7 h. ago Dancing! Fighting! Impregnating! The best movie moments of 2025

From Sinners to F1 to Highest 2 Lowest, Guardian writers pick the scenes that stuck with them the most this yearSpoilers aheadDisclosure: I covered auto racing for years and still follow Formula One skeptically. I definitely went into F1: The Movie knowing what I was in for, an answer to the hypothetical: what if the bougiest sport on God’s green earth was turned into a western? But you can’t help going along for the ride once Brad Pitt starts filling the frame with his blue-eyed winks, wry smiles and Butch Cassidy swagger. I should’ve been more indignant about this martinet sport making a literal hero out of the biggest rogue on the grid. But I left disbelief in parc fermé as Pitt’s Sonny Hayes bumped and nicked his way to the season finale at Abu Dhabi to much consternation before his wingman (Damson Idris) takes up the ticky tactics at Yas Marina circuit and winds up sacrificing himself and producer Lewis Hamilton (not again!) to help Sonny win his first race and thwart a hostile...

Culture

9 h. ago 'I watched 400 movies in 2025 and only rated four of them a five star'

Film reviewer Luke Eccleston has listed the four films that stood out to him in 2025, which is no mean feat given that he sat through 400 of them during the year!

Politics

28 h. ago ‘We’ve fallen behind’: why Germany’s biggest teams have split from DFB

Ownership of Frauen-Bundesliga is being taken over by the clubs, who want to keep pace with game in England“The reason we started this whole process was a fear of losing more and more the connection to the top,” says Katharina Kiel, the head of women’s football at Eintracht Frankfurt.Alongside her role at one of Germany’s more successful women’s football teams, Kiel was this month elected president of the new Women’s Bundesliga Association, after all 14 clubs agreed to split from the German Football Federation (DFB) and form their own committee to take ownership of the league to further commercialise and grow it, with the 2027-28 campaign a targeted start date. Continue reading...

Politics

29 h. ago ‘I’ve waited for this movie my whole life’: Guardian readers’ best films of 2025

From the surreal fairytale The Ice Tower to the revenge western Tornado, our readers share the films that had the biggest impact on them this yearThe 50 best films of 2025Peter Bradshaw’s film picks of the yearMore on the best culture of 2025I still can’t get over Sinners. It’s what the cinema was made for. It looked amazing; its sound was so rich and textured; and the juke joint dance sequence was a genuine WTF surprise that could have been grim but was utter genius. And if you haven’t seen it, please stay for the scene that comes mid-credits: it has to be my favourite five minutes of film all year. Michael, Manchester Continue reading...

Culture

56 h. ago ‘Cue air punches and tears’: why Next Goal Wins is my feelgood movie

Continuing the series where writers pick their go-to mood-lifting films is a look back to the inspiring sports documentaryIt feels apt following a 2026 World Cup draw featuring tiny island debutants Curacao and Cape Verde to revisit Next Goal Wins, an underdog story I adopted upon first watch as if it were a team I would loyally follow for the rest of my life.The documentary chronicles the world’s (once) worst soccer team, American Samoa, and their valiant efforts to qualify for the 2014 World Cup, but to label it merely a soccer film is to overlook a perfect study of remarkable characters, circumstances and a lesser seen island life. You don’t need to be a sports fan to be uplifted here. Continue reading...

Politics

68 h. ago Amadeus review – this Mozart series is a pale, petty version of the movie it’s based on

Will Sharpe and Paul Bettany’s new TV drama is flat, airless and banal. It’s a crass affair with a thin, half-hearted performance from SharpeHere’s my position. If you are going to create a miniseries about the life, death and music of one of the defining geniuses of the last 1,000 years of western civilisation, and if you are going to use as your source material a script for a great play that was made into a near-perfect film beloved by almost everyone for its wit and immense, profound themes rendered accessible and moving, and for the fact that it had two of the most extraordinary performances ever committed to what may still then have been celluloid – well, you had better be pretty damn sure that you are bringing something new, exciting, different, richer, cleverer, even more illuminating to the table. Otherwise you are going to look like a bit of a berk.And so, my friends, to the new six-part drama Amadeus, about the life, death and music of Wolfgang A Mozart, one of the definin...

Culture

3 d. ago Netflix fans left ‘ugly sobbing’ over intense thriller called 'easily one of 2025's best movies'

Viewers have been left in floods of tears after tuning into this high-stakes new Netflix thriller

Politics

5 d. ago And the 2025 Braddies go to Peter Bradshaw’s film picks of the year

Now the Guardian’s Top 50 countdowns, as voted for by the whole film team, have announced their No 1s, here are our chief critic’s personal choices – in no particular order• The 50 best films of 2025 in the UK• The 50 best movies of 2025 in the USThe time has come once more for me to present my “Braddies”, a strictly personal awards list for films on UK release in the year just gone and, as ever, quite distinct from this paper’s collegiate best-of-year countdown. These are my top 10 lists for best film, director, actor and supporting actor, actress and supporting actress, directorial debut, cinematographer, screenplay and film most likely to be overlooked by the boomer mainstream media (or MSM).As we look back over the last 12 months, there can be no doubt of the villain of 2025: Tilly Norwood, the female AI star. Launched in October, she is a smilingly bland and really very convincing non-human being who will work uncomplainingly and cheaply without ever storming off to her trailer...

Events

5 d. ago Barcelona close in on sensational for Norwich and England wonderkid Ajay Tavares, 15, after scoring 16

BARCELONA are set to seal a sensational deal to sign 15-year-old Norwich star Ajay Tavares. The highly-rated forward has been chased by some of Europe's top clubs ahead of January - but the Spanish giants are expected to win the race. Tavares, who made his senior Canaries debut in a July pre-season friendly against Dutch...

Politics

5 d. ago Best movies of 2025 in the US: No 1 – One Battle After Another

Leonardo DiCaprio is a former revolutionary searching for his daughter in Paul Thomas Anderson’s exhilaratingly audacious counterculture epic• The best movies of 2025 in the US• More on the best culture of 2025Paul Thomas Anderson’s countercultural drama-thriller One Battle After Another, inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, is a formal enigma that has perplexed, provoked and entranced, and the year ends with no definitive consensus as to its exact meaning. A rare naysayer is screenwriter and film-maker Paul Schrader, who commented tersely online: “Film-making at level A+, but try as I might I couldn’t muster up an ounce of empathy for Leo DiCaprio or Sean Penn. I kept waiting for them to die.”But that’s why the film is gripping: there is indeed no empathy for its two unlovely leading males, and their mortality and vulnerability has a kind of unwinding, entropic energy. They are heading for disaster. And yes, the film-making is A+ or A++; it is supercharged with pleasure at ...

Events

5 d. ago Paddington and Wonka director Paul King to direct Labubu movie

Film based on popular plush toys is in early development after Sony Pictures acquired screen rightsPaul King, director of the global hit Paddington films and the Timothée Chalamet-led musical Wonka, is set to direct the Labubu film.In November it was announced that Sony Pictures, fresh off the global success of KPop Demon Hunters, had acquired the screen rights to the Chinese plush toy sensation with a feature film already in early development. Continue reading...

Politics

7 d. ago ‘A festive tour de force’: Guardian writers on their favorite underrated Christmas movies

From a John Cusack 80s teen comedy to the other Frank Capra Christmas crowd-pleaser, here are some seasonal picks you might not have seenSomething that bugs me about a lot of contemporary Christmas movies is how insistently self-conscious they are about the whole production – the ostentatious decorations, checklist of soundtrack chestnuts, the dialogue about the true meaning of the holidays that sounds canned even when the movie is trying to acknowledge its various stressors. Maybe because the idea of a holiday movie hadn’t yet ossified into routine, I’ve found that the versions of these films that came out in the 1940s tend to approach Christmas from more inventive, less neurotically obsessive angles. One of my favorite discoveries in sifting through 1940s Christmas comedies is It Happened on Fifth Avenue, a 1947 semi-romantic farce with a great starting hook: a cheerful vagrant Aloysius T McKeever (Victor Moore) winters in New York every year, because he knows a way into a particu...

Politics

8 d. ago Being Charlie: the film Rob and Nick Reiner made together offers home truths

The 2016 drama, loosely inspired by the father-son relationship, is a gritty drama about addiction that has now become a puzzle pieceBeing Charlie, a 2016 movie directed by the late Rob Reiner, stands out from the director’s filmography for a number of reasons. It’s a gritty and grounded addiction movie with a few comic elements, less ebullient than many of the movies Reiner was famous for, as well as the others he was making in the 2010s. It features then-up-and-coming stars, rather than more established figures, and way more sex and nudity than usual. And it’s the only movie co-written by Reiner’s son, Nick, whose experiences formed the basis for the screenplay, and who is now expected to be charged in the murder of both his parents.Those horrific circumstances transform Being Charlie from one of Reiner’s more interesting late-period efforts into the subject of unavoidable rubbernecking. Here is a film Reiner made in collaboration with his son, in part as an obvious act of hope th...

Politics

9 d. ago ‘Apocalyptically funny’: why The Mitchells vs the Machines is my feelgood movie

The latest in our series of writers explaining their comfort watches is a celebration of 2021’s acclaimed animated adventureAnimation is a great way of allowing you to experience the world through the eyes of another, complete with the colour, energy, imagination and chaos that this can bring. It’s true whether you’re looking at the world from the perspective of a frustrated and talented teenage girl, or from that of a megalomaniacal rogue AI who dreams of blasting every human on Earth into space in tiny hexagonal pods (with free wifi!). Such is the chaotic and sensational combination of styles that fuels animated road-trip riot The Mitchells vs the Machines, a film that crams a father-daughter conflict, a techno-apocalypse, Olivia Colman, and every colour of the rainbow into a burnt-orange 1993 station wagon.Phil Lord and Christopher Miller produce with the same kind of free-spirited approach that characterised the likes of The Lego Movie and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. It’s...

Politics

9 d. ago The Great Flood review – Korean apocalypse movie swerves into sinister sci

The storytelling is brittle, but there is still enjoyment to be had from this story of a mother and child and rescue from a catastrophic flood in SeoulKim Byung-woo’s chimeric but not unenjoyable sixth feature begins like a normal apocalypse movie, with a deluge inundating Seoul. Then it flirts with taking on social stratification baggage as a beleaguered mother tries to climb up her 30-storey apartment block to escape the rising flood waters. But once it is revealed that An-na (Kim Da-mi) is a second-ranking science officer for an indispensable research project, the film becomes a different beast entirely – possibly something quite insidious.As the film gats under way, An-na’s swimming-obsessed six-year-old son Ja-in (Kwon Eun-seong) sees his dreams come true when water begins flooding their apartment. Along with everyone else, they begin pounding the stairs – before corporate security officer Hee-jo (Park Hae-soo) catches up with them and explains that an asteroid impact in Antarc...

Events

1 week ago Jeremy Clarkson bans all Labour MPs from his Cotswolds pub in fury at tax hike

TV star's business rates bill has soared from £28,000 to over £50,000 as hospitality industry revolts against Chancellor's Budget

Politics

1 week ago Olivia Attwood in new feud with Bonnie Blue as porn star hits out at ‘name

OLIVIA Attwood has found herself in a new feud with Bonnie Blue after the porn star hit out at her for 'name-dropping'. Earlier this year Olivia, 34, spoke out about the X-rated star, who has become infamous for stunts like bedding “barely legal” university freshers and sleeping with 1,057 men in 12 hours. Olivia said: "I think...

Events

1 week ago Silent Night, Deadly Night review – killer Santa remake is overstuffed

There are too many competing and overfamiliar ideas in this busy slasher reboot that’s sorely lacking in styleThere was a bizarre moral outrage back in November 1984 when seasonal slasher Silent Night, Deadly Night dared to put an axe in the hands of Santa. Despite being, you know, not a real person he was once treated with enough reverence to cause parent-led protests, a ban of all advertising and then of the film itself. It provided a sharp edge to an otherwise blunt and unremarkable post-Halloween knockoff and might help to explain why it managed to eke out four junky sequels and a 2012 remake.We’re now at the inevitable second remake stage but the 2025 redo arrives after the gimmick of Killer Santa has now become a subgenre in itself. He’s cropped up in Christmas Bloody Christmas, Christmas Evil, Santa’s Slay, Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, Deadly Games and last year’s Terrifier 3 and the makers of this December’s take are more than aware that seeing Santa with a weapon isn’t e...

Events

1 week ago The 15 best films of 2025, from Mickey 17 to One Battle After Another

This was a cinematic year of vampires, clones, restless mothers, maybe-ETs and Leonardo DiCaprio struggling to remember complex revolutionary passwords. Clarisse Loughrey has counted down the very best

Events

1 week ago ‘A movie diary’: how Letterboxd became a film review haven for the algorithm

The platform’s esoteric watchlists and rating system appeal to cinephiles craving a different mode of discoveryI never thought I would use Letterboxd. The app’s premise of logging reviews of every film you watch felt like counting steps, and I generally prefer to exercise my pretension the old fashioned way – such as getting a BFA or frequenting art house cinema screenings where I am usually the only person under 50 in the theater.But after I wrote about my feelgood movie for the Guardian – that would be Sullivan’s Travels, Preston Sturges’s perfect 1941 satire – I was swayed by two newsroom colleagues. “Hey Alaina, we heard you like movies,” one of them said. “What’s your Letterboxd?” I wanted to be part of the club, and signed up later that night. Now, I write thoughts on every movie I see, usually before I’ve even left the theater or closed out the streamer. Continue reading...

Culture