Endless Cookie
There’s something almost self-fulfilling about Endless Cookie being an overlooked gem. The crudely animated Canadian documentary, directed by two half-brothers occupying separate worlds between Toronto and Shamattawa First Nation, lives in and finds its voice in the ellipses between typical narrative beats. A fart, a toilet flush, mumbling asides and the squabble of children sharing the same room as Seth Scriver (who is white) he interviews his Indigenous brother Pete are among the overlooked moments that are usually left on a cutting-room floor. But they resonate in Endless Cookie, like life refusing to be silenced in a surrealist self-portraiture that delights in colouring outside the lines. Institutional violence and neglect, intergenerational trauma and over-policing in Indigenous communities are all visible, but often kept at bay. Endless Cookie instead finds its strength and joys in the ebb and flow of community, the humour of its digressions and the dreams these characters latch on to and empower amid the harsh realities surrounding them. These are the things we often miss; the reasons to seek out Endless Cookie. Radheyan Simonpillai
The Unholy Trinity
You may not know this unless you’re a hardcore fan of a particular actor, or ride-or-die for the genre overall, but the streaming era seems to have brought out a strange Hollywood side rustle: making low-budget, old-fashioned westerns with ageing stars, primarily intended to mosey from streamer to streamer after a brief theatrical run (if any at all). You may not be surprised to learn that Nicolas Cage has made about three of these, to little attention or acclaim. Even for a non-aficionado like me, there is something appealing about checking out an under-hyped oater featuring big-name but past-peak stars, especially if you can catch those wide-open vistas and gloriously grizzled faces on a big screen. That’s exactly what I did with The Unholy Trinity, a pulpily satisfying western thriller starring Pierce Brosnan and Samuel L Jackson. Neither of them are the nominal lead; that’s a young actor by the comically on-the-nose name of Brandon Lessard, who plays a young man out to avenge the hanging death of his father. He encounters a well-intentioned sheriff (Brosnan), his dad’s less-well-intentioned former associate (Jackson), and a tough Blackfoot woman (Q’orianka Kilcher, from The New World) along the way. The story’s various twists and shootouts give the cast plenty of red meat; Jackson seems particularly excited to play his part as if relishing a part in a third, lost Quentin Tarantino western. The director, Richard Gray, has improved since making the less-accomplished Murder at Yellowstone City a few years earlier, shooting cleanly exciting action and wringing proper tension from quieter scenes, and getting it all done in about 90 minutes – perhaps assisted by editor Lee Smith, who has worked closely with Christopher Nolan, Peter Weir and Sam Mendes. The Unholy Trinity isn’t a great movie by any measure – except the measure of how satisfied I was by my afternoon at the multiplex, where it outshone any number of higher-profile offerings. Jesse Hassenger
The Wedding Banquet
Following up 2022’s raunchy Fire Island with this openhearted feature, director Andrew Ahn has quietly been making a name for himself with emotionally complex, fantastically witty, and relationally layered queer romcoms. A remake of the 1993 Ang Lee film of the same name, The Wedding Banquet follows the intersecting lives of two couples – one gay and one lesbian – cohabitating together in a Seattle home. When Korean immigrant Min’s “tiger mom”-esque grandmother – head of the family business – declares that Min must return to Korea and prove his scion mettle, the problem is resolved by having Min propose to his housemate Angela. But when Min’s grandmother arrives in the US for the wedding festivities, things quickly unravel, as Min and Angela make very unbelievable heterosexuals, and everyone has to come to terms with the realities of queer family. As with Fire Island, Ahn is working on many different levels, including class, ethnicity, gender and sexuality, deftly handling the complex inter-relationships that occur when trying to manage multiple different, intersecting conceptions of family. The Wedding Banquet is full of so many honestly won moments of tearful emotion, and it’s studded with outstanding performances by its chemistry-laden ensemble cast and plenty of in-group gags that are validating treats to its core audiences, all the while demonstrating with authenticity and sincerity the way that queer relationships continue to evolve and find spaces in this world. Maybe in a less heteronormative world it would have gotten 10 times the viewership it managed this year. Veronica Esposito
Homebound
This Martin-Scorsese-produced Bollywood drama has a Big Movie sheen but is quite approachable, beginning with two childhood best friends in a rural north Indian town eagerly anticipating the results of their police academy exams. Director Neeraj Ghaywan (who made his debut with the 2015 critically acclaimed Masaan) confidently and sweetly embeds a deep male friendship within the muddy waters of caste and religion in India; Chandan Kumar (Vishal Jethwa) is a Dalit, what used to be called the “untouchable” caste, and Mohammed Shoaib Ali (Ishaan Khatter) is Muslim. It’s not a perfect movie, but it’s powerful: without flinching, Homebound points directly at the unrelenting cancer of casteism and Islamophobia. You see how the system feigns support for marginalized communities and what new and blistering damage reverberates from such posturing – and still Chandan and Mohammed brim with joy, love their home, tease each other, sit by the water and talk in earnest about how their fidelity and efforts might propel them and their families forward. And then somewhere in the latter half of the movie, in the world’s most populated country, the pandemic hits, and you might start to cry. Tammy Tarng
Grand Theft Hamlet
AKA the PlayStation’s the thing. I was hooked as soon as I heard about Grand Theft Hamlet, a documentary and attempt by two friends to stage Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy inside the digital world of Grand Theft Auto Online with the avatars they met there, during the Covid lockdown. It’s a virtual premise, with a real-world basis. Our Player Kings are two actor friends, out of work for as long as the theatres stayed closed. Grand Theft Hamlet is often profoundly moving, digging right into the heart of our pandemic isolation and the consolations offered by poetry, friendship and the time-honoured cinematic joy of putting-on-the-show-right-here. But it is also hilarious, with bizarrely augmented but emotionally honest avatars gamely getting to grips with the iambic pentameter in unlikely locations around Los Santos. Not to mention the fact that both soliloquies and heart-to-heart chats between cast members are liable to be disrupted by a passing player seeking their own kind of catharsis with a spray of pixelated bullets. Pamela Hutchinson
A Little Prayer
It’s easy to pick the types of films they just don’t make any more – the legal thriller, the studio comedy, the A-lister romcom – but it’s often harder to pick the ones they might make but no one gets to see. A film such as A Little Prayer, a quiet yet emotionally stirring indie populated by that-one-from-that-thing actors, would have definitely made more of an impact had it premiered at Sundance in the 2000s. It was, after all, the same decade that saw the film’s writer-director Angus MacLachlan score a minor hit with his screenplay for Junebug, a similarly pitched charmer that scored an Oscar nod for then little-known Amy Adams. But this time, the film was unveiled in January 2023 and didn’t even get released until August 2025, its rollout so quiet then no one even knew it existed (it was dropped by one bigger distributor before landing at a considerably smaller one). It’s a great shame, as it’s one of the films I’ve thought about the most this year, a delicately told yet absolutely captivating family drama offering a rare lead for a wonderfully understated David Strathairn as a man questioning his worth as a father when he finds his son has been cheating on his wife, played by a revelatory Jane Levy. It’s about a specifically interesting relationship, between a parent and daughter-in-law, that we just don’t get to see. Their final scene together, an open-hearted and piercingly tender conversation on a bench, wrecked me like no other final scene this year. Benjamin Lee
Ebony & Ivory
Hand up, I have never seen The Greasy Strangler or An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn, the pair of films that made the name of lo-fi Brit surrealist Jim Hosking. But when I saw his new one was apparently a new entry in the Paul McCartney cinematic universe, I thought I would give it a whirl. I’m glad I did because I can report it’s probably the weirdest film I’ve ever seen – not Eraserhead weird, but weird in the sense you can’t believe someone had the conviction and self-belief to get this stuff on film. Here’s what happens: a blind Black musician called Stevie turns up in a rowing boat at the island cottage of a white, mulleted, thumbs-up character called Paul (who is forever promoting a range of vegetarian meals branded “By the Wife”); the title clues you in to who they might be and what they might be doing together. Needless to say, nothing gets done, apart from dressing up as sheep and jumping into the sea. The repetitive, inane dialogue might drive you insane, but it has something of Waiting for Godot about it. This film is a genuine, unrepeatable one-off, worth seeing for its sheer bloodymindedness alone. Andrew Pulver
Griffin in Summer
The coming-out genre is rife with cliche, so many stories playing out in exactly the expected way. Writer-director Nicholas Colia alters that hoary structure by placing the narrative of his film somewhere in the margins of self-realization. Fourteen-year-old Griffin (the remarkable Everett Blunck) isn’t quite in the closet, but he’s not out of it either. He is, in all the wonderful complexity of a real person, simply himself, a theater-obsessed type-A achiever who is hurrying to grow up so that he can realize his artistic dreams. A great distraction from that mission comes in the form of an older guy, played with soft-spoken allure by Owen Teague, on whom young Griffin develops his first massive crush. Colia’s film is a sweet, aching assessment of that seismic life event, gently prodding Griffin toward the rest of his life without rushing him. If only more films about queer youth were made with such specific delicacy and insight. Richard Lawson
Love, Brooklyn
Love, Brooklyn wasn’t in theaters long, about six weeks in fall altogether, and recouped less than a fifth of its $255,000 budget – more of an indictment of the film business than the quality of the product. It’s a throwback to the airy, lyrical daydreams that Hollywood used to churn out all the time back when films were something to discover in the middle of the day, at a video rental shop or on premium cable totally at random. It follows Roger (Moonlight’s André Holland) as he struggles with his feelings for love interest Nicole (a saturnine DeWanda Wise) and gal-pal Casey (a capricious Nicole Beharie) in between the stress of a looming magazine deadline. Come for director Rachael Holder’s lush, Spike Lee-coded shots of Brooklyn in full splendor, stay for the rare film opportunity to see Black people just be (young, vibrant, striving, whimsical) as Roy Wood Jr (Roger’s clumsy sounding board, Alan) gets These Jokes off. Andrew Lawrence
Eephus
There have been an abundance of fine baseball movies – it probably has the edge on any other sport – but Carson Lund’s debut feature immediately joins Bull Durham at the top and for similar reasons. Both have a special appreciation for the game when it’s played at the sub-pro level, when the stakes are lower. The quirks are higher and there’s more attention paid to offbeat comedy and the easy, laconic rhythm between pitches. Set on the last game at a decrepit, soon-to-be-demolished stadium in small-town Massachusetts in the 1990s, Eephus is about middle-aged rivals squaring off for the last time, which is to say that it is ultimately a film about death and a spirited effort to stave it off for a while. (When the sun goes down, the men illuminate the field with car headlights.) But it’s also hugely entertaining and full of fun details, like the need to root through the nearly woods for foul balls because the guys don’t have enough in stock. Scott Tobias
Songs from the Hole
In my years as a critic, I have watched many, many commendable films on the US carceral system – some, like Sing Sing, are scripted explorations of efforts to reclaim dignity in prison. Others, like Oscar-tipped The Alabama Solution, are searing, undeniable portraits of an inhumane system. But nothing has quite bridged the gap, or been as startlingly memorable, as Songs from the Hole, a collaboration between director Contessa Gayles and musician James “JJ’88” Jacobs, given a double life sentence at age 15 for shooting a fellow teenager. The underappreciated Netflix documentary is unlike anything else I have seen – part narrative visual album, based on the lyrics and video treatments written by JJ’88 during solitary confinement (the reason for such torture, as usual, is beyond galling), and part nonfiction meditation on the situational nature of criminality and the work of forgiveness. A pivotal late scene, involving JJ’88 and his brother’s killer, left my jaw on the floor, both at mankind’s capacity for compassion despite everything, and the prison system’s complete lack of interest in it. Above all, it’s a portrait of vulnerable, resilient, honest, hard-won hope. After this wretched year, we all could use some. Adrian Horton