My top watches of the year!
2025 was a really good year for me flicks-wise, and it’s been a great year for film in general — a lot more of my favourites are new releases than usual, and a fair few of them I actually watched in the cinema.
I watched 120 films in 2025 — a few were rewatches — and I rated 46 of them 4 stars or more. Here’s the full list on Letterboxd for easy browsing.
Boarding School (2018, dir. Boaz Yakin)
I fucking adored this film — it’s Problematique, so say the least, but if I’d watched this when I was fourteen or fifteen I really think it could have realigned some things for me.
It’s a psychosexual thriller about a young boy who is sent off to boarding school when his parents become troubled by his frequent night terrors and his quiet and particular ways, but he discovers once he’s at that school that not all is what it seems.
Its exploration of burgeoning queerness and transness in such a young boy, who is not yet fully able to verbalise or express what it is he is or what he wants, except that certain aspects of the feminine and the choreographed make him feel Right and Powerful, is in itself impactful, but the way you see so many people respond to it, and especially adults respond to it, with an immediate desire to punish it out of him, is just so painfully real.
Gender incongruity, femininity in a young man, prettiness in a young man, is treated with revulsion and disgust and distaste, and at the same time he’s immediately pushed and funnelled into various caretaker roles — I think it feels so noteworthy to me how very Jewish that emasculation and complex relationship with his masculinity and feminity is to me, and especially like, the offer of mentorship from a man who isn’t Jewish himself, and is actually benevolently antisemitic, but is balding and small and in various ways delicate and particular with this broad Brooklyn accent, a man who may well have experienced misdirected antisemitism himself, and certainly has been similarly emasculated in his life.
The sheer gender of this film and how much it dives into how fucking horrible but also like, the potentials of power at that age, is just so real to me, and it’s not something a lot of film-makers feel comfortable exploring in such a visual medium, but I just really loved it.
THE LEGEND & BUTTERFLY (2013, dir. Keishi Otomo)
This movie fuuuucks.
Historical romance exploring the relationship between Oda Nobunaga and his wife, Lady Nohime — obviously, Sengoku era Japan has some patchy records, especially when it comes to the wives of leaders like Nobunaga, but this is such a fun and interesting exploration of what that dynamic might have been like.
The hate-to-love-to-what-to-love dynamic is so good, the immense tragedy of it, the fucked up dramatics of their attraction to one another and the performance of their sexuality to each other and to others, the way they clash, the way they fight…
Like, yeah, I love going on a date with my husband of several years and then we murder a bunch of fucking people together. #Romance
This movie really tries to delve into lots of interesting aspects of the period too, the costuming is sublime, so many of the slice-of-life and background elements are well-developed and complex and rich, etc.
Is it realistic?
Who cares?
These bitches fuck.
The Court Jester (1955, dir. Norman Panama & Melvin Frank)
This one had slipped through the cracks for me, somehow I hadn’t had it higher on my list until this year, but as soon as I watched it it was immediately a favourite for me.
It’s a silly fantastical romp about destinies and a hunted child and a Robin Hood-esque background and a fancy castle and a scheming leader and all that wonderful stuff — and it’s a musical!
So much gorgeous costume work and set design, fucking delightful music and camp-as-fuck choreography and acting, it’s so silly and ridiculous, it’s got great sword fights, it’s over-the-top in every way, and it’s just delightful.
It’s so much fun!
Joy Ride (2023, dir. Adele Lim)
This movie is so fucking stupid and I fucking loved it.
A group of Asian-American friends go to China on vacation together, in part to find out the roots of one of their number who was adopted. It’s extremely horny, it’s completely absurd, it’s over-the-top.
It’s very Hangover-esque in its humour, raunchy and stupid and addled with drink and drugs, and I just really enjoyed it, I was laughing the entire time.
Victor/Victoria (1982, dir. Blake Edwards)
Robert Preston, my beloved.
I was lucky enough to see this as part of the retrospective at the Pictureville Cinema where they selected some of Julie Andrews’ best pictures, and I really understand why this film is viewed as so iconic and so impactful. Half a century after its release, basically every joke, every line, still fucking lands, and it makes some still incredibly real commentary about gay people and how we live and how we perform and all the rest.
Set in pre-War Paris, the movie follows a down-on-her-luck soprano who can’t get a job, and a conman of a bastard ageing gay who also can’t get a job because he’s the worst… so he puts her in drag, as a man. And then she plays a drag artist, on the stage.
It’s so good.
The choreography and costuming are obscenely well-done, a lot of the music is just really stand-out, but most of all it just feels really real. There’s so much casual domesticity between everybody, there’s a real sense of the queer familial dynamics that develop when you’re under stress from the outside world and taking solace with each other and in the secrecy of the closets you’re in together, and there’s just so much love and adoration for the stage, for identity, for queerness, for fun.
And Robert Preston is so hot and he gets such a cute gay happy ending and it’s wonderful.
RRR (2022, dir. S.S. Rajamouli)
RRR is… hard to describe.
It’s set during the British Occupation of pre-partition India in 1920, and a lot fucking happens that’s not very easy to put in one easy paragraph, but it’s an incredible epic about two men from apparently different backgrounds who come together to fight the evil of the British Raj.
It’s not without its flaws — especially in the third act, the caste-based bigotry is really blatant — but every movie I’ve recommended so far has had a bunch of flaws, and they’re still big favourites of mine so far.
RRR is really long, but like.
In the first hour, I was like, huh, I don’t know, it’s good, but every recommendation I’ve heard has said this is like, the best movie they’ve ever seen… And in the second hour I was like, oh, wait, okay, maybe I —
And then the third hour happens, and it’s like. Wow. This is just fucking sublime.
If you can watch this on a big screen and with surround sound, watch it with friends, absolutely do. It’s such a fucking banger.
Conclave (2024, dir. Edward Berger)
C-U-N-T-Y, that’s how you spell Conclave. This is a highly choreographed and tense and thrilling exploration of a conclave where a pope is selected, but it’s soooo queer and so pretty.
I watched this movie and I really loved it and I immediately wanted to see it as a ballet.
The way that vestments and robes are adjusted and redeveloped for the screen, elements like the use of umbrellas and Vatican architecture, the way the group scenes are shot, God, it’s just sublime — appropriately so!
It’s really fucking gay in a subtle way, as you’d expect from a thousand priests locked up together, but there’s so much conniving and scheming, so much loaded implication and double meaning in how people talk to each other, so much beautiful light and explosive colour.
It just rocks, and it has some astounding performances from basically every actor present — and the turtles too!
Something The Lord Made (2004, dir. Joseph Sargent)
This one was on my watchlist because I saw YouTube clips a while ago of Alan Rickman doing a sexy US Southern accent, and I didn’t anticipate it to be so good — Mos Def really serves in this role, he just delivers an astoundingly impactful performance, and it’s glorious.
It’s a made-for-TV production so it’s not the prettiest in the world, it’s a little bit understated, but in terms of writing and performance it’s a stand-out piece of film: Mos Def plays Vivien Thomas, who was an absolute pioneer in the field of cardiac surgery in the early-to-mid 20th century, and Rickman is the cardiac surgeon, Doctor Alfred Blalock, who he worked alongside, and who suuucked, but was basically too self-obsessed and busy sucking in other ways to spend too much time being actively racist.
Like I said, it’s an under-stated film — I think it’s literally just on YouTube — but it has some excellent performances, and I think it does a great job of inhabiting Thomas’ deep emotions and the incredible cruelties of his position as a Black man in this period without giving into the temptation a lot of movies do of focusing on how his white friends and counterparts must feel about it.
Boys From County Hell (2020, dir. Chris Baugh)
This is fun and stupid and delightful: it’s a comedy-horror vampire flick with some different-than-the-usual vampire lore, and it’s just really Irish in a way that feels very comfortable to me.
I will say that obviously the subtitles really really struggled with the Hiberno-English slang and dialect, especially the stuff that’s straight from the Irish, so do take that with a grain of salt if you’re not already familiar with Irish English and how it sounds, especially because a lot of the time these lads are shouting or talking very vast, because they’re… under pressure.
Louisa Harland, who plays Orla in Derry Girls, gives an especially stand-out performance in this film, it was great seeing her get to play something with more drama to it.
Some of my other favourite releases of 2025 were the new Guillermo del Toro Frankenstein, which fuuuucked and was so sexy; Weapons, which is a delightfully fucked-up horror; Sinners, which has one of my favourite new scenes of music and choreography of all time; Wake Up Dead Man, which we saw in the cinema at the Bradford premiere; and of course, the homosexual and kinky extravaganza that was Pillion.
What a great year.
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