Paul Emmanuel Enicola
10. “The Secret Agent” (Eir. Kleber Mendonça Filho)
Kleber Mendonça Filho’s most intellectually ambitious film yet disguises itself as a political thriller only to become something stranger and richer: a meditation on memory, absence, and cinema itself. Set against the suffocating backdrop of Brazil’s dictatorship era, “The Secret Agent” unfolds in fragments—voices on tapes, conflicting testimonies, half-glimpsed recollections—so that the story of Armando is never fully possessed by anyone, least of all the film. (Read our review).
That’s the point. The structure mirrors the mechanics of remembering: incomplete, emotional, shaped by gaps. History here is not an archive but a haunting. Mendonça’s camera lingers on textures, environments, and bodies as if each frame were trying to hold onto something that might otherwise disappear. The result is a film where political urgency lives not in speeches but in atmosphere—through what’s withheld, misremembered, or distorted by time.
Wagner Moura grounds the film with bruised restraint, while the ensemble builds a lived-in world that feels culturally precise without leaning on symbolism. The result is a film about resistance through cinema: how images, recordings, and the act of recounting can preserve what power tries to erase. It’s rich, unsettling, and unusually moving for something so structurally elusive.
9. “Black Bag” (Dir. Steven Soderbergh)
Steven Soderbergh makes espionage feel intimate again, not through action set pieces but through glances, pauses, and the specific terror of not knowing the person across the table. “Black Bag” is lean, sharp, and sexy in a way most modern spy films forget: the seduction comes from intelligence, not spectacle.
The hook is brutally simple. George Woodhouse is asked to investigate a leak, and his wife Kathryn is on the list. From there, the film turns a marriage into a pressure cooker. A dinner party becomes a trap. Professional competence starts to look like emotional avoidance. The dialogue has bite, the pacing never bloats, and the humor lands without deflating the tension.
Michael Fassbender plays George with tightly wound control, and Cate Blanchett gives Kathryn a coolness that can read as devotion or strategy depending on the angle. Their chemistry does the heavy lifting. You believe the attraction and the damage. This is Soderbergh reminding everyone he can make a thriller that moves like clockwork and still feels human. It’s one of his most entertaining films in years, and also one of the year’s sneakiest. (Read our review).
8. “The Voice of Hind Rajab” (Dir. Kaouther Ben Hania)
The film announces its location and date, then refuses to let you hide behind distance. Kaouther Ben Hania stages a docufiction built around emergency calls, but what makes it unbearable is that the voices are real, recorded, and impossible to forget. Hind Rajab is there in the audio: scared, polite, trying to be brave, asking for help that never arrives.
Ben Hania’s approach is precise. Reenactment provides structure while the sound carries the truth. The call-center workers become our point of entry, which is its own kind of cruelty. You’re placed in the position of someone trying to help while rules, bureaucracy, and danger make that help feel meaningless. The film avoids graphic imagery, yet it’s still crushing, because imagination fills what the camera refuses to exploit.
Hind’s name matters here because the film is fighting erasure. The war continues, the headlines keep moving, and this story insists on presence. It demands witness, not consumption. Few films this year felt as necessary, or left me as shaken. (Read our review).
7. “Marty Supreme” (Dir. Josh Safdie)
What Josh Safdie and Timothée Chalamet pull off here shouldn’t work: a film centered on a selfish, manipulative, deeply exhausting young man. And yet somehow you end up leaning forward, hoping he survives his own worst instincts.
That’s almost entirely Chalamet’s doing. His Marty is slippery, frantic, vain, often indefensible. But the performance is so committed, so electrically alive, that you begin to understand the hunger underneath the bravado: the need to be remembered, to matter, to outrun erasure. Safdie wisely builds the film around character rather than redemption. This is not a sports movie, not a moral parable, not a comeback story. It’s a character study propelled by nervous momentum.
The direction amplifies this approach. Safdie’s camera rarely lets Marty breathe, mirroring the way he ricochets through scams, relationships, and self-made catastrophes. The rhythm becomes the point: life as perpetual hustle. Beneath the chaos sits a quiet thematic thread about legacy—Jewish identity, historical trauma, and the terror of being forgotten. And that final act doesn’t tie a bow around Marty. Instead, it leaves him suspended between failure and clarity. That ambiguity is what makes the film stick.
6. “No Other Choice” (Dir. Park Chan-wook)
Park Chan-wook takes a simple nightmare, then tightens it until it becomes a critique of modern survival. A man loses his job after a corporate buyout. Thirteen months later, the bills are crushing him, the home he fought to reclaim is slipping away, and something inside him turns. Park treats the descent like procedure: not melodrama, not a sudden snap, but a series of decisions that get easier to justify once the first line is crossed.
Lee Byung-hun is phenomenal here. He plays Yoo Man-su with coiled tension, the kind that makes even domestic scenes feel unsafe. The performance sells the central horror: that this man isn’t a monster at the start. He’s recognizable. He’s proud. He believes he earned his life. And that belief becomes the fuel for what follows.
Park’s dark humor threads through the film without softening it. The style is controlled, the violence exhausting rather than cathartic, and the final images undercut any illusion of victory. “No Other Choice” is class warfare filtered through shame, masculinity, and the terror of becoming disposable. Park makes it entertaining, then makes it sting. (Read our review).
5. “It Was Just an Accident” (Dir. Jafar Panahi)
It starts with a dead dog on a dark road and ends with a sound you can’t shake. Jafar Panahi builds the film around a question that refuses to stay theoretical: what happens when victims come face-to-face with the person who broke them, and certainty is never clean?
In “It Was Just an Accident,” Vahid hears a squeaky prosthetic leg and spirals. The kidnapping feels impulsive, almost absurd at first, but the film keeps widening into a group portrait of former prisoners who can’t agree on justice, mercy, or even identification. Panahi’s gift is tone: the humor is real, the logistics get messy, and the conversations feel lived-in. Then the anger rises, slow and steady, until you realize the comedy has been sharing space with trauma the whole time.
The thriller mechanics are tight, but the real tension comes from moral pressure. Killing might be wrong. Letting him go might be worse. Either choice carries a cost that doesn’t end with a body in the ground. That last cue is the punchline and the curse. Whether it’s real or imagined, the threat remains. Panahi leaves you with dread, not closure.
4. “Sentimental Value” (Dir. Joachim Trier)
A father returns after a death in the family and behaves as if presence alone should count as reconciliation. That’s the kind of emotional violence “Sentimental Value” understands in detail: the casual comments, the polite evasions, the way an adult child can regress in seconds once the old dynamic enters the room.
Renate Reinsve’s Nora is a wound with a sharp sense of humor. Her stage fright isn’t just a quirk; it’s the body remembering what the mind tries to manage. Joachim Trier lets scenes unfold at human pace, giving full attention to pauses, glances, and the small humiliations that don’t look dramatic from the outside but stay lodged for years. Meanwhile, Stellan Skarsgård plays Gustav with a believable mix of ego and confusion, a man who thinks he tried and can’t see why that wasn’t enough.
In the film, cinema becomes the film’s cruelest language. Gustav wants to turn his past into art and call it intimacy. Nora hears the request as theft. In between, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas’ Agnes tries to translate what cannot be said. Trier doesn’t promise repair. He offers recognition, and the ache that comes with it. That’s why the film lands so hard. (Read our review).
3. “Sinners” (Dir. Ryan Coogler)
Ryan Coogler throws five genres in a blender and somehow the mess feels like life, not clutter. “Sinners” is jagged in the right way: not because it’s forcing pieces together, but because the world is crowded, loud, and textured. The characters don’t feel like genre archetypes. They feel like people with habits, histories, and secrets that existed before the camera found them.
Here, music is the glue. It’s not decoration and it’s not just mood. It’s story logic. And It’s how grief gets spoken, how memory survives, how the film’s supernatural current becomes believable instead of silly. The set pieces hit, sure, but what makes them hit harder is the groundwork underneath: quiet conversations and the sense of a community with its own rhythms.
Michael B. Jordan’s dual performance is strong, but the revelation is Miles Caton. He gives the film its pulse. When he plays, you believe the room changes. Coogler doesn’t sand down the rough edges. He leans into them, then lands the emotional weight anyway. That’s filmmaking with nerve.
2. “Hamnet” (Dir. Chloé Zhao)
Jessie Buckley’s grief in Hamnet isn’t performative. It’s physical. There’s a scream in this film that feels almost intrusive to witness, and what follows is even worse: the quiet. Buckley plays Agnes as someone both grounded and uncanny, a mother whose intuition reads like magic because grief sharpens perception into something feral.
Chloé Zhao frames mourning with patience, letting the domestic textures matter: the house, the woods, the labor of living before and after tragedy. Paul Mescal’s Shakespeare is the countercurrent, less openly explosive, burying pain in distance and work. The film’s best passages come from watching these two modes of suffering exist side by side without tidy moral judgment.
What lifts Hamnet into best-of territory is the honesty of its portrait: grief as routine, as obsession, as memory you can’t set down. Buckley and Mescal are excellent, but Buckley is on another level. The film keeps returning to the same wound from different angles, and each time it hurts in a new way. (Read our review).
1. “One Battle After Another” (Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)
Paul Thomas Anderson steps into the present tense with a fury that feels bracing. “One Battle After Another” is chaotic, funny, and frightening in the same breath, a film that understands how quickly politics becomes atmosphere: background noise until it suddenly isn’t.
The filmmaking is full-bodied. Vistavision images have grit and scale. Jonny Greenwood’s score needles the film forward, teasing satire one moment and dread the next. The set pieces are thrilling, but they aren’t the reason the film stays lodged in your system. The reason is emotional. Under the conspiracy energy and national rot is a father–daughter relationship that gives the story gravity. The personal stakes keep the political ones from turning abstract. Anderson doesn’t simplify the ugliness. He also doesn’t surrender to cynicism. The film keeps finding humor without softening the danger, and tenderness without pretending the world is safe.
No other film this year grabbed my attention the way this one did. It’s a big, unruly movie with real craft behind the noise, and it feels urgent without turning into a lecture. Anderson makes the moment feel alive on screen, and that alone is worth the top spot.
Honorable Mentions
- “Sorry, Baby” (Dir. Eva Victor)
- “The Perfect Neighbor” (Dir. Geeta Gandbhir)
- “Companion” (Dir. Drew Hancock)
- “Ky Nam Inn” (Dir. Leon Le)
- “Happy Birthday” (Dir. Sarah Goher)
