Political Pandora’s Best of the Year So Far
- Pandora Editorial Staff
- Aug 6
- 9 min read
From subversive thrillers to gothic-pop odysseys, Pandora’s entertainment staff weighs in on the films and albums that have defined 2025 so far. Here are our mid-year favourites, spotlighting the boldest, strangest and most unforgettable works of the year.
Staff Pick - Best Movie: Sinners, dir. Ryan Coogler
Sinners is indisputably the film of the moment. As has been covered previously by Pandora, there was a brief, flailing attempt by mainstream news outlets like Variety to tamp down on it, as they were wary of an original, Black-focused story achieving such success, but even they were eventually cowed by the sheer public enthusiasm for this film.
The film engages with heavy ideas about identity and culture, but it does so on its own terms, in its way. It refutes easy categorisation, which might be the ultimate Coogler touch – a film that looks easily digestible on the surface, but which contains multitudes and nuances that thwart simple readings. It’s a great horror picture, playing with weighty themes and ideas while never sacrificing its sense of fun.
From Sam Stashower
Staff Writer
Best Film: Black Bag, dir. Steven Soderbergh
Steven Soderbergh released two movies this year – the ghost story Presence and the spy thriller Black Bag. Unlike Sinners, which captured audience attention and had huge box office numbers, Black Bag got headlines for the fact that no one saw it, which is a shame because in a moviegoing landscape increasingly proliferated by artless studio hackery, Soderbergh’s modest competence stands out more than ever.
Black Bag is centred around intelligence agents whose marriage and loyalties are tested in a sharp thriller. I really admired how well the movie functions as a Rorschach test – for the majority of the runtime, the camera clinically and dispassionately shows us the actions of various spies of questionable loyalties, and leaves it to us to decipher their motives, being tripped up by our assumptions and biases.
Best Album: GOLLIWOG by Billy Woods
For all intents and purposes, Billy Woods’ GOLLIWOG is a horror movie in album form. There’s a constant, throbbing undercurrent of tension throughout the album, with songs that reference horror movie icons – zombies, cannibals (metaphorical or otherwise), autopsies and “storm drains full of clowns” – or more modern horrors. Standout track Corinthians explicitly confronts issues of current affairs like AI and the genocide in the Gaza Strip. Similarly, All These Worlds Are Yours references drone strikes. But oftentimes it’s the production itself that manages to convey dread – “Waterproof Mascara,” the highlight of the entire album, is underscored by constant crying.
Anticipated Piece: Highest 2 Lowest, dir. Spike Lee
In terms of movies I’m looking forward to, I’m tempted to stick with horror movies and go with Weapons, but the trouble is, I know literally nothing about what that movie’s about, and I intend to keep it that way. I’m still chasing that Barbarian high from a few years ago, I guess. So instead, I’m going with Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest. The prospect of a director like Lee tackling a loose remake of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low, a thriller that centres around a kidnapping, is extremely exciting, even before you get to this being the first re-team between the director and star Denzel Washington in almost 20 years.
From Anish Paranjape
Associate Editor (Entertainment)
Best Movie: Materialists, dir. Celine Song
Celine Song's Materialists is rife with contradictions, which strangely emerge as its greatest strength. It is a romantic drama that weaponises the very genre conventions it appears to embrace, transforming what could have been another algorithmic love triangle into a charming meditation on love and relationships under late capitalism. While 2025 has delivered spectacle in the new Mission: Impossible instalment, and franchise extensions in James Gunn’s Superman, none possess the earnest spirit of Song's sophomore effort.
Materialists demands a more uncomfortable recognition of ourselves in its protagonists' clinical calculus of romance and their honesty about the transactional nature of modern relationships. Song's achievement lies not simply in her direction but in her creation of a script that functions simultaneously as entertainment and autopsy, dissecting the notions of romantic idealism with precision while somehow managing to perhaps spark the most subtle of revivals for the dormant genre. Materialists is brave enough to ask whether love can survive commodification, and wise enough to suggest that perhaps the question itself is the answer.
Best Album: Mayhem by Lady Gaga
Continuing in the incredible precedent set by 2024, this year has also seen a slew of major artists release new music and expand their bodies of work to critical and fan acclaim. 2025 has seen great albums from the likes of Lorde, Haim, Pinkpantheress, The Weeknd and even Addison Rae. To me, however, Lady Gaga’s Mayhem stands as the most daring and exhilarating album of the year so far, a gothic-palatial odyssey through the fractured terrain of fame, self-invention and identity that only she could conceive. A return to form and to the avant-garde Gaga of old.
From the industrial thunder of lead singles to the baroque disco of the album’s deep cuts, Gaga channels the spectres of Bowie, NIN, and late-’70s punk with a precision that feels less pastiche than excavation, unearthing the primal urgency beneath every pop veneer. The monochrome audio-visual conception of the album, with splices of distortion evoking an empty cathedral rave, mirrors its thematic exploration of duality and reconciling divergent parts of oneself, where chaos and control, along with vulnerability and shimmering spectacle, coalesce in a singular form, Gaga herself.
What truly cements Mayhem’s supremacy, however, is Gaga’s uncanny ability to transform personal anxiety into collective ecstasy through performance, exemplified by her enthralling and record-breaking Rio headline act and the start of the worldwide Mayhem Ball.
Anticipated Piece: After the Hunt, dir. Luca Guadagnino
Luca Guadagnino has been on the run of a lifetime. After 2017’s Call Me By Your Name, 2018’s Suspiria remake, 2022’s Bones and All and last year’s incredible Challengers and Queer, his 2025 release, After the Hunt, is my most anticipated piece of media for the remainder of the year.
The film is perhaps this year’s most electrifying prospect not simply because it reunites Guadagnino’s genius with cinema’s enduring icon, Julia Roberts, but because it promises a searing excavation of power and memory at the heart of a university campus tinged by scandal. Poised to open the New York Film Festival after premiering at Venice, the film’s whispered tension, added to with performances from Ayo Edebiri and Andrew Garfield, suggests a web of moral complexity in which desire and power intersect.
From Ganim Singh
Staff Writer
Best Movie: Dilli Dark, dir. Dibakar Das Roy
Away from the Instagram reels and Pinterest posts that romanticise Delhi, Dilli Dark is a dark comedic commentary on the seedy underbelly of my beloved city. It showcases Delhi’s levels of discrimination and corruption explicitly through the plot, but also implicitly through expertly executed directions.
The most important motif that is present throughout the film is that of ‘light’, and it is used to illuminate everything from the time of day, the morality of actions, the color of skin, the legality of money, the nature of people, and a plethora of other themes. Even months after watching this, it still resonates with me. This should not be a surprise; it has been going around the world, premiering at countless film festivals, from the New York African Film Festival in 2024 to the Indo-German Film Week in Berlin just a few weeks ago.
Best Album: Gaddabout Season by Brandee Younger
While the contemporary jazz scene is majorly populated with takes on bebop or funk, this album changes the tide and explores spiritual jazz. The defining feature of this adventure is Younger’s ethereal harp, an unpopular instrument in popular music and even jazz to an extent.
Through the leading melodic harp and the complex rhythms and harmonies, Younger makes the intention behind this album explicit. It is purely the search for happiness and contentment amidst backing complexities. In fact, that is also the meaning of gadabout: someone who adventures in search of pleasure. The optimism behind this piece, along with its distinctiveness, makes it one of my favourite albums so far. It projects serenity in a turbulent world and externalizes contentment.
Anticipated Piece: september 29th, 2024 by picture frames
As to the piece I am most looking forward to, it is Shaan Chhadva’s next album, under his project titled Picture Frames. To contextualise the premise of Picture Frames, it is a musical time capsule released yearly. Where each album is created in one day, named after the date it is recorded on; and each track is recorded in one single unedited take, named after the exact time its recording starts. All of this is directly recorded on a vintage tape machine that embraces music’s raw imperfection.
His music is often a form of ambient music; through its sustained chords and tones and textural melodies, it holds the listener’s attention. It brings about a reflective mood and subtextually reveals the emotions of the artist himself. While following other projects of Chhadva, such as Ornithology, SCayos and B9, I have found myself enamoured by it all. What started as a desire to delve into Ornithology’s Chet Baker Reimagined album turned into an obsession with all his music projects. Thus, his next album from Picture Frames is one I am on the lookout for, to discover what emotions it holds in store for us.
From Krish Agarwal
Staff Writer
Best Movie: How to Train Your Dragon, dir. Dean DeBlois
While most critics have panned the recent Disney live-action remakes, How to Train Your Dragon attempts just that with surprising success. Instead of twisting characters or forcing in awkward modern dynamics, the movie sticks to its original animated classic and actually benefits from it. The emotion still lands, the visuals are stunning without feeling overdone, and Toothless somehow looks even more expressive in live action. It doesn’t try to be bigger or smarter than the original, which is probably why it works. It knows what it is and doesn’t mess with it, which, at this point, feels like a minor miracle.
Best Album: Parasomnia by Dream Theatre
For music, I’ve only recently started exploring Dream Theatre beyond their more well-known tracks like Forsaken and The Spirit Carries On, and so, Parasomnia has quickly become my favourite album of 2025. There’s something oddly captivating about how it blends intense, almost chaotic instrumentals with these dreamlike, eerie themes around sleep and the subconscious. Even though I’m not usually into progressive metal, the storytelling on this album pulled me in: it feels more like a journey than a set of songs. Some tracks are heavy and complex, but there are also moments of calm and reflection that caught me off guard in the best way. Parasomnia feels like a soundtrack to some weird, vivid dream I didn’t know I had, and that’s exactly why it’s my favourite album of the year.
Sam Stashower is a recent graduate student and a writer at Political Pandora. He has contributed film reviews and pop culture analysis to The Quindecim (Goucher College) and The Eagle (American University). A devoted media enthusiast, he can—and inevitably will—find a way to connect everything he watches, listens to, or reads back to Star Trek.
Anish Paranjape (he/him) is a student of Public Policy and the Associate Editor (Entertainment) at Political Pandora where he leads the Entertainment Department. His research interests encompass global policy and its influence on various landscapes, as well as an interest in film, and pop culture.
Ganim Singh is an undergraduate History major and a writer at Political Pandora. An amateur saxophonist with a love for jazz and its theory, they have a deep appreciation for film, television, and other media. Their writing explores the historical and sociopolitical contexts of their subjects, drawing connections that illuminate broader cultural narratives.
Krish Agarwal is a writer at Political Pandora’s Entertainment Department and a current high school student.
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Keywords: Best Movies 2025, Top Albums 2025, Must Watch Films 2025, Best Horror Films 2025, Lady Gaga New Album, Billy Woods GOLLIWOG Review, Spike Lee New Movie, After The Hunt Trailer, Materialists Movie Review, Sinners Ryan Coogler Analysis, Underrated Films 2025, Best Jazz Albums 2025, Live Action How To Train Your Dragon, Picture Frames Album Concept, Steven Soderbergh Black Bag
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