As we enter the final month of the year, we’ll be sharing an extensive look at the best in cinema of 2025 (bookmark here), but first, let’s look at the highlights when it comes to December’s new releases. We should also note a number of films will have qualifying runs this month, but receive proper releases come 2026. Also, Quentin Tarantino’s long-awaited release of Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, beginning December 5, doesn’t qualify for the below list of new releases, but I’m greatly looking forward to seeing the 70mm print.

12. The Plague (Charlie Polinger; Dec. 24)

Train Dreams earned much-deserved acclaim, but it’s not the only Joel Edgerton film releasing this season. He also has a strong supporting turn in Charlie Polinger’s Cannes breakout The Plague, an intense bullying drama set at a water polo camp. While Polinger brings a strong sense of style in his directorial debut, one wishes the script was a bit more captivating, but nonetheless, it’s a strong calling card.

11. WTO/99 (Ian Bell; Dec. 5)

Premiering at the renowned True/False Festival and nominated for a Critics Choice Documentary Award, Ian Bell’s acclaimed archival documentary WTO/99 follows the clash between the then-emerging World Trade Organization (WTO) and the more than 40,000 people who took to the streets of Seattle in 1999 to protest the WTO’s impacts on the environment, human rights, and labor. In this impressive feat of editing, constructed by Bell and co-editor Alex Megaro, there’s a sense of immediacy to every cut, leading up to the denouement showing how we’re still very much living in the aftermath of what was being protested a quarter-century ago.

10. Ella McCay (James L. Brooks; Dec. 12)

In the fifteen interminably long years since James L. Brooks’ last directorial feature, the kind of adult-focused, warm dramas with recognizably empathetic characters that defined his career have sadly fallen out of fashion. After staying busy helping emerging filmmakers like Kelly Fremon Craig realize their visions with the stellar The Edge of Seventeen and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, the 85-year-old director makes his overdue return this month. Ella McCay, a political comedy-drama set for a December release, stars Emma Mackey, Woody Harrelson, Kumail Nanjiani, Spike Fearn, Ayo Edebiri, Jack Lowden, Rebecca Hall, Julie Kavner, Becky Ann Baker, Joey Brooks, Albert Brooks, and Jamie Lee Curtis.

9. The Testament of Anne Lee (Mona Fastvold; Dec. 25)

Following up last year’s acclaimed drama The Brutalist, Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet returned this year with The Testament of Ann Lee, this time with the former directing and the latter co-writing. Led by Amanda Seyfried in a career-defining performance, Ann Lee has all the bombast and style of last year’s outing to make it a recommendation, even if the character dynamics, shaded more mythic here, are thinly drawn. Rory O’Connor said in his Venice review, “In The Testament of Ann Lee, Amanda Seyfried gives the finest performance of her career. The actress shakes, rattles, and moans through a selection of 18th-century hymns that have been updated by Daniel Blumberg, the composer who shouted out London’s Cafe Oto (another church of peculiar noises) after winning an unlikely and richly deserved Oscar for The Brutalist earlier this year. Directed by Mona Fastvold and co-written by her partner Brady Corbet, Testament feels so symbiotic to their previous movie that it’s not hard to picture Seyfried’s Lee––the real-life founder of the Shaker movement and a woman who believed herself to be the second coming––and Adrien Brody’s László Tóth existing in the same grainy, textured, 70mm frame (if a century or so apart).”

8. No Other Choice (Park Chan-wook; Dec. 25)

While it may seem blasphemous to suggest around certain cinephile circles, Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice is another exercise in wildly compelling style that leaves one ultimately feeling a bit detached. Yet it’s certainly worth seeing on the big screen. Christopher Schobert said in his review, “There’s no telling whether Park Chan-wook is a fan of the Sex Pistols. But during his latest film, No Other Choice, I found myself pondering the line John Lydon memorably uttered during the band’s disastrous final performance in 1978: ‘Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?’ No Other Choice is 139 minutes centered on such a feeling––what it means to be cheated by employers, competitors, and artificial intelligence. It is also about what it takes to fight back––really fight back.”

7. Is This Thing On? (Bradley Cooper; Dec. 19)

After a pair of rather ambitious, music-related undertakings for his first two features, consider my surprise when Bradley Cooper delivered his best film yet with the rather quaint, deeply moving Is This Thing On? Drawing inspiration from the real life of British comedian John Bishop while telling the story of a stand-up (Will Arnett) as he deals with a mutual divorce from his wife (Laura Dern), Cooper achieves a sense of intimacy that sneaks up on the viewer, delivering the kind of mid-budget adult dramedy barren and much welcome in today’s Hollywood output. Luke Hicks said in his review, “Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On? opens with both a simple and incredibly complex question: is this thing over? Alex and Tess Novak (Will Arnett and Laura Dern) are at their wits’ end after decades of marriage. They love their ruffian boys, but that doesn’t make up for the fact that they hate their lives together. So the answer is easy: yes, it’s over. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy.”

6. Cover-Up (Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus; Dec. 19 in theaters and Dec. 26 on Netflix)

Returning with another astounding documentary after All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Laura Poitras has teamed with Mark Obenhaus to direct Cover-Up, a portrait of investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. Capturing decades of misdeeds and atrocities enacted by the U.S. military and intelligence, it also shows the necessity of independent journalism otherwise encumbered by capitalistic ties. Savina Petkova said in her review, “Cover-Up may as well be the most important American documentary of the year. Poitras and Obenhaus have made a documentary film that’s equally a film-document: informative, pedagogical even, in the ways it lets a subject tell the stories he has already told, well knowing that they shape an alternative political history of America, past and present.”

5. Reflection in a Dead Diamond (Bruno Forzani, Hélène Cattet; Dec. 5 on Shudder)

If one wished the Bond series oozed buckets more style, look no further than Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s wild new spy thriller Reflection in a Dead Diamond. Leonardo Goi said in his review, “Anyone familiar with Cattet and Forzani’s oeuvre will know the kind of thrills their films unfailingly elicit. For newcomers, the encounter might amount––I say this as the highest of compliments––to an assault to the senses. Like its predecessors, Diamond unfurls as a sort of feverish mirage. It’s a film where the camera seldom stays still, shots rarely last more than five seconds, and the frame keeps splintering with the same orgasmic joy that characters experience whenever stabbing or slashing through human flesh (which happens a lot). Manuel Dacosse, who’s shot all the couple’s previous features, works with a palette that’s drenched in lurid crimsons and blues, toggling between extreme close-ups of eyes and mouths redolent of Spaghetti Westerns and Argento-styled shots of blades and stilettos tearing through skin. This is a film where the camera need only tilt skyward and back to earth for the story to shift from present to past, one fiction to the next. There are images culled from nightmares––a giant millipede crawling over a corpse––and others that are almost disarming in their inventiveness, such as an evening dress worn by one of John D’s female associates made entirely of sequins the size of a two-euro coin that can dart in all directions like scintillating daggers, killing everyone in their wake.”

4. Avatar: Fire and Ash (James Cameron; Dec. 19)

While the review embargo is still in effect, I was able to share some brief thoughts on Avatar: Fire and Ash. Rest assured, those who were enthralled by the wonders of The Way of Water will not be disappointed.

3. Father Mother Sister Brother (Jim Jarmusch; Dec. 24)

Picking up a well-deserved Golden Lion, Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother is one of the loveliest, most delicately-woven films of the year. Returning to the episodic structure of Night on Earth and Coffee and Cigarettes, the film traces three familial stories starring Cate Blanchett, Vicky Krieps, Adam Driver, Tom Waits, Mayim Bialik, Charlotte Rampling, Indya Moore, and Luka Sabbat. Rory O’Connor said in his review, “The director is, of course, no stranger to the anthology format: Mystery Train, Night on Earth, and Coffee and Cigarettes are some of the best examples of the unloved format. If the first two segments here were filmed in black-and-white, they could have slipped into Coffee without too much fuss. Nobody smokes in them, naturally, but the humor is relatively similar and the drinks, while tea, are at least served in cups. Of the three vignettes, I’m fondest of the middle story in which Krieps plays Lilith, the free-spirited sister of Blanchett’s buttoned-up Timothea, a public servant who has just landed a job at the heritage society. Seeing the two actresses spar while Rampling inquisitively watches on is probably worth the entry.”

2. Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie; Dec. 19)

One of the most electric viewing experiences of the year was seeing Josh Safdie unveil his long-awaited return to directing, Marty Supreme, as the secret screening of the 63rd New York Film Festival. Featuring Timothée Chalamet’s Marty Mauser going through the wringer to achieve his ping-pong dreams, it’s a dark-yet-emotional character study of flawed morality and seeking greatness at a cost. Even while the drama hits many of the same grooves that the director has found success with in the past, Safdie serves quite an uncompromising showcase for his lead actor, who delivers one of the best performances of the year. Read Vikram Murthi’s full review here.

1. Resurrection (Bi Gan; Dec. 12)

There is no film you’ll see this year quite like Bi Gan’s Resurrection, which finds the director following Kaili Blues and Long Day’s Journey Into Night with a dizzyingly ambitious anthology starring Jackson Yee and Shu Qi. As Zhuo-Ning Su said in our Cannes review, “With this collage-like format, Bi Gan is obviously breaking from the narrative structure of both Kaili Blues and Long Day’s Journey Into Night. One could argue the impact of a continuous story is diffused by this change, but what he attempts to do here goes beyond building a single dreamscape; he’s also touching on the philosophical, existential subtext of dreams and treating the last 100 years of cinema as their chronicle. Through the film’s five parts (including prologue and epilogue), Bi showcases five distinct cinematic styles that confirm the silver screen has always been a portal for us to escape reality; and that, as creators and consumers of cinema, we are helping to keep the act of dreaming alive for our increasingly unimaginative species.”

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