

Pop-culture phenomenon KPop Demon Hunters, directed by Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans, won the Globes for Best Motion Picture: Animated and, for “Golden,” Best Original Song. KPop Demon Hunters is by far the most-watched original title in Netflix history, and when the streamer put it in theaters for sing-along events, it became Netflix’s first #1 movie at the U.S. box office.

One of the most thorough dissections of the past year in movies comes from Roderick Heath, and those with an insatiable desire for more can turn to lists from these fine writers (with their #1s in parentheses): Michael J. Anderson (It Was Just an Accident), Cory Atad (28 Years Later), Michael Atkinson (Fairytale), Sam Bodrojan (The Secret Agent), Matt Brennan (A Little Prayer and The Testament of Ann Lee), Philip Concannon (One Battle, followed by Measures for a Funeral; plus a year in discoveries), Mike D’Angelo (Marty Supreme), Henri de Corinth (The Ice Tower, plus first watches), Steve Erickson (an alphabetical list), Alex Fields (Dry Leaf), Filipe Furtado (Blue Moon), Nolan Kelly (Sentimental Value), Michael Nordine (Sound of Falling), Kat Sachs (Afternoons of Solitude), Sukhdev Sandhu (an unranked list), Michael Sicinski (My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow), Srikanth Srinivasan (Happiness, followed by Peter Hujar’s Day), R. Emmet Sweeney (Retro), and Ryan Swen (Caught by the Tides).

Contributors to Crooked Marquee and Hammer to Nail have their lists up, and for the titles-only crowd, there are lists from Geoff Andrew (Young Mothers), Sean Fennessey (One Battle), Ray Pride (alphabetical), and Blake Williams (Dry Leaf). For discussions of the greatest movies of 2025, tune into Filmspotting and Outskirts. And then there are collections of notes on the year’s standouts, some restricted to films, others less so, from John Wyver and from contributors to Bright Wall/Dark Room,Defector,Equator, and the Yale Review.