Stephen Dalton’s 5 Favorites from 2025

IF I HAD LEGS I’D KICK YOU (Mary Bronstein)
Mary Bronstein’s wildly original dark comedy depicts high-anxiety parenthood as a surrealistic nightmare. Breaking out of her anodyne rom-com lane with all guns blazing, Rose Byrne stars as the super-stressed mother of a teenage daughter with a disturbingly vague eating disorder. Producer credits include Bronstein’s husband Ronald and his frequent collaborator Josh Safdie, lending heavyweight indie pedigree to this audaciously weird, highly entertaining genre mash-up.

BULK (Ben Wheatley)
After flirting with mainstream Hollywood success on the blockbuster shark thriller Meg 2: The Trench (2023), British indie auteur Ben Wheatley returns to his lo-fi roots with this darkly comic sci-fi meta-mystery about three characters trapped inside an endless quantum loop. Post-modern narrative in-jokes, mind-bending plot twists and purposely cheap-looking visual effects make this Wheatley’s most thrillingly experimental, daringly imaginative work for years.

THE WOMAN WHO POKED THE LEOPARD (Patience Nitumwesiga)
Director Patience Nitumwesiga’s assured debut feature is an intimate, highly entertaining documentary portrait of Ugandan poet, academic, ex-convict and political activist Dr. Stella Nyanzi. A one-woman Pussy Riot and compelling force of nature, Nyanzi proudly pursues a strategy of “revolutionary rudeness” against repressive patriarchal authority figures, most notably her country’s long-serving president Yoweri Museveni.

THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER (Kristen Stewart)
It divided critics in Cannes but actor turned film-maker Kristen Stewart’s feature directing debut is a stylistically dazzling treat, adapted from writer Lidia Yuknavitch’s emotionally wrenching 2011 memoir of the same name. Starring Imogen Poots on revelatory form, K-Stew’s powerful, haunting psychodrama replicates the book’s sense-blitzing effect using non-linear narrative, woozy voice-over, disruptive sound design, high-art visuals and hyper-intense staccato edits.

BETTER GO MAD IN THE WILD (Miro Remo)
Mischievously interweaving fly-on-the-wall reportage with magical realism, Czech director Miro Remo’s prize-winning documentary delivers an intimate, tragicomic portrait of two deeply eccentric twin brothers who share a remote, crumbling farmhouse full of memories and regrets. Loosely adapted from a non-fiction book of the same name, Better Go Mad in the Wild is a lyrical, hugely charming real-life fairy tale narrated by a talking cow.