A roundup of the Cinapse team’s breakout faves from this year’s festival
Fantastic Fest’s 20th year had plenty of surprises for fest-goers looking to catch the latest in genre cinema from around the globe. With 45 World Premieres, 15 International and North American Premieres, and 13 U.S. Premieres across this year’s lineup, this year’s attendees were especially spoiled for choice when it comes to the festival’s programming roster. Many on the Cinapse team broke their personal records for total titles seen at Fantastic Fest in 2025–making our annual closer a fierce debate for what topped our lists. To wrap things up, here’s what made our individual “Best of the Fest” lists!
Julian Singleton
1. ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER: Of course, the latest from my favorite director was going to top my list. Paul Thomas Anderson’s sprawling speedrun of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland pushes him into full-on action movie mode. It’s a scathing spectacle about a failed activist generation forever outrunning its own mistakes—then lands on a final, luminous note of hope for the next. The kids, it turns out, are all right.
2. OBSESSION: Curry Barker’s bonkers toxic relationship flick is guaranteed to be everyone’s next horror obsession when Focus Features releases it wide next year. This barebones Monkey’s Paw story soars on just how far Barker and leads Michael Johnston and a star-making Inde Navarrette push every scene to its stomach-churning, nail-biting breaking point, leaving you caught between screaming, crying, and cheering.
3. (TIE) SIRĀT/THE PLAGUE: Two of the most immersive cinema experiences I’ve had this year, both Oliver Laxe and Charlie Polinger’s films are about the tenuous connections we forge in incredibly stressful situations, the masks we put up in order to belong, and how terrifyingly liberating it can be to surrender to self-expression, unleashing the violent emotions we keep bottled up inside. Both also feature some of the best needle-drops this year, as well as Fantastic Fest’s most armchair-gripping sequences of suspense and dread.
4. BUGONIA: Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest is another wickedly hilarious social skewering, framing both incel culture and corporate hegemony as equally alien forces. By pitting them against each other, he exposes humanity’s self-destructive absurdity—where fleeting sparks of hope are often lost in translation in our failed yet well-meaning attempts to communicate with one another.
5. THE HOLY BOY: I’m always hunting for a good slow-burn at Fantastic Fest, and Paolo Strippoli’s Wicker Man-tinged folk horror gem is a haunting parable about the price of easy happiness. Both a chilling and tender coming-of-age story, it follows a supernaturally gifted boy and the grieving, washed-up coach who alone sees the child’s humanity as the rest of the village conveniently objectifies him.
Honorable Mentions: Forbidden City, A Useful Ghost, Luger, Reflection in a Dead Diamond, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die
Ed Travis
My Fantastic Fest 2025 experience featured probably more duds than normal, but those lows were outshined by dazzling highs! Before I share a few thoughts on my top films of the festival, I do have to say that I love and often take advantage of the repertory screenings that Fantastic Fest prioritizes, and had wonderful experiences viewing Thai martial arts banger Chocolate in 35mm, and seeing Cruel Jaws, Freaked, and Angel’s Egg for the first time.
The film I most want to highlight is Forbidden City. Italian filmmaker Gabriele Mainetti crafted a magical genre hybrid that gets everything right and offers something that feels like nothing we’ve ever seen before. It’s a blistering martial arts revenge epic mashed up with an operatic Italian romance, and it’s the Fantastic Fest title I’ll be hyping and evangelizing for years to come as it deeply impacted me emotionally.
Of course, One Battle After Another is probably the best film of 2025 and after its secret screening I was simply enraptured by it. Sure, it’s technically a more major work than Forbidden City, but that means it has already gotten wildly more attention. So while One Battle After Another was undoubtedly the best film I saw, it wasn’t the most Fantastic Fest film I saw, if that distinction makes any sense at all.
Steven Kostansky and Daniel Bernhardt’s Deathstalker reboot was probably my third favorite film experience of the fest, with my fandom being activated by the opportunity to get a photo with one of my action hero favorites in Mr. Bernhardt. The film is a blast, featuring Kostansky’s trademark practical effects, bizarro sense of humor, and a glorious and rare leading man turn from Bernhardt. What put it into the “love” category for me, however, is the clear passion and homage to the sword and sorcery subgenera that the film manages to be a love letter to, even as it also takes the piss out of it.
A few final highlights would be Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest Bugonia, Kiah Roache-Turner’s WWII shark movie Beast of War, and Spanish crime film Luger.
Jon Partridge
1. FORBIDDEN CITY: The Italian Mafia/Chinese gangster movie you never knew you needed. Love, revenge, cultural clashes, comedy, and hard-hitting action, all under the big lights of Rome. It’s huge in scope and ideas, and nails them all. Bravissimo!
2. THE PLAGUE: A pressure cooker of a film about conforming and the perils of breaking from the pack. Perfectly captures the social dynamics of a collective of 12-year-old boys. Compelling, anxiety-inducing, visually stunning, & packed with brilliant young performances.
3. REFLECTION IN A DEAD DIAMOND: A glorious, gonzo riff on the superspy genre, and one of the most visually indelible experiences you’ll have in a movie theater.
4. ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER: Timely, topical, and just a rollicking good time at the movies. DiCaprio nails it once again. One of the year’s best, and a thrilling example of a filmmaker utterly assured and thriving in their craft.
5. HONEY BUNCH: A lush mystery that explores ideas of love and devotion by playing with memory and mood. Evokes 70’s Gothic vibes, but crafts a distinct hazy tone and compelling tale all its own.
Honorable Mentions: The Holy Boy, The Piano Accident, The Vile, Find Your Friends
Dan Tabor
1. SIRĀT: The film is a powerful metaphor for one group’s journey through purgatory under the guise of ravers traversing the barren desert to get to their next party as the world ends around them. It’s not just the stunning cinematography, but the gut-wrenching performances each actor delivers as their faith is tested one by one.
2. REFLECTION IN A DEAD DIAMOND: Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, two of my favorite filmmakers known for their neo-giallos, apply the lush visual language they’re known for to a film about a secret agent–very similar to James Bond–at the end of his life. Inspired by Italian comic books, this film is nothing short of a masterclass in visual storytelling, packed with double crosses and narrative twists and turns.
3. GOOD LUCK, HAVE FUN, DON’T DIE: Gore Verbinski’s first film in nearly a decade is a satirical, hyper-relevant look at our current technological hellscape. I absolutely love films where a group of strangers are forced to work together to save the world, and here they are led by a time-traveling Sam Rockwell, who is monologuing as he did in White Lotus. This film was weird, charming, and hilarious in all the right ways for me.
4. FORBIDDEN CITY: Who knew an Italian Kung-fu movie would be this good? But this gender-swapped Kung-Fu take on Get Carter is not only completely badass, but it’s one hell of an emotional rollercoaster too. Somehow, they throw a rom-com in there too–but stay with me on this, it’s amazing.
5. BUGONIA: Yorgos Lanthimos puts a modern spin on Save the Green Planet, fashioning it into a poignant satire on the dark work of Internet rabbit holes and conspiracy theories. This feels like it would be a great double feature with Eddington, as it also goes to some extremely dark places.
Spencer Brickey
1. OBSESSION: It’s rare to come across something that truly knocks you out at a festival. Watching over a dozen, sometimes dozens, of films in as short an amount of time as a film festival usually runs means that even the best stuff kinda gets mixed in with everything else. But then the credits rolled on Obsession, and I realized I had seen something truly special: something that very much cut through the haze of Day Six of an eight-day festival and completely rewired me, reenergized me, and held my thoughts hostage for days afterwards. Curry Barker opens his feature career with an absolute all-timer debut, one that’s able to be funny, sad, and scary as Hell, as a throwaway wish on a party favor turns a desperate crush into a romance from the pits of Hell. A lot of my love for this film comes from my own history of knowing the pains of an unattainable crush, longing for years for something that’ll never come to pass. It’s also built on fully experiencing the terror of being in a relationship that has gone off the rails as your partner becomes someone you don’t recognize, and cute quirks become violent fixations. This is something truly special, and I cannot wait for all of y’all to see this sometime next year.
2. ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER: What a special day the 6th day of the Festival was, as I walked out of Obsession and right into a 70mm screening of Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest. One Battle After Another is a film of our time: a film about gross government overreach, about a country at large that has given into a life filled with constant pressure and attacks from above, about a generation that looks at the world around them and thinks, “My God, how did we fail so spectacularly?”, before drowning themselves in booze and weed smoke. Where OBAA differentiates itself from the rest of the doom-and-gloom cinema we’ve slowly become entrenched in in the last 5 years is that it’s really about resilience, about surviving for the next day, and the day after that. Early in the film, we are first introduced to Benicio Del Toro’s Sensei Sergio, the beating heart of OBAA, as he instructs Willa (Chase Infiniti, in an absolute knockout debut role) to do one thing: “Breathe”. That is the thesis of OBAA: “Breathe”. Things are bad; they’ve been bad before, and they’ll most definitely be bad again. But time and time and time again, we persist. The thirst for power, for control, for domination always corrupts and perishes. Love–for family, for community, for ourselves–always persists. Walking out of OBAA was one of the few viewings in the last few years where I genuinely was able to think, “You know what? We will be ok.”
3. FORBIDDEN CITY: Easily the biggest surprise of the fest for me. The true nature of a film festival, especially one with such a focus on foreign releases, is that most of your viewings are an out-and-out gamble. All you usually have is a quick blurb doing its best to get the vibe of the movie across, accompanied by either a poster or a still (rarely both) if you’re lucky. You just have to hope that what you’re walking into is your jam. For Forbidden City, the blurb described it as a “cultural genre mashup”, specifically an Italian/Chinese fusion. What Forbidden City truly is is an absolute ass kicking good time. Part top-tier beat-em-up, part melodramatic Italian crime noir, and part cute romantic comedy, Forbidden City was an absolute blast. It moves at an absolute clip (can’t remember the last time a nearly 2 and a half hour film moved so fast), and always keeps the energy up, be it from an amazing kung fu set piece (there is a kitchen fight early on that feels like an genuine all timer), big, brash melodramatic family politics, or just watching two kids from different sides of the world fall in love. Not sure when or how this’ll reach domestic audiences, but make sure to seek this one out!
4. THE PLAGUE: Man, remember how much middle school sucked? And not in that Disneyfied way of memory, where you just remember it as an awkward time where you first realized what it meant to actually like someone, and you always seemed to be concealing some social-life-destroying zit somewhere on your face. I’m talking about the actual politics of those early teenage years; namely, how it was a pure dog-eat-dog society, where the rules of being a kid suddenly changed, and everything became meaner, harsher, and all about keeping your head above water. Simple mistakes, such as a misspoken word or straying from your social group, now become capital offenses that could have you shunned into oblivion. The Plague understands the prison rules of young adulthood, and it presents these battles within a summer water polo camp in 2003. The Plague is all about the cruel realities of an unfortunate time in all our lives, while breaking any clichés we could expect from such a cinematic setting. This is a story about how just being the new kid can hamstring your chances of being anything but a punching bag to those around you. This is a story about how adults can sometimes be not only useless, but actively harmful in their inaction towards children. This is a story about how sometimes the weird kid in the group isn’t just misunderstood, but is actively a mentally unwell person. This is a story about how good intentions can actually be all the wrong decisions in a social setting. The Plague does not sugarcoat its world, but instead lays the rash of youthful social cruelties bare for all to see.
5. GOOD LUCK, HAVE FUN, DON’T DIE: Gore Verbinski, we missed you, you mad man! Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is Verbinski’s first foray back into the director’s chair in 9 years. It’s also a hell of a good time at the movies, while also carrying an incredibly dark underside about the decay of modern society and the dangers we are fast approaching (namely, A.I.). We open in a diner in some city’s downtown when Sam Rockwell, sporting the typical look of a homeless man, bursts in and starts monologuing about being from the future and needing to enlist a team from the restaurant’s patrons to help stop a great evil. What we are then led through is a story that is part sci-fi romp, part pitch black comedy, and part social commentary, all held together by a patchwork of familiar cinematic elements (We have **deep breath** 12 Monkeys, Southland Tales, Brazil, a pinch of Ghostbusters, and a whole lot of Terminator). What sets Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die apart for me was both its unwavering “fuck A.I.” approach, which is desperately needed in 2025, but also the pull-no-punches approach towards satirizing modern morality. Specifically, there is an extended vignette about school shootings and their potential future “solution” that was funny yet also deeply sad and infuriating. There is an anger just under the surface here, a fire from Verbinski about the world he sees around him. It makes for an awesome film in Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, and makes me very excited for whatever he does next.
Honorable Mentions: If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Bugonia, V/H/S/Halloween, Reflections In A Dead Diamond, Luger
The Cinapse team looks forward to seeing y’all next year for Fantastic Fest 2026!
Fantastic Fest is the largest genre film festival in the U.S., specializing in horror, fantasy, sci-fi, action and just plain fantastic movies from all around the world. In years past, the festival has been home to the world and US premieres of PARASITE, SMILE, JOJO RABBIT, THE BLACK PHONE, JOHN WICK, FRANKENWEENIE, THERE WILL BE BLOOD, APOCALYPTO, ZOMBIELAND, RED DAWN, SPLIT, HALLOWEEN, BAD TIMES AT THE EL ROYALE, MID 90s, and SUSPIRIA while the guest roster has included such talent as Tim Burton, Nicolas Winding-Refn, Lilly and Lana Wachowski, Bong Joon-Ho, Taika Waititi, Robert Rodriguez, Rian Johnson, Bill Murray, Keanu Reeves, Martin Landau, Winona Ryder, Edward Norton, Ryan Reynolds, Patrick Wilson, Matthew Fox, Karl Urban, Josh Hartnett, The RZA, Dolph Lundgren, Paul Rudd, Bill Pullman, Paul Thomas Anderson, Kevin Smith, Jon Favreau, George Romero, Darren Aronofsky, Mike Judge, Karyn Kusama, M. Night Shyamalan, James McAvoy, Vince Vaughn, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jonah Hill, Barbara Crampton and Jessica Harper. Fantastic Fest also features world, national, and regional premieres of new, up-and-coming genre films. Fantastic Fest has seen the acquisition of many titles, including BULLHEAD, KILL LIST, MONSTERS, KLOWN, THE FP, PENUMBRA, HERE COMES THE DEVIL, NO REST FOR THE WICKED, VANISHING WAVES, COMBAT GIRLS, I DECLARE WAR, THE PERFECTION, and TIGERS ARE NOT AFRAID. Fantastic Fest is held each year at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Austin, Texas. Alamo Drafthouse has been named the best theater in the country by Entertainment Weekly, Wired, and TIME.
In March 2023, Fantastic Fest joined the FIAPF (International Federation of Film Producers’ Associations) as a Competitive Specialized Feature Film Festival alongside Cannes, Berlin and Venice.
