Arty films to look out for in 2025

Keep an eye out for these films with an art-historical twist over the next few months.

The Brutalist, dir. Brady Corbet

You wait years for a movie about an architect’s ambitions, then two come along at once. On the heels of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis – in which Adam Driver’s master builder designs a utopian city made from a material he has invented himself – comes Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist. Adrien Brody plays László Tóth, a Holocaust survivor who settles in Pennsylvania and finds himself balancing the demands of art and commerce as he tries to give concrete form to his dreams. It is interesting that the style of both films seems at temporal odds with their subjects: Megalopolis is set in an apparently futuristic United States that draws heavily on ancient Rome for its imagery and social structure, while The Brutalist – with its overture, intermission, 35mm cinematography and 212-minute runtime – is a formally classical drama about an avant-garde thinker. But then, cinema has never quite known what to do with those who dream in buildings – as Charles Holland’s history of architects in film attests.

In UK cinemas from 24 January

Still from The Brutalist (2024), directed by Brady Corbet. Courtesy Universal Pictures

Architecton, dir. Victor Kossakovsky

However seductive the architect proves as a silver-screen figure, the materials they use can be just as thrilling. Victor Kossakovsky’s documentary Architecton surveys the role of concrete and rock in human history, with some of its most memorable scenes simply comprising monumental shots of majestically hewn stone. For all its epoch-spanning ambition, the film feels urgent in light of current events: apartment blocks are reduced to wreckage in Ukraine, while shots of the ruins of Baalbek in Lebanon are unintentional reminders of the risks recently posed to the site by Israeli bombardment. Still, even this austere documentary can’t resist the compelling figure of the architect: Michele De Lucchi, whose practice spans architecture and design, is on hand to dispense opinions about the nature of building in bygone centuries and today.

In UK cinemas from 10 January

An abandoned concrete building in Gibellina, Sicily, in a still from Architecton (2024), directed by Victor Kossakovsky. Photo: Ben Bernhard/BVK; courtesy Point du Jour – Les Films du Balibari; © 2024 Ma.ja.de. Filmproduktions GmbH

I Am Martin Parr, dir. Lee Shulman

Having begun The Anonymous Project in 2017 – a collection of approximately one million Kodachrome photographs of random people, spanning from the 1940s to 2010 – the artist Lee Shulman has now made his first film: a documentary about the photographer Martin Parr (b. 1952). Best known for his brightly coloured, carefully composed shots of British people, Parr has, over the course of his long career, captured elements of British regional and national identity both affectionately and critically – and in ways that words cannot quite manage. He is a winning presence as we follow him around England on a tour of the sites of some of his most famous work. ‘I make serious photographs disguised as entertainment,’ Parr once said; it makes him an intriguing match for Shulman, who seems to take the opposite approach: using photographs often taken in a light-hearted spirit to treat seriously the ephemerality of film stock and of life itself.

In UK cinemas from 21 February

Photo from the series New Brighton, England, 1983–85 (1983–85) by Martin Parr. © Martin Parr/Magnum Photos

Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, dir. Raoul Peck

A very different picture of a very different photographer arrives courtesy of Raoul Peck, best known for his polemical non-fiction portraits (I Am Not Your Negro, 2016, about James Baldwin and racism in America) and fleet-footed dramatisations (Lumumba, 2000, about the Congolese premier’s career and assassination). His latest film is a documentary about the South African photojournalist Ernest Cole, who devoted his career to capturing the conditions of life under Apartheid before fleeing to the United States, where he published his photobook House of Bondage in 1967. (South Africa banned him from returning and he died of cancer, at the age of 49, before the country’s transition to democracy.) The film’s title refers to the discovery of a cache of Cole’s photographs in 2017, which prompted a reappraisal of his work. Peck makes eloquent use of Cole’s archive to argue not just for his artistry and eye for composition, but also for the enduring political power of photography.

In UK cinemas from 7 March

Ernest Cole in a scene from Ernest Cole: Lost and Found (2024), directed by Raoul Peck. Courtesy Raoul Peck/Dogwoof

The End, dir. Joshua Oppenheimer

Artistic practice and artifice were central to the documentary The Act of Killing (2012) and its sequel The Look of Silence (2014), in which the film-maker Joshua Oppenheimer encouraged the high-ranking Indonesian goons who ordered or carried out the murder of half a million suspected leftists in the mid 1960s to re-enact the killings as if they were in a pulpy genre film. No one would have guessed that Oppenheimer’s follow-up, ten years later, would be a post-apocalyptic musical starring Michael Shannon, Tilda Swinton, George McKay and Tim McInnerny. Art features more explicitly here: the entire film is set in an underground bunker gallery, a cosseted escape from the climate change wrought by Shannon’s oil-man patriarch and his ilk. His wife, played by Swinton, is the gallery’s curator, and eagle-eyed viewers will spot that the works on display include Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s The Dancer, exhibited at the first Impressionist exhibition in April 1874; Monet’s Woman with a Parasol, made the following year; and paintings of the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada by Albert Bierstadt and other members of the Hudson River School – depictions of a verdant world long since rendered extinct by the actions of Shannon’s character.

In UK cinemas spring 2025

Still from The End (2024), directed by Joshua Oppenheimer. Courtesy Neon

The Mastermind, dir. Kelly Reichardt

Admirers of Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up (2022), a low-key character study in which an Oregon sculptor prepares for an exhibition of her work, and Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera (2023), in which Josh O’Connor plays a grave-robber who scours Tuscany for Etruscan tombs to pilfer, will surely be excited for Reichardt’s upcoming film. O’Connor again plays a criminal in a period setting, this time plotting an ambitious art heist against the backdrop of the Vietnam War. Showing Up enjoyed a release in the United States but never made it past the festival circuit in the UK; The Mastermind will fare better, having already been picked up by MUBI for distribution in the UK, the United States and elsewhere.

Expected to be released in 2025