From vampires to demon hunters, these are the movies we loved this year.
We should have known when people started bringing live chickens to A Minecraft Movie that it was going to be a buzzy year for cinema. Trump announced a 100% tariff on all movies made outside of the United States, which those in the the local industry found “a little confusing” and “lacking in logic.” We also saw the launch of Hollywood’s “first AI actor” Tilly Norwood, while Netflix bought Warner Bros and box offices in the United States plunged to a 27-year low.
Hollywood may be in shambles, but it felt like a great year for local cinema in Aotearoa. Tinā shattered box office records and brought everyone to tears. Pike River saw two acting titans bring one of our darkest days back into the light. The Weed Eaters revived our proud scrappy splatter traditions. The Rule of Jenny Penn saw John Lithgow nail a New Zealand accent while enacting pure evil. All the while, ‘Don’t Dream It’s Over’ was absolutely everywhere.
Hey now, hey now, here are our favourite movies of 2025.
One Battle After Another
Possibly the best movie of 2025, if not its most definitive. Though Paul Thomas Anderson took years to bring this Vineland adaptation to fruition, it couldn’t have been more of-the-moment, released into ICE raids, frayed tempers and increasingly militant ideologies in every quadrant of society. Fun! Except it is, satirising literally everyone with pitch-perfect comedy and some career-topping performances (Sean Penn’s engorged muscles deserve their own best supporting Oscar nod). I left thinking about the American need to believe in something and how each cause defines itself in opposition to a rival. The challenge is the purpose – and most meaningful revolutionary work is done behind the dojo. / Emma Gleason
28 Years Later
Director Danny Boyle and Alex Garland, the dynamic duo behind 28 Days Later, sunk their teeth back into the post-apocalyptic zombie franchise in June and reinfected it with a surprising amount of heart. Set, well, 28 years after a bamboozled Cillian Murphy strolled through an empty London, a small island outpost off the coast of quarantined Britain is getting on with life in a new world (which is a lot like ye olde world). Cue a brave young lad venturing out to try and cure his mam’s mystery ailment, and getting into all sorts of bother with some thrilling new advanced species of the undead. Come for the blood and guts and frights, stay for a bright orange Ralph Fiennes who will honestly make you weep like a baby. Spectacular, scary and frequently profound, it’s the kind of movie that reminded me why I love movies. / Alex Casey
Pike River
A harrowing plunge into the blackness of the 2010 Pike River mine disaster, this film drags you through grief, fury and despair. But the darkness is lit by the strength and humour of Anna Osborne, who lost her husband in the explosion, and Sonya Rockhouse, who lost her son.
New Zealand acting royalty Robyn Malcolm and Melanie Lynskey play the remarkable women who first took on each other, before uniting to get justice for the 29 men killed.
The complex and ongoing aftermath of the disaster could have swamped the script and hijacked the pace, but, in the hands of writer Fiona Samuel and director Robert Sarkies, the story successfully assembles itself around Osborne and Rockhouse’s intertwining stories of grit through grief. It’s a harsh history lesson but, ultimately, a tale of courage and hope. / Veronica Schmidt
Sinners
Sinners was a reminder of the power of cinema and what a big screen experience could bring to a film. It grossed $367.9 million worldwide and had an opening weekend that presented both a box office upset and the most successful original film since 2019, driven by its director Ryan Coogler, memorable performances (not one but two Michael B Jordans, and Jack O’Connor’s disturbingly entrancing turn as the ostensible antagonist) and word-of-mouth recommendations. Turns out people want fresh, well-filmed stories after all.
Yes, it’s a bombastic vampire movie, but it’s also a rumination on race and identity. Set in the Mississippi Delta amid the segregation of Jim Crow laws, the concept of space – who has it and who gets access to it – is one we see play out across the juke joint and the Chow family’s two stores. It’s in these spaces that the town’s different communities converge, or bump at the edges of the literal and metaphorical fences (a lot of people loved that time-bending music scene.) Vampires have long been a symbol of the other, and Coogler applies that to the Black and immigrant experience in an unwelcoming country. Exploring cultural exchange and assimilation alongside the extractive nature of integrating into a society, it asks what is lost by belonging. Speaking of belonging: Coogler cut a groundbreaking, leasehold-like deal with Warners Brothers for the IP rights, ensuring that Sinners ownership returns to him after 25 years. / EG
Marlon Williams: Nga Ao E Rua – Two Worlds
Following Marlon Williams’ four year journey to write and record his first album in te reo Māori, Nga Ao E Rua has an airiness and lightness of touch seldom seen in music documentaries. “You might expect a portrait of a solo musician undertaking the biggest challenge of his life to plumb the dead serious depths of a tortured lone genius, but both the documentary and its subject seem totally disinterested in any kind of moody myth-making,” I wrote in May. That is not to say that the film isn’t serious, though. It follows Williams up north to Tōrere, where he talks frankly throughout about his own shifting relationship with te reo Māori, and includes a horror montage of media commentators spitting divisive venom. Much more than another music documentary, it felt like quietly witnessing a piece of history. / AC
KPop Demon Hunters
Sony Pictures Animation selling KPop Demon Hunters to Netflix for a measly $20million USD profit is the stupidest business decision any company has ever made. If you think that it isn’t the stupidest decision anyone has ever made, you haven’t seen the film. Within 20 minutes of watching it you would absolutely know that this was going to be a global smash-hit success. Of course it was going to hit number one on the Billboard charts. Of course it was going to be the number one movie on Netflix for 15 consecutive weeks.
The film stars three bad-ass women who fight demons and sing the best songs you’ve ever heard. Many times when watching the film, my partner and I would turn to each other and say, “Oh, yay, my favourite song!” upon hearing a new song for the first time.
It perfects the Sony animation style pioneered in Spider-Man: Into The Spider-verse, which reminded people that animated films are allowed to look good and interesting. It’s also genuinely funny. There’s a long sequence in which a demonic tiger designed to sell merch (which Netflix also owns, by the way) is trying to tip a plant-pot up the correct way and fails to do so for a solid minute. I love that moment. I think I have pretty high standards for comedy, and I’m telling you it’s a funny movie.
Anyway, Sony bad. KPop Demon Hunters good. Thank you for reading. / Robbie Nicol
The Weed Eaters
As Madeleine Chapman wrote during Whanau Marama: New Zealand International Film Festival, everyone needs to see The Weed Eaters. The crowd-funded “minuscule-budget stoner horror” felt like a potent combination of early Peter Jackson splatter (with some overt garden-tool-related nods) with the frenetic, lightening-in-a-bottle energy of the best films made during the 48 Hour film competition. Crowdfunded and shot with a tiny crew, many of which did double duty as the cast, the film followed a group of friends who head to the wops for New Year’s, only for a dodgy batch of weed to throw them into a hilarious stomach-churning nightmare. In a year where so much emphasis was placed on attracting big budget international productions to Aotearoa, The Weed Eaters is a perfect example of “what can be achieved when creative people have a vision and just really, really want to make it so don’t wait around for permission.” / AC
Nosferatu
Watching this on the first day of 2025 was quite a way to kick off a new year. Erotically syphilitic vampirism and intoxicating period detail (a Robert Eggers specialty) make for a heady fever dream – Anna Rawhiti-Connell wrote as much back in February – and really set the tone for a weird, intense 12 months. And after 12 more, we can soon all go to the movies and see Eggers next film, Werwulf. / EG
Sirât
I went into this movie totally blind during the film festival, aside from a friend describing it as an “elliptical nightmare” and by gum he was right. Following one man’s perilous journey to find his daughter across the harsh deserts of Morocco, when the credits rolled on Sirât I was unable to move for about 10 minutes with my whole nervous system in tatters and my feet filled with lead. Shocking, brutal, jaw-dropping, harrowing – a lot like 2025, innit. / AC
Weapons
I can’t help but feel like 2025 was kind-of a flop year for the moving pictures industry. There were just a couple of big blockbusters, some really great local offerings and then everything else was Just OK. The film that’s stuck with me through it all is Zach Cregger’s Weapons. I went into it knowing nothing except that I really enjoyed Barbarian (and the drama of Jordan Peele firing two of his longtime managers after losing the bidding war on this script), but I didn’t except Weapons to tug on such a deep heartstring for me. Behind all the horror and strange mysticism is a little boy whose parents have essentially been bewitched to the point of being hollow shells of themselves, and yet he keeps having to go to school, return home to be the parent to his parents, try to avoid the ghoul haunting his house, and do it all again the next day. Fuck being freaked out by the children Naruto-running in the middle of the night through the neighbourhood – often, the scariest shit is the stuff that reminds you of the pains of your own life. / Lyric Waiwiri-Smith
Final Destination: Bloodlines
Sometimes you just really need to put your phone on flight mode, order a big popcorn and a choc top, and watch a bloody fun horror movie about a group of youngsters trying, once again, to cheat death’s design. Final Destination was one of the defining horror properties of the early 2000s, and this 2025 requel breathed new life (and many, many new slapstick deaths) into the ghoulish franchise. Where some of the later sequels got too bogged down trying to be serious and spooky, Bloodlines leaned hard into splatter, satire and absurdity. When a young lass in the swinging 60s has a premonition about a brand new tower collapsing, she saves the lives of every groovy soul meant to perish that day. As Devon Sawa will attest, death doesn’t like that, and soon makes a beeline not only for the survivors, but their children. And then their children’s children. A perfectly corny and self-aware thrill ride for an utterly preposterous year. / AC
