The Best Historical Movies of 2025
Nothing brings history alive quite like movies, which have the power to shape our understanding of the past as no other medium can. Some of this year’s best movies were works of historical fiction that both depicted actual events from the past and also speculated on others that might have occurred, using varying degrees of creative license to offer new takes on timeless subjects. Here’s a rundown of 2025’s most compelling historical cinema, offering fresh perspectives on the famous and forgotten events of yesteryear.
Hamnet
Though based on a work of fiction, Hamnet is about one of history’s most celebrated figures: William Shakespeare, whose son Hamnet is the namesake of Maggie O’Farrell’s widely acclaimed novel. Hamnet Shakespeare died at the tender age of 11, leading to centuries of speculation as to what effect that tragedy had on his father’s work — especially his magnum opus Hamlet, the title of which is far from a coincidence in this powerful film by Oscar-winning Nomadland director Chloé Zhao. A pair of devastating performances by Paul Mescal as the Bard and Jessie Buckley as his wife Anne (nicknamed Agnes) will get most of the attention throughout awards season, but young Jacobi Jupe is nothing short of princely as Hamnet himself.
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Magellan
Lest you think this is a traditional biopic, know that director Lav Diaz’s movies usually run between four and eight hours long and are considered exemplars of the slow-cinema movement. Magellan is fairly conventional by his standards — it’s a mere 160 minutes and stars an international movie star (Gael García Bernal) in the eponymous role — but it’s still unmistakably a Diaz film. Taking place over the final decade of the circumnavigator’s life and giving an impressionistic account of its subject rather than the usual bullet-point approach taken by most of its genre peers, this is the biopic at its most inventive and experiential.
The Secret Agent
A title card at the beginning of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s latest film introduces it as taking place during “a period of great mischief,” a playfully understated way of describing 1977 Brazil. A brilliant Wagner Moura plays a former teacher who has run afoul of the military dictatorship and is now living in the city of Recife under an assumed name. But The Secret Agent isn’t as grim as it might sound. It could more accurately be called strange, vibrant, and darkly funny — if you had 100 guesses, you’d never figure out how the subplot involving a human leg found inside a shark resolves itself. That the movie does all of this without being flippant or making light of its subject matter is truly impressive, and likely part of why The Secret Agent is the rare film to have won not one but two awards at the Cannes Film Festival: Best Director and Best Actor.
Sound of Falling
Mascha Schilinski’s astonishing sophomore feature is a time-traversal drama that takes a familiar premise and turns it into something startlingly original. Spanning more than a century but never leaving its single physical setting of a rural German farmhouse, the film — which follows the lives of four interconnected women who are only vaguely aware of their links to one another, like phantom limbs that carry the attendant pain — often jumps from one timeline to another so seamlessly that you don’t even realize it, alternating between the early 20th century, the World War II era, East Germany in the 1980s, and the present day. Watching the movie is a bit like sitting outside as it gets dark on a summer night and seeing fireflies blink in and out of view: Each small moment captures your full attention and leaves an afterimage that you can still see when you close your eyes.
Train Dreams
A literary adaptation of Denis Johnson’s lyrical novella of the same name, Train Dreams is an ode to an America that no longer exists. A never-better Joel Edgerton stars as Robert Grainier, who spends most of his adult life working on the railroad all the live-long day. “Though he didn’t know it then,” the narrator says early on, when Robert marries a woman named Gladys (Felicity Jones) and has a daughter, “he would always look back on this time in his life as the happiest.” Clint Bentley’s understated drama is more melancholic than happy, but there’s true beauty in its depiction of early-2oth-century Idaho.
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