The sacrifice – F1

Disclosure: I covered auto racing for years and still follow Formula One skeptically. I definitely went into F1: The Movie knowing what I was in for, an answer to the hypothetical: what if the bougiest sport on God’s green earth was turned into a western? But you can’t help going along for the ride once Brad Pitt starts filling the frame with his blue-eyed winks, wry smiles and Butch Cassidy swagger. I should’ve been more indignant about this martinet sport making a literal hero out of the biggest rogue on the grid. But I left disbelief in parc fermé as Pitt’s Sonny Hayes bumped and nicked his way to the season finale at Abu Dhabi to much consternation before his wingman (Damson Idris) takes up the ticky tactics at Yas Marina circuit and winds up sacrificing himself and producer Lewis Hamilton (not again!) to help Sonny win his first race and thwart a hostile takeover of their fragile team. And when the lights went up at my desolate midday screening, it was just me still on the edge of my seat and my disbelief still firmly off track. Andrew Lawrence

The impregnation – Marty Supreme

Where to start? Jos Safdie’s ping-pong epic is fitted out with one brilliantly imagined sequence after another, any of which could qualify as the year’s best. The death camp honey-licking? The orange-ball sales pitch? The Chalamet ass-whipping? The ping-pong club as mob lounge? You’re spoiling us, Mr Safdie. But I think on balance the most eye-popping bit of all is, of all things, its animated opening credits sequence, which follows, shall we say, a spermatozoa race to the ovum, a pseudo-real version of what Woody Allen got up to in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex. This takes its cue from what’s just happened in the film’s opening scene, and ties in (without giving too much away) to its ending. It’s been a long time since I felt my jaw actually drop slightly in a cinema; if nothing else, it tips you off that something ... unusual ... is on its way. Andrew Pulver

The loft – The Mastermind

Plenty of us saw something of the silent comic in Josh O’Connor when he tramped around in La Chimera, and this year, in Wake Up Dead Man he was able to leap triumphantly into physical comedy. But as hapless heistman JB in Kelly Reichardt’s beautiful The Mastermind he is a very appealingly low-key kind of clown. JB is an everyman reaching for an easy win, a little chap hindered by his own ineptitude, and beset by forces beyond his control. In particular, I loved the sequence in which he labours up a rickety ladder in a dark pigsty to stash his pilfered paintings in a hay loft. The camera lingers on the wobbling ladder, the snuffling hog always in sight while JB huffs and puffs. You just know that ladder is going to fall, which tells us so much about the likely success of his entire plan. Sooner or later, slapstick Sisyphus is going to end up flat on his back in the pigshit. Pamela Hutchinson

The dance – Sinners

I’m often indifferent to music performances in a movie; they rarely cast the same spell that live music does. Midway through Ryan Coogler’s 1930s vampire thriller Sinners, though, Sammie (Miles Caton) sings an original song, I Lied to You, at his cousins’ juke joint opening night, and what at first seems like a standard party interlude becomes a seductive and sublime centerpiece moment. With cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s Imax aspect ratio choice and Caton’s deep, buttery voice, the room begins to bend around Sammie, his talents suspending the laws of physics. In what feels like one sumptuous, swirling shot, then appears a futuristic Bootsy-Collins-type figurer, a Zaouli dancer, a DJ, Memphis jookin dancers, a ballerina – Black ancestors and descendants of the partygoers appearing under one roof, summoned by Sammie’s song. “This music is ours,” legendary harmonica player Delta Slim tells Sammie in a flashback – “we brought this with us from home.” It’s a risk taken by Coogler that pays off handsomely as we’re given an inebriating taste of transcendence. Watching it for the first time in a crowded theater, I felt every person lock in in a way that now seems meta: relishing in art and feeling its rapture and defiance. Like Slim said: “It’s sacred and big.” Tammy Tarng

The fight – Splitsville

In late summer of this year, I briefly took a break from bemoaning the death of the big-screen comedy. That break lasted around 104 minutes as I found myself actually audibly laughing in a cinema at the self-billed “unromantic comedy” Splitsville. It was a film that managed to be both absurdly silly and neatly relatable, a chaotic but thoughtful yet deranged look at straight couples navigating the brave new world of non-monogamy. There were many great small gags but it was the ridiculously extended fight between the central friends turned rivals, played by the film’s writers Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin, that has truly stuck for me. Post-Bridget Jones it became an easy joke to poke fun at polite middle-class men engaging in fisticuffs without knowing what to do and when this one starts with a slap, one might expect the same, now very tired routine. But instead we see two men who do know what they’re doing, albeit messily, proceed to destroy their friendship and the beautiful house around them, a spectacularly violent, and seriously well-directed, set piece. It serves as an early, unhinged reminder that behind the sleekly designed, smugly progressive sheen of certain “modern” couples lies pettiness, rage and a desire to drown your best friend in a bathtub full of fish. Benjamin Lee

The play – Hamnet

For weeks, I have been imploring those close to me to see Hamnet, Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, which proves that sometimes, a great ending can save an OK movie. Zhao’s film on Shakespeare’s domestic life pre-Hamlet struggles to balance sylvan fairytale with brutal, beautiful realism – I was put off by the remote romance between William (Paul Mescal) and Agnes (Jessie Buckley), then riveted by the unsparing horror of their child’s final hours, then tepid on the biopic-esque treatments of grief. But the ending! The stellar, knockout, bravura ending, in which – light spoilers ahead – Agnes attends the inaugural performance of Hamlet at the Globe, saves the whole thing, and accomplishes the stunning feat of briefly collapsing time. Watching the title character face death, Agnes reaches for her late son; the audience, moved by the performance, reaches for the departing prince; and we, watching a new imagining of a 425-year-old play, reach toward the same question that has dogged all humans, always: how do you endure, when to live means to lose the ones we love? I left in tears, reminded again that such reaching – for others, for the lost, for connection, for a moment of transcendence through great art – is really all we have. Adrian Horton

The chase – One Battle After Another

Right in the middle of Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest opus, after years living an incognito, marijuana-saturated life far away from anything, the heat descends on former revolutionary Pat Calhoun in the form of a militarized team reminiscent of Ice stormtroopers, and it’s time for him to run like hell. Crawling through a homemade spider hole, Pat emerges yards away from his house, eventually grabs a burner phone, gets help from his teenage daughter’s ready-for-anything martial arts instructor (played charmingly by Benicio del Toro), attempts multiple times to call up his former revolutionary outlaws (but gets rebuffed because he can’t remember the password), wanders through an immigration raid (orchestrated to give cover to the operation to abduct Pat), leaps across rooftops, and trips over his own two feet at least half a dozen times. On one level this chase is extraordinary film-making, choreographed like a ballet and an exercise in pathos, high-wire thrills and absurd comedy all rolled into one, but on another level it’s absolutely prescient in a way that only movies can be, documenting so much of what it feels like to live in a would-be authoritarian America in 2025. It’s also a showcase for late-stage Leonardo DiCaprio and the absolutely thick chemistry that he has with Del Toro. In its seeming endlessness, its paranoid capacity to bring together things that shouldn’t be combined but are, its slapstick energy, and its finger-on-the-pulse realness, this segment of One Battle After Another seems destined to be remembered. It was the best part of one of the best movies of the year, and something I’m going to be thinking about for a long time to come. Veronica Esposito

The subway – Highest 2 Lowest

The first half or so of Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest takes place mostly in the rarified world of David King, a wealthy, respected, gregarious but stubborn music mogul played by Denzel Washington. He lives in a Dumbo penthouse with his family, travels by private car, and has a skyscraping office in Manhattan. Lee captures all of this with clear, crisp digital cinematography that borders on antiseptic, especially with the static, sometimes oddly placed camera angles. But when a friend of the family is accidentally kidnapped in place of David’s son and he reluctantly agrees to pay the ransom, the film’s visual strategy shifts. As David boards a subway in Brooklyn to drop the money somewhere in the Bronx, Lee switches to 16mm celluloid, capturing the less controlled, more vibrant energy of a crowded 6 train making its way through multiple boroughs – on a Yankees game day coinciding with the Puerto Rican Day parade, no less. David’s cloistered version of New York falls away. It’s a good long while before any traditional thriller action kicks in, yet in this transition, the movie vibrates, subway-like, with excitement, like it’s about to break into song. Forty years into his career, Lee keeps finding new ways to show his love for the city, and the movies. Jesse Hassenger

The van push – It Was Just an Accident

The Iranian film-maker Jafar Panahi made It Was Just an Accident in secret, his usual MO to resist censorship from an Iranian regime that recently sentenced him (in absentia) to yet another year in prison. That clandestine approach made way for one of the movie’s most surprising (and in part, accidentally) subversive moments, during an overhead shot where the film-making team is recording and directing from a rooftop. In Panahi’s soul-searching tragicomic allegory about how Iran’s people will find a way forward from oppression and trauma, the occupants in a stalled white van, a bride in a full white gown among them, hop out into Tehran’s traffic to push the vehicle along. They’re in a panic because these former political prisoners have got an abducted man, who they believe to be their torturer, knocked out and tied down in the back. The moment arrives as a joyous bit of comic relief from the urgency of the narrative. But it grows even more transcendent when passersby, at least one who isn’t an actor according to the film’s cinematographer, come along to help the stranded passengers. It’s one of the many fissures between fiction and reality in It Was Just an Accident, a potent and unassuming image of hope and community, where the people of Iran have a hand in the film’s political resistance, whether they know it or not. Radheyan Simonpillai

The opening – On Becoming a Guinea Fowl

Perhaps the most arrestingly mysterious establishing scene of the year was in Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, a drama of memory and reconciliation set in present-day Zambia. The film opens on Susan Chardy’s city-dwelling Shula, driving alone at night on a dark rural road. She is clad in a glittery mask as if having just come from a masquerade ball, a jaunty classic tune (Come on Home by the Lijadu Sisters) brightly blaring on the radio. Her pleasant, if strange, journey is then suddenly darkened by the discovery of a body lying on the road. What follows in Nyoni’s transfixing film is grim and haunting and fitfully funny. That mood is cast perfectly right from the get-go, as dreamy surreality runs into cold, hard fact. Richard Lawson

The skeeting – Predators

At first, David Osit’s documentary reflects on the unsavory legacy of To Catch a Predator, the popular mid-2000s Dateline NBC show in which would-be pedophiles were lured to a home packed with hidden cameras and exposed for trying to hook up with underage kids. But the show is merely a jumping-off point for a more prismatic look at a culture of abuse and exploitation, and it leads to a particularly mesmerizing segment on the YouTube copycats who have brought the same TV formula into the digital era. In one sequence, Osit’s camera is present for a chaotic sting operation in a seedy motel where Skeet Hansen, a popular host, emerges from a closet to snare a man who thinks he’s meeting a 14-year-old girl. The man is so profoundly distraught over his choices that it deflates Hansen’s “gotcha” moment. Yet Hansen has a brand to protect, which leads to the most comically sober utterance of his catchphrase imaginable: “You’ve just been Skeeted.” Scott Tobias