Cahiers du Cinéma Top 10 Films 2025: What This List Reveals About Cinema’s Future

The French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma has released its annual Top 10 films list for 2025, and once again, the selections reveal as much about cinema’s current state as they do about the magazine’s enduring influence on film criticism. This year’s list—topped by Albert Serra’s controversial bullfighting documentary Tardes de soledad—signals a continued resistance to mainstream aesthetics and a deepening commitment to cinema as existential inquiry rather than entertainment.

But what does this list actually tell us? Beyond the usual art-house suspects and auteur worship, there’s a pattern here worth examining: a cinema increasingly concerned with ritual, mortality, and the spaces where human experience resists commodification.

The only thing we can say is the number one “Tardes de Soledad” receives a well-deserved recognition, even the critics received because filming a documentary so aesthetic about bullfighting, we believe that this movie has to be considered and exercise of good cinema, and mastery on filming.

The List: Who Made the Cut

1. Tardes de soledad (Afternoons of Solitude) – Albert Serra
2. Une bataille après l’autre (One Battle After Another) – Paul Thomas Anderson
3. Oui (Yes) – Nadav Lapid
4. L’Agent secret (The Secret Agent) – Kleber Mendonça Filho
5. Le Rire et le Couteau (The Laugh and the Knife) – Pedro Pinho
6. L’Aventura (The Adventure) – Sophie Letourneur
7. Sept promenades avec Mark Brown (Seven Walks with Mark Brown) – Pierre Creton and Vincent Barré
8. Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) – Richard Linklater
9. Laurent dans le vent (Laurent in the Wind) – Anton Balekdjian, Léo Couture, and Mattéo Eustachon
10. Miroirs No. 3 (Mirrors No. 3) – Christian Petzold

Albert Serra’s Tardes de soledad: Controversy as Cinema

Placing Tardes de soledad at number one is Cahiers‘ most provocative choice in years. Serra’s documentary follows Peruvian bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey through multiple corridas, shot almost entirely in tight, suffocating close-ups that transform ritual into visceral experience. The film won the Golden Shell at SSIFF, but it also ignited fierce debate about what cinema should—and shouldn’t—document.

The controversy isn’t accidental. Serra, the Catalan filmmaker behind Pacifiction and Liberté, has built a career on discomfort. Tardes de soledad offers no commentary, no interviews, no narrative scaffolding. It simply watches. The bullfighter prepares. The bull dies. Again. And again. The repetition isn’t tedious—it’s the point.

What Cahiers recognizes in Serra’s work is cinema stripped to its essence: duration, framing, and the uncomfortable truth that watching is complicity. By refusing to editorialize, Serra forces viewers to confront their own relationship to spectacle, violence, and tradition. The film doesn’t argue for or against bullfighting—it simply insists you witness it fully, without the moral guardrails of narration or explanation.

This is filmmaking as philosophical inquiry. Serra asks: What does it mean to look? What happens when we remove distance? Can cinema capture the spiritual weight of mortality?

For a magazine that launched the careers of Godard and Truffaut by arguing cinema could be art, philosophy, and politics simultaneously, Tardes de soledad represents everything Cahiers has always championed: cinema that refuses to be entertainment, that demands intellectual engagement, that treats the viewer as equal rather than consumer.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s Return: One Battle After Another.

Anderson’s second-place finish is less surprising than the film’s title suggests. Une bataille après l’autre (working title) marks the director’s return to the sprawling, multi-character narratives of Magnolia and Boogie Nights, but with the formal precision he’s developed through Phantom Thread and Licorice Pizza.

What Cahiers has always appreciated about Anderson—dating back to their championing of There Will Be Blood—is his ability to make American cinema feel European. His films operate with novelistic depth, rejecting the three-act structure Hollywood mandates in favor of accumulation, digression, and emotional architecture that doesn’t resolve cleanly.

The “battle after battle” suggested by the title hints at Anderson’s ongoing preoccupation: how Americans construct meaning in the absence of shared mythology. Whether it’s oil barons, cult leaders, fashion designers, or teenagers navigating the San Fernando Valley, Anderson’s characters are always building belief systems from scratch, fighting to impose order on chaos that won’t cooperate.

For Cahiers, this makes Anderson one of the few American filmmakers working at the level of classical European cinema—not through imitation, but through shared conviction that film can excavate the human condition with the complexity literature once claimed as its exclusive domain.

Nadav Lapid’s Oui: Provocation as Form

Nadav Lapid, the Israeli filmmaker behind Synonyms and Ahed’s Knee, continues his exploration of identity, nationalism, and the impossibility of certainty with Oui. The title’s simplicity—French for “yes”—belies the film’s confrontational energy.

Lapid’s work divides audiences precisely because it refuses cohesion. His films are aggressive, self-contradicting, aesthetically unstable. Characters argue with themselves. Scenes collapse into other scenes. The camera movement feels reactive, almost panicked. This isn’t sloppy filmmaking—it’s cinema attempting to capture consciousness under duress.

Cahiers has historically celebrated filmmakers who reject formal convention not as aesthetic rebellion but as philosophical necessity. Lapid belongs to this tradition: his films argue that uncertainty, contradiction, and instability aren’t failures of clarity but accurate representations of how identity actually works in contested political space.

Placing Oui at number three suggests Cahiers sees Lapid as essential to understanding contemporary cinema’s relationship to geopolitics. His films don’t offer solutions or moral clarity—they recreate the psychic state of living in constant crisis. That’s not escapism. That’s documentary.

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Genre Subversion

The inclusion of Mendonça Filho’s L’Agent secret at number four continues Cahiers‘ long investment in Brazilian cinema as counterweight to Hollywood’s cultural dominance. The director of Aquarius and Bacurau has mastered the art of genre subversion—taking familiar forms (thrillers, westerns, horror) and revealing the political architecture hidden inside.

L’Agent secret reportedly follows a government operative whose mission collapses into personal crisis, blurring surveillance, paranoia, and complicity. Mendonça Filho’s genius lies in making genre feel urgent again—not through homage or irony, but by recognizing that genre conventions encode power relations. Who watches whom? Who moves freely? Who’s disposable?

For Cahiers, this represents cinema as political critique without propaganda—films that make ideology visible through form rather than dialogue.

The Rest of the List: Patterns and Priorities

The remaining films—Pinho’s Le Rire et le Couteau, Letourneur’s L’Aventura, the Creton/Barré collaboration Sept promenades avec Mark Brown, Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, the collective Laurent dans le vent, and Petzold’s Miroirs No. 3—share common preoccupations:

Duration over event. These aren’t plot-driven films. They’re explorations of time, routine, and the spaces between dramatic moments.

Collaboration over auteurism (selectively). The inclusion of multi-director works (Sept promenades, Laurent dans le vent) suggests Cahiers is rethinking auteur theory for collaborative practice.

Regional specificity. Many films root themselves in particular geographies—not as backdrop, but as co-author. Place shapes possibility.

Anti-spectacle. Nothing here is designed for virality, streaming platform algorithms, or franchise potential. These films resist the metrics that dominate contemporary film economics.

What Cahiers Is Really Saying

This list isn’t neutral. It’s argument. Cahiers du Cinéma, founded in 1951 by André Bazin and others, has always functioned as manifesto disguised as criticism. The annual Top 10 isn’t just taste—it’s positioning.

By leading with Serra’s bullfighting documentary, Cahiers makes a statement about cinema’s responsibility in 2025. In a year dominated by AI-generated content, algorithmic recommendations, and cultural homogenization, Cahiers champions films that can’t be streamlined, optimized, or made frictionless.

These are difficult films. They require attention, patience, and intellectual engagement. They don’t provide easy answers or moral clarity. They assume viewers capable of complexity.

This is cinema as resistance—not to narrative or entertainment per se, but to the flattening of human experience into consumable content. It’s a rejection of film as product and a reassertion of film as art, philosophy, and witness.

The Linklater Inclusion: A Telling Exception

Richard Linklater’s presence at number eight is notable precisely because he’s American, commercially successful, and associated with accessible filmmaking. Nouvelle Vague‘s inclusion suggests Cahiers sees in Linklater something the American critical establishment often misses: a filmmaker genuinely interested in time, not just storytelling.

From Boyhood to the Before trilogy to Waking Life, Linklater has spent decades exploring duration, conversation, and the accumulation of small moments into meaning. This aligns perfectly with Cahiers‘ longstanding interest in filmmakers who treat cinema as temporal art first, narrative art second.

Including Linklater alongside Serra and Lapid positions him as bridge between European art cinema and American independent film—a reminder that geographic boundaries matter less than philosophical commitment.

What’s Missing: The Absences

As revealing as the inclusions are the omissions. No Marvel. No streaming platform blockbusters. No obvious Oscar contenders. This isn’t snobbery—it’s clarity about what Cahiers believes cinema is.

The magazine has never pretended to cover “all of cinema.” It covers cinema it believes advances the medium—films that pose questions previous films didn’t, that discover new formal possibilities, that refuse inherited assumptions about what film can do.

This means Cahiers lists always feel incomplete to readers expecting comprehensive coverage. But comprehensiveness was never the goal. Provocation was.

The Future Cahiers Envisions

If this Top 10 reveals anything about cinema’s direction, it’s a commitment to cinema as durational, philosophical, and geographically specific—cinema that exists outside algorithmic recommendation and audience metrics.

This is cinema as analog resistance in a digital age. Films that require theatrical exhibition, that lose meaning on laptop screens, that can’t be reduced to clips or summaries.

Cahiers is making a bet: that cinema’s future belongs to filmmakers who reject optimization, who embrace difficulty, who trust audiences with complexity. Whether that bet pays off depends on whether enough viewers, programmers, and funding bodies share the conviction that cinema is worth preserving as art form, not just content delivery system.

Why This List Matters Beyond Criticism

Cahiers du Cinéma‘s annual lists don’t just reflect taste—they shape discourse. When Cahiers champions a filmmaker, festivals pay attention. Programmers reconsider. Funding bodies take notice. The magazine’s influence, though diminished from its 1960s peak, remains substantial in determining which films enter the canon and which disappear.

This Top 10 will influence what gets restored, studied, and remembered. Decades from now, film historians will cite this list as evidence of 2025’s critical priorities. That’s power.

It’s also responsibility. By centering Serra’s bullfighting documentary, Cahiers isn’t just saying “this is the best film.” They’re saying “this is the conversation cinema should be having.” They’re arguing against consensus, against comfort, against the easy answers streaming algorithms provide.

The Value of Difficulty

What unites these ten films is difficulty. Not difficulty for its own sake, but difficulty as philosophical stance. These films assume viewers capable of sustained attention, moral ambiguity, and emotional complexity.

In 2025—a year marked by AI content, algorithmic curation, and cultural homogenization—Cahiers du Cinéma‘s Top 10 reads as manifesto: cinema is not content. Cinema is art. And art’s job isn’t comfort or consensus. It’s inquiry.

Whether you agree with these choices or find them elitist, pretentious, or out of touch, the list succeeds in its real goal: forcing conversation about what cinema is, what it should be, and who it’s for.

That’s not entertainment. That’s the work.