Beyond the blockbuster: 25 intriguing, under-the-radar films to watch out for in 2025 | Canada Voices

Thanks to the after-effects of the 2023 Hollywood strikes, the past 12 months at the cinema felt a bit … off. And after a quick glance at the 2025 calendar, the major studios still seem to be in recovery mode, reverting to familiar franchises and wan high-concept pitches. But not all hope is lost. Here are 25 movies for 2025 that promise originality, depth, and vision outside of the blockbuster machine.

There was a moment during this past September’s Toronto International Film Festival in which it looked like William Goldenberg’s underdog sports drama might have landed the fest’s coveted People’s Choice Award. Unstoppable checked all the boxes: a fantastic lead performance from Jharrel Jerome as Anthony Robles, an NCAA wrestling champ who took on all comers despite being born with only one leg, plus starry supporting turns from Jennifer Lopez as Robles’s mom, and Don Cheadle as his coach. And then there are the film’s remarkable visual effects, which digitally erase Jerome’s real right leg – proof that the best VFX work goes unnoticed. Yet after Unstoppable left TIFF empty-handed, MGM Amazon seemed to forget about the movie entirely. Don’t make the same mistake. (Streaming on Prime Video starting Jan. 16)

Last Days

After spending more than a decade of his life rewiring the Fast & Furious franchise to unprecedented action-movie heights, director Justin Lin returns to his indie-film roots with this drama tracing the story of real-life missionary John Allen Chau (Sky Yang), whose visit to an isolated tribe living on an island in the Indian Ocean sparks a series of crises. Twenty years ago, Lin took his crime thriller Better Luck Tomorrow to the Sundance Film Festival and sparked a mini-revolution whose reverberations can still be felt today. Here’s hoping that the mountain-air lighting strikes twice. (Premiering at Sundance Film Festival late January; general release date to be determined)

Almost entirely shot and set in a frigid and brutalist Winnipeg – or at least an imaginary version of it that feels equal parts Manitoban and Iranian – Universal Language is inspired by writer-director Matthew Rankin’s lifelong fascination with the gentle-touch cinema of such Iranian masters as Abbas Kiarostami. But there is something so distinctly Canadian about the entire affair – which the other week got shortlisted for the 2025 Academy Award for Best International Film – that it feels both homegrown and international at the same time. A hundred bonus points for the most inventive use of Burton Cummings in any movie, ever. (Opens in Winnipeg Jan. 24 before expanding to other Canadian cities)

The Woman in the Yard and Cliffhanger

If you are one of the many millions and millions of Netflix subscribers who watched the airport-set thriller Carry-On over the holidays, then you know just how entertainingly unhinged director Juame Collet-Serra can be when given just the right sort of pulpy genre material. And this year will give audiences a double dose of JCS madness with both The Woman in the Yard, which seems to be a return to House of Wax/Orphan-style horror for the filmmaker, and the director’s remake of Cliffhanger on the calendar. While Sylvester Stallone sits out the latter title, JCS has roped in an intriguing high-low mix of performers for this new journey up the mountain, including Lily James, Pierce Brosnan and Franz Rogowski. (The Woman in the Yard opens March 28; Cliffhanger’s release date is TBD)

Presence and Black Bag

Add Steven Soderbergh to the list as another filmmaker pulling double duty in 2025. First up is Presence, a uniquely styled haunted-house tale that is told entirely from the perspective of the occupying spirit. Slick, inventive, and with a standout performance from Chris Sullivan as a father fighting demons far larger than some pesky ghost, the film is essentially Soderbergh’s answer to Poltergeist. And just two months after that movie opens, the director delivers his own version of Mr. & Mrs. Smith with Black Bag, a thriller starring Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett as married spies who share a bed, but not necessarily their secrets. (Presence opens in January; Black Bag opens in March)

Finally making its way to the screen after years of development, noted television director R.T. Thorne’s feature debut is top-tier genre Trojan-horsing that puts it in league with such homegrown thrillers as Blood Quantum. Set in a future where food is dwindling and farming is the only means of survival, 40 Acres blends furious social commentary with blood-soaked action, all shot with an eye for beautiful rot. And star Danielle Deadwyler is so fierce in her lead role that I was genuinely concerned about the actress’s resting heart rate. (In theatres this March)

David Cronenberg, Canada’s greatest living filmmaker, is back with The Shrouds, a thriller that digs into the mystery that has haunted much of the director’s canon: death itself. Starring his Eastern Promises and A Dangerous Method collaborator Vincent Cassel, Cronenberg’s new film follows Karsh, a Toronto businessman whose company GraveTech has revolutionized the act of mourning. Before going six feet under, GraveTech’s deceased clients are covered in a high-tech cloth that allows loved ones to monitor the decay of the body in real time. But after the grave of his wife is desecrated, Karsh – alongside his former sister-in-law (Diane Kruger) and her ex-husband (Guy Pearce) – falls into an existential journey of reality, memory, sex, and the expiration date that we are all staring down. (Release date TBD)

Untitled Nirvanna the Band the Show Movie

Around this time last year, I originally-slash-naively had this comedy pegged as a 2024 release. But I’m now confident that director Matt Johnson’s follow-up to his smash hit BlackBerry will make landfall this year. Returning to his smaller (but no less prankish) roots with a movie based on his cult-favourite series Nirvanna the Band the Show, Johnson reteams with his usual collaborators (co-star and composer Jay McCarrol, producer Matthew Miller, cinematographer Jared Raab) to lead a Canadian-flavoured Harold & Kumar-style road comedy about two wannabe rock stars whose hare-brained schemes to play local Toronto haunt The Rivoli spiral wildly out of control. Having visited the set this past spring, I can promise both fans and NTBTS newbies alike that something extraordinary this way comes. (Release date TBD)

Mile End Kicks

After delivering the breakout hit of the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival with her feature debut I Like Movies – currently the favourite film of Japan’s video-game titan/noted cinephile Hideo Kojima – filmmaker (and freelance Globe and Mail film critic) Chandler Levack returns with this romcom that follows a twentysomething music critic (Euphoria’s Barbie Ferreira) as she tries to make sense of the Montreal rock scene circa 2011. Costarring Jay Baruchel, Devon Bostick, and Juliette Gariépy, Mile End Kicks sounds like it deserves the holy trifecta of the era: competing cover stories from the Montreal Mirror, NOW Magazine, and Eye Weekly, were any of those alt-weekly publications still existing. (Release date TBD)

The Land of Nod

After Edmonton’s Kyle Edward Ball creeped out the entire world with his $15,000 horror experiment Skinamarink, the director levels up exponentially with this A24-distributed thriller, which also boasts the genre bona fides of producers Elijah Wood and Josh Safdie. No plot details are available as of yet – not that the minimalist Skinamarink exactly leant itself to a tidy synopsis, either. (Release date TBD)

Sacrifice

If you haven’t yet watched Romain Gavras’s arresting 2022 French epic Athena, then stop reading this article and head to Netflix right this second to take it in – truly, I won’t take offence. Are you back? If so, then you now know why all eyes should be trained on Gavras’s English-language follow-up, which stars Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Evans, Vincent Cassel and John Malkovich in a thriller about a charity event that is upended by a group of extremists. (Release date TBD)

Anemone

Just like the aforementioned Soderbergh, who about a decade ago declared he was going to retire from filmmaking only to come back stronger than ever, Daniel Day-Lewis cannot seem to grasp the concept of sitting on a beach. After vaguely promising to leave acting after his 2017 romance Phantom Thread, Day-Lewis returns for an understandable enough reason: to lead the cast of the debut feature film from his son, director Ronan Day-Lewis. Details are so far scarce, but the family affair seems to revolve around, surprise, a generational conflict between fathers and sons. (Release date TBD)

Untitled Paul Thomas Anderson Movie

Speaking of Phantom Thread: Cinema’s current master auteur Paul Thomas Anderson returns this year with a mystery project that is either a drama, a crime thriller, a comedy, or all three. Whatever the mix ends up being, Anderson has collaborated for the first time with Leonardo DiCaprio for the project, while also filling in the margins with such familiar P.T.A. faces as Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, and Licorice Pizza star Alana Haim. (In theatres Aug. 8)

Ann Lee

After making the very best film of 2024 with The Brutalist, partners in art and life Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet are set to make a speedy return to the art house with this “epic fable” musical following the founding leader of the Shaker Movement. Amanda Seyfried stars in the title role, while The Brutalist composer Daniel Blumberg returns to handle the score. (Release date TBD)

Speaking of Amanda Seyfried, her lead turn in Atom Egoyan’s opera-world thriller finally looks like it will be getting a theatrical release this spring after premiering at TIFF back in 2023. At once a heady psychological drama and a beguiling act of artistic reminiscence, Seven Veils follows a relatively neophyte director (Seyfried) who is charged with remounting her late mentor’s production of Richard Strauss’s Salomé at an organization that highly resembles the Canadian Opera Company, the very same place where Egoyan staged his own version of Salomé back in 1996. And the reunions don’t end there, as Seyfried of course starred in Egoyan’s 2009 erotic thriller Chloe. (In theatres March)

Equal parts Evil Dead, The Blob, Gremlins, and American Pie, the latest film from American genre provocateur Joseph Kahn (Detention, Bodied) smooshes together incendiary satire with sticky gore to wildly entertaining effect. As much a deeply affectionate love letter to ‘80s-era horror-comedies as it is a synapse-stretching exercise in defiant maximalism, the creature feature starring Brandon Routh (in peak Bruce Campbell mode) is a true ride designed to hold, thrill, kiss and kill you. (Release date TBD)

The Toxic Avenger

After debuting to acclaim at Austin’s genre-centric Fantastic Fest way back in September of 2023, director Macon Blair’s reboot of the grade-Z Troma Studios touchstone The Toxic Avenger seems frustratingly stuck in its own kind of radioactive situation. Perhaps this will be the year, though, that Toxie 2.0 – starring Kevin Bacon, Taylour Paige, Jacob Tremblay, and, in the title role, Peter Dinklage – finally sees the neon-green light of day. (Release date TBD)

After the Hunt

Director Luca Guadagnino started off 2024 strong with the tennis love-triangle Challengers, before exiting the year with a slight whimper thanks to the too-quiet reception to his Daniel Craig-starring drama Queer. But before anyone can possibly accuse the Italian filmmaker of slagging off, Guadagnino is set to take over the cultural conversation once more with this college-set thriller starring Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield, and Chloë Sevigny. (Release date TBD)

Untitled Matt Stone/Trey Parker Comedy

Next month, hip-hop superstar Kendrick Lamar will humiliate Canada’s Drake in an unprecedented global fashion when the rapper headlines the 2025 Super Bowl halftime show – where, in all likelihood, he will unleash his chart-topping Drake diss track “Not Like Us.” But it’s anyone’s guess whether Lamar will continue to hound Degrassi’s own Aubrey Graham when he stars in a new untitled comedy from the South Park team of Matt Stone and Trey Parker. The premise is certainly provocative enough to make even the most hardcore Drake track seem like a nursery rhyme: Lamar plays a Black actor whose life – both in his job as a slave re-enactor and his romance with a white woman – is torn asunder upon learning that his girlfriend’s ancestors once owned his family in the Deep South. (In theatres July 4)

Korean-Canadian filmmaker Celine Song is about to learn about the unbearable weight of massive expectations when she follows up her feature debut, 2023’s Past Lives, with another tale of a love triangle. This time, Song has enlisted Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, and Pedro Pascal to star, and all signs point to a lighter comedic touch than Past Live’s tear-stained drama. (Release date TBD)

No Other Choice

Years before they collaborated on the wonderfully layered and loopy 2024 HBO miniseries The Sympathizer, Korean director Park Chan-wook and Canadian Renaissance man Don McKellar tried to get an adaptation of Donald Westlake’s novel The Ax into development. And now, they’ve chopped down enough roadblocks to make it to the screen, with this Korean-language adaptation following a man (played by Lee Byung-hun) who goes to violent extremes after he gets fired from his job. (Release date TBD)

Paper Tiger

James Gray’s 2022 autobiographical drama Armageddon Time unfortunately, tragically got lost in that year’s awards-season shuffle. So here is hoping that this new Gray effort makes the leap from the New York director’s dedicated fan base to the wider world. The story follows two brothers who pursue the American dream – a logline that could describe the filmmaker’s entire canon, but most notably harks back to his 2007 masterpiece We Own the Night. And in an added bonus, the director has reunited with his Armageddon Time stars, Jeremy Strong and Anne Hathaway. (Release date TBD)

Weapons

Zach Cregger’s follow-up to his surprise 2022 horror-comedy sensation Barbarian is, at the moment, scheduled as a 2026 release. But I’ll place good money – enough to buy a dilapidated Detroit home, Barbarian style – that this thriller starring Josh Brolin and Julia Garner that follows the disappearance of a group of suburban schoolchildren shifts to this year. (In theatres Jan. 16, 2026, but … stay tuned)