The year-end list industrial complex is about to kick into overdrive, but Cahiers du Cinéma has already planted its flag. The legendary French magazine has unveiled its Top 10 films of 2025, topped by Albert Serra’s “Afternoons of Solitude” and followed closely by Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another,” with new work from Nadav Lapid, Kleber Mendonça Filho, Richard Linklater, and Christian Petzold also making the cut.
READ MORE: Fall & Winter Film 2025 Preview: 61 Movies To Watch
Serra’s “Afternoons of Solitude” — his bullfighting documentary about Peruvian torero Andrés Roca Rey that won the Golden Shell at San Sebastián — marks the director’s second time topping the Cahiers list after “Pacifiction” in 2022. Anderson’s “One Battle After Another,” his long-awaited collaboration with Leonardo DiCaprio, lands in the #2 slot, with Lapid’s “Yes!” rounding out the top three.
As usual, the list leans heavily into European cinema and familiar Cahiers favorites (Serra, Lapid, Mendonça Filho, Petzold), while also spotlighting newer names and curiosities that will likely become hunt-down titles on the festival and repertory circuit over the next year. With Serra now topping their list twice in four years and Anderson finally crashing the party with “One Battle After Another,” it’s also another reminder of how closely the magazine’s obsessions track with a particular corner of contemporary cinephilia — and how many of 2025’s key titles most of us still haven’t had a chance to see yet.
Here’s Cahiers du Cinéma’s Top 10 films of 2025:
- “Afternoons of Solitude” (Albert Serra)
- “One Battle After Another” (Paul Thomas Anderson)
- “Yes!” (Nadav Lapid)
- “The Secret Agent” (Kleber Mendonça Filho)
- “I Only Rest in the Storm” (Pedro Pinho)
- “L’Aventura” (Sophie Letourneur)
- “7 Walks With Mark Brown” (Vincent Creton / Sébastien Betbeder Barre)
- “Nouvelle Vague” (Richard Linklater)
- “Laurent Dans le Vent” (Rafael Balekdjian / Cléo Couture Eustachon)
- “Miroirs No. 3” (Christian Petzold)
