O melhor de 2025

10

Sinners (Pecadores, 2025) de Ryan Coogler 

The Shrouds (As Mortalhas, 2024) de David Cronenberg 

Nosferatu (2024) de Robert Eggers  

Weapons (Hora do Desaparecimento, 2025) de Zach Cregger 

Bring Her Back (Volta Para Mim, 2025) de Danny and Michael Philippou 

Presence (A Presença, 2024) de Steven Soderbergh 

The Ugly Stepsister (A Meia-Irmã Feia, 2025) de Emilie Blichfeldt 

28 Years Later (28 Anos Depois, 2025) de Danny Boyle 

Eddington (2025) de Ari Aster 

The Long Walk (O Desafio, 2025) de Francis Lawrence

+ 10

Sirât (2025) de Oliver Laxe

Qingchun (Juventude, 2023-2024) de Wang Bing

A House of Dynamite (Prestes a Explodir, 2025) de Kathryn Bigelow

Misericordia (2024) de Alain Guiraudie

Kuraudo (Cloud, 2024) de Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Tardes de soledad (Tardes de Solidão, 2024) de Albert Serra

O Agente Secreto (2025) de Kleber Mendonça Filho

Gouzhen (Cão Preto, Guan Hu, 2024)

Mickey 17 (Bong Joon Ho, 2025)

Eojjeolsuga eobsda (No Other Choice, 2025) de Park Chan-wook

++ 10

IT: Welcome to Derry (Andy Muschietti, Barbara Muschietti, Jason Fuchs, 2025)

Adolescence (Jack Thorne, Stephen Graham, 2025)

Monster: The Ed Gein Story (Ryan Murphy, Ian Brennan, 2025)

Pluribus (Vince Gilligan, 2025)

Alien: Earth (Noah Hawley, 2025)

Paradise (Dan Fogelman, 2025)

Zero Day (Eric Newman, Noah Oppenheim, Michael Schmidt, 2025)

Mussolini: Son of the Century (Joe Wright)

Severance (Dan Erickson, 2025)

Andor (Tony Gilroy, 2025) 

+++ 3

Cinema Experimental Português: O Cinema dos Artistas, Anos 60 e 70 (Cinemateca Portuguesa)

Mestres Japoneses Desconhecidos IV (The Stone and The Plot)

Malamor / Tainted Love – Realizadores Convidados: João Pedro Rodrigues e João Rui Guerra da Mata (Cinemateca Portuguesa)

//

O Melhor Terror de 2018

 

 James Benning, L. Cohen, 2018

The analogy frequently invoked between films and dreams is usually concerned with the experience of the audience. The spectator sits in darkness, and the sort of involvement the entertainment film invites necessitates a certain switching-off of consciousness, a losing of oneself in a fantasy-experience. But the analogy is also useful from the point of view of the filmmakers. Dreams — the embodiment of repressed desires, tensions, fears that our conscious mind rejects become possible when the "censor" that guards our subconscious relaxes in sleep, though even then the desires can only emerge in disguise, as fantasies that are 'innocent" or apparently meaningless.

One of the functions of the concept of "entertainment" — by definition, that which we don't take seriously, or think about much ("It's only entertainment”) — is to act as a kind of partial sleep of consciousness. For the filmmakers as well as for the audience, full awareness stops at the level of plot, action, and character, in which the most dangerous and subversive implications can disguise themselves and escape detection. This is why seemingly innocuous genre movies can be far more radical and fundamentally undermining than works of conscious social criticism, which must always concern themselves with the possibility of reforming aspects of a social system whose basic rightness must not be challenged. The old tendency to dismiss the Hollywood cinema as escapist always defined escape from, but escape logically must also be escape to. Dreams are also escapes, from the unresolved tensions of our lives into fantasies. Yet the fantasies are not meaningless; they can represent attempts to resolve those tensions in more radical ways than our consciousness can countenance.

Popular films, then, respond to interpretation as at once the personal dreams of their makers and the collective dreams of their audiences — the fusion made possible by the shared structures of a common ideology. It becomes easy, if this is granted, to offer a simple definition of horror films: they are our collective nightmares. The conditions under which a dream becomes a nightmare are (a) that the repressed wish is, from the point of view of consciousness, so terrible that it must be repudiated as loathsome, and (b) that it is so strong and powerful as to constitute a serious threat. The disreputability noted — the general agreement that horror above films are not to be taken seriously — works clearly for the genre viewed from this position. The censor (in both the common and the Freudian sense) is lulled into sleep and relaxes vigilance.

Robin Wood, American nightmare: essays on the horror film, 1979.
Editado por Robin Wood e Richard Lippe. 

18

James Benning, L. Cohen
Yann Gonzalez, Un couteau dans le coeur
Juliana Rojas, Marco Dutra, As Boas Maneiras
Ari Aster, Hereditary
Lars von Trier, The House That Jack Built
François Simard, Anouk Whissell, Yoann-Karl Whissell, Summer of 84 
Andy Mitton, The Witch in the Window
Johannes Roberts, The Strangers: Prey at Night 
John Krasinski, A Quiet Place
Shinichiro Ueda, Kamera o tomeru na! (One Cut of the Dead)
Joachim Trier, Thelma
Cory Finley, Thoroughbreds
Mike Flanagan, The Haunting of Hill House 
Coralie Fargeat, Revenge 
Duncan Skiles, The Clovehitch Killer
Justin Benson, The Endless
David Gordon Green, Halloween
Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Sanpo suru shinryakusha (Before We Vanish)

//

The suburbs

Summer of 84 (François Simard, Anouk Whissell, Yoann-Karl Whissell, 2018) 

You never know what might be coming around the corner.
And that's the thing about this place.
It all might seem normal and routine,
but the truth is the suburbs are where the craziest shit happens.

Just past the manicured lawns and friendly waves.
Inside any house, even the one next door,
anything could be happening and you'd never know.
If I've learned anything, it's that people hardly ever let you know who they really are.
Tough pill to swallow, I know. But it's true.
Even serial killers live next door to somebody.

//