Yes, I know I'm slow to the party, but better to be here than not.
I will admit, I haven't seen a lot of foreign films this year in order to service my ongoing project for Filipino cinema. Still, over the past 12 months, either through filmfests, theatrical releases or streaming, I've watched roughly over a hundred non-Filipino films. Yes, I've already posted this list over at various social media sites, though I'd like to say a few words about this list of the 25 films I liked a lot in 2025.
25. Mag Mag (a.k.a. Magamaga Onna, Yuriyan Retriever, 2025) - aside from being an obvious parody and homage to 90s and 2000s J-horror, Yuriyan Retriever's Mag Mag plays on ideas of the Japanese rendition of the monstrous feminine, and more broadly on unrequited 'love' in many forms. Plus points for various bizarre sequences, anus lips (yes) and a completely unhinged sequence set to a Sachiko Nishida enka song.
23. Tourist Family (Abishan Jeevinth, 2025) - first of all, no, I was not able to see Madras Matinee, SUN NXT is not available here in the Philippines. In lieu of that, I offer this Tamil film about a Sri Lankan family hiding from authorities in a quiet seaside community. It is melodramatic to a fault, but it works really well.
22. Brand New Landscape (Yuiga Danzuka, 2025) - after watching this at times impenetrable sophomore effort by Yuiga Danzuka, I began to consider the idea of a 'polysemy of spaces', in that the idea of place holds different meaning when loaded with different histories - an ordinary looking rest stop shokudo may mean the last place you saw your loved one alive, or the place where you are reunited with them once more. Add that to the idea that reshaping landscapes for the sake of development also removes histories as well, and it makes for a pretty interesting watch.
21. Palestine 36 (Annemarie Jacir, 2025) - the official Palestinian entry to the Academy Awards' Best International Film category is a sweeping historical epic that shows the many little ways a nation is colonized, a horror film where the monster is in plain sight and its actions are laid bare as it slowly takes away everything you love. It is not surprising at all why continued, unrelenting resistance is the only recourse these characters take.
20. K-Pop Demon Hunters (Maggie Kang, 2025) - This one is my comfort pick for this year, a fun, entertaining romp about accepting one's self. It is no doubt the bane (or pleasure!) of many a parent egged by their kid to play this for the 67th time.
19. The Voice of Hind Rajab (Kaouther Ben Hania, 2025) - watching this film over at QCinema really made me think of the function of film as a way to send a message - in this film, one of the characters (directly based off of the real life responders who took that fateful phone call) tells another to go to social media to post. They are rebuffed, saying that the social media feeds are already filled with burning wreckage and dead bodies, and many of the people scrolling those feeds are so desensitized that they either will not care or the message will be lost in the noise. The Voice of Hind Rajab is a way of cutting through that noise, a way to have us directly connect with the real voice of a child that was killed by occupation forces. It is my hope, on the other hand, that the awareness this film is aiming for will transcend any accolades or awards or best film lists.
18. Mother Father Sister Brother (Jim Jarmusch, 2025) - Jim Jarmusch's latest flows breezily, its three humorous and sometimes melancholy family stories hinting at deeper histories unsaid, while we are left to watch the aftermath of those histories in real time.
17. Left Handed Girl (Tsou Shih-ching, 2025) - while it does have a little bit of influence from producer Sean Baker, Left Handed Girl is ultimately a film about women, a film about their evolving roles in contemporary Taiwanese society and the way many women sometimes internalize resistance against that evolution for the sake of tradition. The title, for me at least, hints at this evolution - when in the past using your left hand (or being a woman) is associated with something negative, now those old superstitions sound absurd.
16. The Land of Morning Calm (Park Ri-woong, 2024) - I particularly enjoy stories like that of The Land of Morning Calm, in which a small, almost innocuous lie slowly but surely snowballs into chaos and upends the relationships in a small, insular community.
15. Resurrection (Bi Gan, 2025) - I wholly admit to not getting all of Bi Gan's sprawling love letter to cinema (if that letter were the size of a novel). But there are some scenes in this film, where dreams and film are one and the same, that left me utterly spellbound.
13. Exit 8 (Genki Kawamura, 2025) - When I first heard about this I wondered, how do you make an adaptation of a very simple video game about a person escaping an endless subway corridor? Little did I know, a lot actually. I absolutely love what Genki Kawamura added to the source material. I love the usage of Bolero (a famously looping musical piece that may have been created by a guy with advancing dementia) as a musical echo to the film form. And finally, I love how the game's liminal horror and endless loop is tied to the purgatory of personal inertia.
12. Human Resource (Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit, 2025) - there are so many things in this film that remind me of birth and the creation of life, but twisted into a dark version of itself: a long car wash that serves as a birth canal, a job interview that serves to "give birth" to a new employee, the sounds of lovemaking reduced to mechanical noises. It is in many ways an anxious horror film about the bleak prospects of introducing a new life into this world.
11. Jinsei (Ryuya Suzuki, 2025) - aside from the fact that the whole film was animated by one person which is impressive in itself, Jinsei takes us from relatively humdrum beginnings to an indictment of the entertainment industry to pulpy science fiction and ultimately into a transcendent, wordless, utterly strange ending that still sticks with me to this day.
10. Teki Cometh (Daihachi Yoshida, 2024) - rarely does a film switch from terrifying paranoia into deadpan hilarity in the space of a handful of scenes and make it all work. This one does.
9. Blue Heron (Sophie Romvari, 2025) - at first Blue Heron looks like a straightforward account of a childhood indelibly marked by a family crisis, but then it transforms into something introspective, looking at itself in the mirror with the benefit of distance and time, trying to find closure where none truly exists.
8. The Way We Talk (Adam Wong, 2024) - there have been many films about the deaf community, but many of those films have been framed from an outsider's perspective looking in - this one, on the other hand, considers how an actual deaf person contends with either accepting their identity as something distinct from the rest of the hearing world, or integrating themselves into a perceived notion of normality.
7. No Other Choice (Park Chan-wook, 2025) - Park Chan-wook's films have their protagonists make decisions whose ends are technically well meaning (in this case, finding financial stability for one's family and finding pride in work that one truly loves) but are driven to extremity. Add that to a certain playfulness with form and we have a film that may not be one of his best, but even an okay film by Park is still something to watch out for.
6. Tomorrow's Min-jae (Park Young-jae, 2025) - no other film in this list left me on the edge of my seat as Tomorrow's Min-jae, where its titular protagonist, perhaps out of guilt from a wrong decision, spends most of the movie trying to do the right thing, even though issues of class and other social hierarchies have corrupted social systems so much that not doing the right thing will always give you the advantage.
5. Rental Family (Hikari, 2025) - Rental Family is an easy film to love. Yes, it is fluff compared to many other films in this list, but I appreciate the way it is a film about acting, about how, in being someone else for somebody, you tap into something beyond yourself, something almost divine.
4. A Useful Ghost (Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke, 2025) - we're living in a world where resistance is needed more than ever. A Useful Ghost demonstrates how memory is integral to resistance - that is, how the act of remembering, whether in personal, cultural, and national scales, is itself a form of resistance. (It's also very funny.)
3. The World of Love (Yoon Ga-eun, 2025) - Few films in 2025 were as quietly devastating as The World of Love, a film about reclaiming your life from unspeakable trauma. I immediately latched on to the idea that everyone in this film does what they do out of love, regardless of whether those actions were appropriate or even right.
2. Kokuho (Lee Sang-il, 2025) - the relentless pursuit of a singular craft is not uniquely a Japanese thing (see Whiplash for a prominent Western filmic example) but they have made so many films about it that it's its own subgenre. Kokuho argues that to become the absolute best at one's craft, one has to lose something in exchange - that is, to become a god, one sheds all that makes them human.
1. Bound in Heaven (Huo Xin, 2024) - rarely do I see a film that rewires my brain in such a way that it changes the way I see every film that follows. While many may view Bound in Heaven and see a well-made, moody arthouse romance thriller that's nothing special, I adore the way it articulates a very intense, possessive kind of love perfectly. It's also gorgeously shot, and a certain cable car sequence will live rent free in my head for decades to come.
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This is just the first part of our belated roundup! Next up (and finally!) a roundup of Philippine Cinema in 2025.
