The year’s finest big-screen releases, from an epic sci-fi sequel to a quiet, contemplative movie about a public toilet cleaner.

The Wild Robot

Helmed by Chris Sanders, the co-director of Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon, this DreamWorks film adaptation of Peter Brown’s beloved novel is about kindness and connection — and how those things are essential for survival.

A mysterious box washes up on a remote island. Inside is a lone survivor named Roz (Lupita Nyong’o) — only this castaway is no human but a state-of-the-art robot. Roz is eager to help the animal inhabitants of her new home, but the feeling isn’t mutual with her frightened and hostile neighbours. When she stumbles upon a goose nest, she takes up the task of raising its single remaining gosling, Brightbill (Kit Connor), with the help of mischievous fox Fink (Pedro Pascal).

The Wild Robot is DreamWorks Animation’s final feature produced entirely in-house, and Sanders has fittingly gathered “an amazing cast”. Among the line-up are Stephanie Hsu as Vontra, another robot sent to retrieve Roz; Mark Hamill as Thorn, a grizzly bear; and Ving Rhames as Thunderbolt, a peregrine falcon.

Nyong’o describes the movie, lauded for its impressionistic art style and humanist themes, as “not afraid to pull at your heartstrings”.

“People are going to enjoy watching a robot learn how to be wild,” says the Academy Award-winning actress.

The Wild Robot

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The Wild Robot

Rozzum 7134 (“Roz” for short), a futuristic robot, washes ashore on a deserted island. A tale of survival begins when she becomes the protector to an orphaned gosling, which she names Brightbill.

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Transformers One

Every Transformer has an origin. Transformers One, the latest film entry in Takara Tomy and Hasbro’s long-running media franchise, explores the backstory of the two most famous factions’ leaders — Optimus Prime of the heroic Autobots and Megatron of the villainous Decepticons.

Before they were bitter arch-enemies, they were best friends Orion Pax (Chris Hemsworth) and D-16 (Brian Tyree Henry). Their latest misadventure has got them sent to the bowels of their planet Cybertron, where they meet the bumblebee-yellow B-127 (Keegan-Michael Key). A chance discovery sends the three miners and their supervisor, Elita-1 (Scarlett Johansson), on a quest to uncover a secret that could change the fate of their world and lives forever.

Rounding out the star-studded voice cast are Laurence Fishburne as Alpha Trion, Jon Hamm as Sentinel Prime, and Steve Buscemi as Starscream.

Henry likes that this prequel “is truly the beginning” without human characters. “We got all the humans out of the way … humans complicate stuff! We want to see where [the Transformers] started, we want to see what Cybertron looked like, this is the way to do it.”

Transformers One

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Transformers One

The untold origin story of Optimus Prime and Megatron, better known as sworn enemies, but who once were friends bonded like brothers who changed the fate of Cybertron forever.

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Inside Out 2

Pixar brings the feels again in Inside Out 2, the sequel to 2015’s hit animated movie Inside Out. Just like the original movie, it follows Riley and her personified emotions — Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger. Now 13 years old, Riley is on the cusp of adolescence. With puberty comes four new emotions — Anxiety, Envy, Embarrassment, and Ennui — that turn her inside world upside down. Anxiety, in particular, has grand plans for Riley, staging a coup and launching the teen’s familiar five emotions to the back of her mind. With Riley’s chance of joining her dream hockey team and her childhood friendships on the line, can the old gang save her sense of self — and Anxiety — before it’s too late?

First-time feature director Kelsey Mann and his team consulted psychologists and a group of nine teenagers, dubbed ‘Riley’s Crew’, to accurately portray contemporary youth and their emotions. Their meticulous research and attention to detail paid off, with adolescents and even adults making fan memes about some of the film’s endearing side characters, such as the new emotion Nostalgia and Riley’s videogame crush Lance Slashblade.

Inside Out 2’s universal themes of self-acceptance and forgiveness also resonated with international audiences, judging by its earnings. It has surpassed The Lion King as the highest-grossing animated film with a worldwide box office total of US$1.7 billion.

Inside Out 2

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Inside Out 2

Disney and Pixar’s “Inside Out 2” returns to the mind of newly minted teenager Riley just as headquarters is disrupted by something entirely unexpected: new Emotions!...

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Blink Twice

If you think you’ve seen it all, look again in Blink Twice, the directorial debut of The Batman star Zoë Kravitz. Cocktail waitress Frida (Naomi Ackie) has attended many parties, but none as lavish as the ones held on billionaire Slater King’s (Channing Tatum) private island. Only this time, she’s one of the tech magnate’s guests, along with her friend Jess (Alia Shawkat), photographer Vic (Christian Slater), and DJ Tom (Haley Joel Osment).

It’s a dream come true for Frida — indulgent meals, lazy afternoons by the pool, and psychedelic nights of wild abandon. But as the days melt into each other, and Frida starts to lose her memory and grip on reality, she begins to realise there is more than meets the eye to Slater and the island.

Despite it being Kravitz’s virgin directorial effort, the psychological thriller has garnered critical praise, with The Guardian calling it a “superbly twisted romance which takes gender politics into a brutal combat zone” and Variety describing her use of close-ups as “riveting” and “the work of a born filmmaker”.

Blink Twice

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Blink Twice

Slater King invites Frida to join him on a vacation to his private island. As the guests on the island begin to feel like something might be off, Frida becomes determined to uncover the truth.

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Longlegs

It’s the ’90s, and there’s a manhunt for a serial killer. Federal Bureau of Investigation agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is assigned to the case, which involves a series of murder-suicides orchestrated by a Satan worshipper known as Longlegs (Nicolas Cage). As the bodies start to pile up and the long arm of the law gets nearer to catching Longlegs, Lee begins to realise this case might just hit too close to home.

Longlegs is written and directed by Osgood ‘Oz’ Perkins, whose first acting role was as a young Norman Bates in the horror slasher movie Psycho II. Fitting, then, that he returns to the genre that gave him his first taste of showbiz.

Loosely inspired by real cases and Perkins’ family, Longlegs has received critical acclaim for Cage’s terrifying performance. Flickering Myth declared it “the scariest film of the decade”, while Awards Radar called it “the best serial killer horror film since The Silence of the Lambs”. Reportedly made for a budget under US$10 million, the psychological thriller slayed at the box office, earning US$108.9 million worldwide.

Longlegs

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Longlegs

In pursuit of a serial killer, an FBI agent uncovers a series of occult clues that she must solve to end his terrifying killing spree.

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Dune: Part Two

The space-opera saga of Dune continues in director Denis Villeneuve’s film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s landmark science fiction novel. Timothée Chalamet returns as Paul Atreides, the exiled heir of the deceased Leto Atreides and prophesied messiah of the Fremen, the indigenous people of the desert planet Arrakis.

As war looms and alliances are forged with love interest Chani (Zendaya) and mentor Stilgar (Javier Bardem), Paul must face a new enemy in Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler), the bloodthirsty potential successor of House Harkonnen. This second instalment — which also stars Rebecca Ferguson, Josh Brolin, Florence Pugh, and Furiosa star Anya Taylor-Joy in an uncredited cameo — features unforgettable sequences like Paul riding a sandworm for the first time. With Dune 3 set for release in December 2026, there’s even more reason to (re)visit the beautiful and brutal world of Arrakis.

Dune: Part Two

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Dune: Part Two

Explore the mythic journey of Paul Atreides as he unites with Chani and the Fremen while on a path of revenge against the conspirators who destroyed his family.

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Perfect Days

Director Wim Wenders’ Oscar-nominated slice-of-life drama follows Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho, who won Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival for the role), a humble public toilet cleaner in Tokyo.

Despite his Sisyphean task of keeping the Japanese capital’s loos clean, the middle-aged man finds contentment in living in the moment — reading used paperbacks, taking analogue photos of trees, and listening to ’70s rock on his cassette tapes.

The film was originally planned as a short documentary of The Tokyo Toilet, an urban redevelopment project in Shibuya to transform its public restrooms. Wenders, with co-screenwriter Takuma Takasaki, eventually decided to turn it into a feature-length character piece.

Shot over 17 days in 4:3 aspect ratio and stylistically inspired by legendary Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu, Wenders’ meditative film invites the viewer to find the magic in the mundane.

Furiosa

George Miller, the co-creator of the Mad Max franchise, is back at the director’s wheel again all “shiny and chrome” for Furiosa, the first entry in the long-running post-apocalyptic action film series in nearly a decade.

Anya Taylor-Joy plays the title character, which was last seen in 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road and portrayed by Charlize Theron. Set several years before the events of Fury Road, this prequel tells the origin story of Furiosa, which begins when she is kidnapped as a young girl by the Biker Horde, led by Dementus (Chris Hemsworth). After several years in hiding, she attempts to return to her homeland with the help of War Rig driver Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke).

Miller delivers his trademark high-octane car chases and pyrotechnics set against the unforgiving landscape of the desert wasteland (filmed in the Australian outback), while Taylor-Joy brings both vulnerability and tenacity to her role of the Imperator-in-the-making.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

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Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

As the world fell, young Furiosa was snatched from the Green Place of Many Mothers and fell into the hands of a great Biker Horde led by the Warlord Dementus.

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Civil War

The American dream has turned into a nightmare in this film’s terrifying vision of a divided United States. Written and directed by Enslaved: Odyssey to the West and 28 Days Later writer Alex Garland, the film follows a team of journalists, including photographer Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst), travelling from New York to Washington, DC, to interview the President (Nick Offerman) amid a raging civil war.

Garland’s road-trip thriller surpassed Hereditary in scoring film studio A24’s biggest opening weekend and is the company’s first to top the box office. Shot in Atlanta and London, the movie received rave reviews for its unflinching examination of a nation at war with itself.

Look out for a standout one-scene performance by Breaking Bad actor Jesse Plemons, as an unnamed rebel militiaman who questions the group on “what kind of American” they are.

Civil War

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Civil War

A journey across a dystopian future America follows a team of military-embedded journalists as they race against time to reach DC before rebel factions descend upon the White House.

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Hit Man

Based on an unbelievable true story, Richard Linklater’s romantic comedy stars Top Gun: Maverick actor Glen Powell as Gary Johnson, a mild-mannered philosophy and psychology professor who moonlights as a fake contract killer on behalf of the police for sting operations.

Things get complicated — and more dangerous than usual — when his latest client, Madison (Andor actress Adria Arjona), wants her abusive husband killed but instead steals the unassuming professor’s heart. The film’s screenplay, written by Linklater and Powell, was inspired by a Texas Monthly article of the same name by Skip Hollandsworth. Oscar-nominated director Linklater’s flick premiered at the Venice Film Festival and received plaudits for Powell’s versatility in portraying Johnson’s multiple personas, as well as his sizzling onscreen chemistry with Arjona.

True crime and psychology fans should check out this equal-parts rib-tickling and gut-wrenching biopic, which explores what happens when a great pretender gets too close to becoming the mask he wears.

Challengers

Spider-Man star Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, and Mike Faist play frenemies — and really, a throuple of sorts — both on and off the tennis court in Luca Guadagnino’s sports drama. The tale of three professional tennis players meeting their match in more ways than one is presented in a nonlinear fashion, as it volleys back and forth between their past and present.

Tashi (Zendaya) is caught between her ex-boyfriend Patrick (O’Connor) and husband Art’s (Faist) affections, while the two men — once an inseparable doubles team — are facing off at a tournament final that will put their intertwined relationships on the line.

Guadagnino, who last collaborated with Zendaya’s Dune co-star Timothée Chalamet in the cannibal romance film Bones and All, serves up trysts, double-crosses, and sensuous scenes, with a sweat-inducing one involving a pair sharing a delectable churros stick. The script, by Justin Kuritzkes, was inspired by tennis legend Andre Agassi’s memoir Open.

The Zone of Interest

This historical movie is a striking portrait of the banality of evil. It is 1943, and Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) is a Nazi SS Commandant overseeing the Auschwitz Concentration Camp. He lives with his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) and their five children in an idyllic house next to the camp, trying to shield their children from the horrifying reality that Rudolf is perpetrating.

Adapted from the novel of the same name by Martin Amis, the film makes a few changes to the source material. While Amis’ novel features fictional characters inspired by the Hösses, writer-director Jonathan Glazer opted to make the movie about the Hösses themselves, researching them for two years.

The Zone of Interest won the Grand Prix at 2023’s Cannes Film Festival, the Cannes Soundtrack Award, and the International Federation of Film Critics Prize, and went on to win the Best International Feature and Best Sound Oscars in 2024.

The Taste of Things

This delectable historical romance is a feast for the senses. Set in the French countryside in 1899, The Taste of Things revolves around a long-term romance between chef Eugénie (Juliette Binoche) and gourmand Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel). Dodin is enamoured of her cooking and has asked her to marry him many times, but Eugénie prefers things the way they are. Dodin tries to win her over by cooking for Eugénie instead of the other way around.

This gentle yet passionate and moving film is written and directed by French-Vietnamese filmmaker Trần Anh Hùng, who won the Best Director prize at Cannes in 2023. Sumptuous in its cinematography, The Taste of Things opens with 35 minutes of footage purely focused on the act of making food sans dialogue. And when the dialogue begins to filter through, it is peppered with interesting facts about various figures and luminaries in French culinary history, including a fascinating bit about the creation of the Baked Alaska dessert. We dare you not to get hungry while watching this stylish homage to gastronomy.