Lee Marshall joined Screen in 1996 as an Italy-based film critic. He also writes on travel, design and culture for a range of UK, US and Italian publications.
Best film
1. Sirât
Dir. Oliver Laxe
Once in a while you come across a film that performs a factory reset, renewing one’s faith in the energy of the medium and its power as a collective experience. This, for me, was Sirât, a 21st-century spin on The Searchers in which a small human story gradually becomes a cosmic drama underscored by seat-shaking waves of trance music. Is it, in the end, an upside-down, north-south migration allegory? Who knows — everyone seems to have their own take on the film. It’s difficult to hook an audience while refusing to give answers, but Sirât pulls it off.
2. Blue Moon
Dir: Richard Linklater
There is no stopping Linklater. Of the two films he premiered in 2025 (the other being Nouvelle Vague), it was this bittersweet biopic of lyricist Lorenz Hart that really impressed. Ethan Hawke delivers what’s very nearly a dramatic monologue in a single location — and it’s riveting. Legendary Broadway drinking hole Sardi’s becomes a performative cocoon for the waspish wordsmith as he dallies with Margaret Qualley’s society belle and, in some of the film’s most poignant moments, tries to hide his hurt from Andrew Scott’s Richard Rodgers, the songwriting partner who jettisoned Hart for the more dependable Oscar Hammerstein.
3. Bugonia
Dir. Yorgos Lanthimos
Ari Aster tried in the disappointing Eddington, but it was Lanthimos who nailed the craziness of today’s post-truth rabbit holes in this wild satirical ride. There is something so precise and acidic in the way Lanthimos frames his scenes, ably abetted here by the great cinematographer Robbie Ryan. Stars Emma Stone and Jesse Plemmons lift each other’s game.
4. Sorry, Baby
Dir. Eva Victor
Surely the year’s most impressive debut, Victor’s funny-heartbreaking study of a young woman numbed by trauma, depression and self-doubt combined a delicacy of touch with a real command of atmosphere. Imagine Anna Karenina doing stand-up, and you come close.
5. Resurrection
Dir. Bi Gan
This year’s standout WTF? movie. Bi’s unclassifiable epic drags the history of a cinema through a Chinese hall of mirrors to create a work that frustrates, dazzles and fascinates in equal measure. It’s a film I want to return to as soon as I get the chance.
6. One Battle After Another
Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson
7. No Other Choice
Dir. Park Chan-wook
8. Father Mother Sister Brother
Dir. Jim Jarmusch
9. It Was Just An Accident
Dir. Jafar Panahi
10. A Useful Ghost
Dir. Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke
Best documentary
1. My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air In Moscow
Dir. Julia Loktev
The two best documentaries I saw this year both demonstrated the value of being in the right place at the right time, keeping the camera running and letting a story simply evolve. Loktev presents an embattled group of young, mostly female independent journalists in Putin’s Russia, channelling their passion, wry humour and defiance in the face of Orwellian suppression of press freedom. Then she nudges us into thriller territory. We’re hooked, for more than five hours.
2. The Prince Of Nanawa
Dir. Clarisa Navas
This year’s other remarkable long-form documentary, which lifted the grand prix at Visions du Reel, was a non-fiction Boyhood about a precocious kid from a poor Paraguayan family. It’s a work that explores with sensitivity the social and economic pressures that curdle childhood dreams, and the complex ethics of embedded documentary filmmaking.
3. Below The Clouds
Dir. Gianfranco Rosi
Rosi’s latest cinematic fresco is a nuanced, melancholic portrait of Naples, a city with an ancient soul where history’s moments of hope and despair seem stuck on an endless loop. Shot in sombre black and white, it has a chiaroscuro grandeur that, with the help of Daniel Blumberg’s austere soundtrack, makes the argument for beauty amid the squalor.
Performance of the year
Ethan Hawke in Blue Moon
Dir. Richard Linklater
Plenty have stuck in my mind this year. Quite a few have been double acts: the tenderness that Eva Victor and Naomi Ackie bring toSorry, Baby, or that of the bereaved siblings played with warmth by Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat in the final chapter of Father Mother Sister Brother. But the standout turn for me this year was Hawke’s account of Lorenz Hart as a complex man — vain, catty, generous, brittle, vulnerable — clinging to his gilded cage of tuxedos, whisky and witty rhymes as to a life-raft.
