X-Press Magazine’s Top Films of 2025

The cinema is still going strong. Just this half decade, it’s been hit by a pandemic, increasing AI concerns, various strikes, and its competition with all the other screens in our lives. Yet when it comes to being able to so artfully convey our concerns, woes and dreams, whether they be personal, political, or spiritual, no other medium can do it like the movies. X-Press film reviewers DAVID O’CONNELL and DAVID MORGAN-BROWN guide you through the very best 2025 has to offer, with a variety of genres that (in their own degrees of explicitness) commented on the tumultuous times we live in today.

The Long Walk
If you can make a film that’s about a bunch of people walking so damn intense to watch and so revealing of our humanity, then I’d say you’ve succeeded. The Long Walk is very much like the road these characters walk along: straight and narrow, with most of the focus put on the varying attitudes, temperaments, and philosophies on how this messed up contest pits and brings these characters together, while hardly shying away from the brutality of it all (particularly the bloody feet and trying to shit while walking).
DAVID MORGAN-BROWN

Friendship
Tim Robinson has had instant success with his surreal TV shows I Think You Should Leave and The Chair Company, so fans of these shows surely won’t want to miss him in a less bizarre, but more grounded and more troubling character examination. Friendship really tests your sympathies with the lead character, as we see him go through quite the evolution, mostly a downward spiral fuelled more by entitlement than disappointment. His cringiness may be exaggerated a little for comedic effect, but his initial social awkwardness starts snowballing into downright narcissistic behaviour. This is one of the very few recent movies that can make such an engaging and transformative characterisation so hilarious and hysterical.
DAVID MORGAN-BROWN

Bring Her Back
A dark little Aussie horror with a brutal black heart, Bring Her Back really delivers chills and emotional gut punches. At the centre, writer-director duo Danny and Michael Philippou create a ritual that has a complex verisimilitude, expanding their universe as a world with dark magic whispered at the fringes of urban legends. However, what pushes this over the edge is a trio of superb performances helmed by Sally Hawkins. This is a film that will disquiet audiences and leave you drained by the ending.
DAVID O’CONNELL

Bugonia
Despite the weird premise (Jesse Plemons kidnaps Emma Stone because he thinks she’s an alien), Bugonia actually runs with this oddity in a straight manner, with a fairly thoughtful and grounded representation of a conspiracy theorist, a high-profile girlboss, and a neurodivergent. The tension gets even more tightened and increasingly amusing as it heads towards a playful climax (that contrasts well with everything that came before it), and then a finale sequence that will delight misanthropes all over the world.
DAVID MORGAN-BROWN

Hard Truths
Director Mike Leigh has reunited with his Secrets and Lies star Marianne Jean-Baptiste, but her character here is completely different from her timid role in that 1996 film. Instead, she is outwardly nasty and antagonistic towards every single person in her life—her husband, son, sisters, strangers at the mall and in the carpark. But it is so damn hysterical to watch, making this one of the funniest films of the year … until it becomes one of the more depressing, all of which is guided by Marianne’s powerful, hilarious, and compelling performance.
DAVID MORGAN-BROWN

Flow
This Oscar-winning animation is a testament to the power of visual storytelling. A wordless odyssey that casts us adrift in a strange and wondrous apocalyptic world, bereft of humans but brimming with humanity. This tale told through the voyage of a ragtag group of animals is laden with mythic significance and dreamlike imagery. We Australians had to wait a little longer than a lot of the world for this gem to see general release, but it was certainly worth the wait. A singular vision unlike much else you’ve ever seen.
DAVID O’CONNELL

Die My Love
What is perhaps the most harrowing film of the year, though that may be expected from director Lynne Ramsay. Fronted by a stunning, engaging, but thoroughly confronting performance from Jennifer Lawrence (very likely her best), this character study busts at the seams with tension, wondering where Lawrence’s maniacal character is going to go—it’s so unpredictable, as it leads to a devastating (yet still ambiguous) climax. This is for sure the date night film of the year!
DAVID MORGAN-BROWN

Eddington
Even though Eddington is writer-director Ari Aster’s most overtly comical and satirical film, its commentary on very contemporary issues in the Western world in the 2020s still has the immense power to horrify viewers like he did with his horror films. It became so prescient about our modern times that one of its shocking plot points actually got replicated in America in September, mere months after its release, proving that his film is as much about 2025 as it is about 2020. Aster pulled no punches with his acidic depiction across all political affiliations, generations, classes, and societal temperaments, but it’s the humour and fun of Eddington that contains its humanity, its need to offset this bitterness so as to entertain even the people it satirises.
DAVID MORGAN-BROWN