The best films of 2025 … you may not have seen
From an old-fashioned western to a charming baseball comedy, Guardian writers pick their favourite lesser-known films of the yearThe pick of 2025’s film, music, art, TV, stage and games, chosen...
By Radheyan Simonpillai, Jesse Hassenger, Veronica Esposito, Tammy Tarng, Pamela Hutchinson, Benjamin Lee, Andrew Pulver, Richard Lawson, Andrew Lawrence, Scott Tobias and Adrian Horton · The Guardian Culture
From an old-fashioned western to a charming baseball comedy, Guardian writers pick their favourite lesser-known films of the year The pick of 2025’s film, music, art, TV, stage and games, chosen by Guardian critics and writers 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 Continue reading...