2025 Wrap: The Good & Not-So-Good Of Film Pop Culture

AND BEFORE YOU KNOW IT, we’re a year closer to death. Not to sound morbid, but given the sheer drama on and off the screen these days, time doesn’t pass — time gets closer to ending. On that very positive note, it’s the end of 2025, which means only one thing: it’s time for my annual Global-Hollywood-World-Cinema-but-Sometimes-Indian awards list. There is no shortage of categories and no dearth of trophies to hand out this year. A gentle reminder that not just the ‘best’ wins these things. We believe in diversity of merit, mediocrity, autocracy and general controversy. Everyone makes the news, it’s hard not to, so no reason they shouldn’t be recognised. Having said that, here goes:

Best ‘Greatest Film Of All Time’ Cultural Moment Award: Sinners

It was Challengers last year, but Ryan Coogler’s vampire-race-music-horror epic is more of a heavyweight in terms of cinematic and socio-cultural merit. Sinners tore a hole in the fabric of White Hollywood for a hot second in April. It got such early Oscar buzz that, as usual, it’s no longer a top contender. But that doesn’t take away the sheer power and genius of a film that’s as anthropological as it is innovative. It does for Black history and cinema what nobody else could: a masterpiece so cold that it will invariably prove to be too good for today’s America and for awards season.

New ‘Greatest Film Of All Time’ Film Twitter Explosion Moment: One Battle After Another

It was always going to happen. PTA, Penn, DiCaprio, VistaVision, del Toro. Cinephilia reached Peak 2025 when the reviews of One Battle After Another started trickling out before its release, calling it the greatest thing since sliced bread. None of it is untrue, even if the exaggerations kind of rob the sheen off a genuinely great, complex, funny and subversive American fable. The praise continues, though it’s now accompanied by the “what’s so great?” and “is it really right-wing?” stage of the discourse. It won’t stop PTA from winning those long-overdue statues, but it’s also kind of desensitised us to significant post-modern storytelling from auteurs. 

ALSO READ | One Battle After Another Is A Mic-Drop Moment By Paul Thomas Anderson

The Fascism-in-Democracy Talk-Show-Host Target Specials: Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert

I never really liked Kimmel until this year. Until now. Suddenly, the comedian, anchor and talk-show host is one of the bravest and smartest minds in the country — after Trump and his government pressured the network into taking his show off-air during the Charlie Kirk saga. Kimmel got back on air and didn’t pull punches, lending new meaning to free speech and courage in an age of state-sponsored bullying and censorship. Unlike the annoyingly safe and apolitical Jimmy Fallon, who did himself no favours by not standing up for his contemporaries. Colbert’s show has been cancelled from mid-2026, but he continues to throw digs and potshots at the establishment in between doing empathetic interviews with celebrities and friends. One of the finer television moments of the year featured both of them appearing simultaneously as guests on each other’s shows and “taking notes”.

The Foot-and-Jeans-in-Mouth Business Person of the Year: Sydney Sweeney

Not just the bathwater soap product, which isn’t creepy at all by her standards. Sweeney’s “genes” advert only revealed about her what everyone already suspected. Being Republican was never a problem; being racist is. Not to mention the fact that nothing she did on screen worked — her ambitious boxing biopic Christie bombed, and her public appearances have gotten more attention than her roles. Hollywood is also a famously liberal industry (unlike Bollywood, which sways in the direction of the wind), so to see someone like Sweeney — who leans into her reputation as a sex symbol more than most — suffer ‘consequences’ is a jolt for most South Asian moviegoers. 

Best Film Of The Year That Only A Few Spoke About: Train Dreams

The hypnotic and lilting period adaptation dropped quietly on Netflix after lighting up Sundance earlier in the year. And it did generate reactions — it did not go unnoticed. Some divisive of course (Hi Richard Brody). But the overall consensus has been that rarely has a fictional-biopic-coded film elicited so many primal emotions in a viewer through sound and images alone. It’s so beautiful to look at, so lovely to hear, that its primary themes — anonymity, grief, the invisibilisation by history, a changing America, an anti-narrative of life — register without any fuss. I needed a walk after watching it (on not even the biggest screen). I won’t be forgetting it anytime soon. And that background score.

Best Supporting Actor In An Acclaimed Movie: Sean Penn’s Facial and Erectile Muscles

You know what I’m talking about. Penn’s Steven J. Lockjaw in One Battle After Another is a force of vile nature, a creature so carnal and bigoted that the muscles on his body give its own performance. Penn riffs on the satirical depiction of such villains, making him as funny as he is tragic and disgusting. And the boner that Lockjaw sports early on (that camera angle, though) has its own fan pages — and I don’t mean that in an erotic way. Ever.

Most Unnecessary Online Publicity Campaign Ever: Dhurandhar

Not for the first time, a hyperpolitical Bollywood movie has used film critics and naysayers as internet fodder to promote their product. The orchestrated hate campaign (especially against women) has swallowed even the most sane-minded and casual moviegoers, tapping into their everyday resentments and giving them a target again. We are used to it, but it's sadder to see regular folks getting caught up in the focused attacks and trolling: from anti-national to Pakistan lover to YRF spy movies suck to let's criticise the critics, it's been an ugly few weeks at the movies. And this is not the end. The puppeteers have only started. The puppets can't even see the strings.

The Homebound for Normies Award: Homebound

Neeraj Ghaywan’s empathetic and sharp second film made all the right noises, despite its various pre-film controversies (including censor troubles and the DOP facing serious sexual harassment allegations). It didn't make money at the box office, but it became India's official selection for the Oscars, backed by none other than Martin Scorsese himself. Much deserved, but the irony is that it seals Dharma’s year as one of critical rather than commercial success. It's been so hit or miss — disasters like Naadaaniyan and Sarzameen have co-existed with Dhadak 2 and Homebound as if it's the most normal roster in the world.

ALSO FROM THE AUTHOR | Notes On Neeraj Ghaywan's Homebound & The Lifelong Friendship Of Grief

Best Safdie Brother of the Year: Josh Safdie

With the Safdie brothers splitting to make their own individual films, everyone’s in the “now we know who had the vision” mode. Benny Safdie came out with The Smashing Machine, which was supposed to be The Rock’s Oscar tilt, only for it to receive lukewarm responses after its Venice debut. Then came Josh’s Marty Supreme, which elicited the same rapturous response that One Battle After Another did. I'm yet to see the latter, but it's always amusing when the less “exposed” or popular sibling walks away with the plaudits. Hey, at least Benny started in an Oscar-winning Nolan film recently.

Best “BrokeBack Mountains weds All Of Us Strangers Sadboi Hours weds Sinners” Film: The History of Sound

Inject a grieving-and-gay-and-lovestruck Paul Mescal into my veins, already. This is a genre on its own, and Oliver Hermanus’ sweeping period romance expands the genre by adding the latest hunky-sadboi actor into the mix: Josh O’Connor. It is impossible to survive the melancholy of this film in all the right ways possible. Two young men meet in 1917 in a music conservatory, and use this music — they record folk songs and voices in Maine for the next few years — to sustain their unlikely bond. I’m not crying, you are.

All Of Us Strangers & The Main Character Energy Of Grief

Best Use of ‘On The Nature of Daylight’ after Arrival: Hamnet

I’ve been waiting to be destroyed by this film for so long that my algorithm has decided to ruin me by bringing up Hamnet tweets about how the famous Max Richter track has outdone its use in Arrival — a film I’ve still not recovered from. And I don’t want to. Being in India, of course, we wait for Hamnet. It’s like sound reaching months after the rest of the world gets light.