Cahiers Again Puts Serra First and Anderson Second

Cahiers du cinéma ranked Albert Serra’s Afternoons of Solitude the best film of 2025, ahead of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, on Nov. 28, 2025. Eighteen staff critics also published signed ballots beside that staff list.

Anderson’s film later won Best Picture at the 98th Academy Awards. The magazine’s order did not move, and Richard Linklater’s film about Jean-Luc Godard shooting Breathless sat at eight.

Cahiers Ranked a Bullfight Over Best Picture

The Catalan director’s first straight nonfiction film follows Peruvian matador Andrés Roca Rey through corridas, hotel rooms, and the car that carries his entourage. Serra had already taken the Golden Shell at San Sebastián on Sept. 28, 2024, after a campaign by the animal-rights group PACMA against the screening. The staff at Cahiers then placed that Spain-France-Portugal film over a Warner Bros. release that would gross $213.1 million worldwide.

The magazine posted its 2025 editorial top 10 the same day it went up on the site. The official account put the Serra still next to the ten titles.

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— Cahiers du cinéma (@cahierscinema) November 28, 2025

THE CAHIERS 2025 COLLECTIVE TEN

Anderson’s film, inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, opened in the United States on Sept. 26, 2025, after a premiere at the TCL Chinese Theatre on Sept. 8. It runs 162 minutes and stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor, and Chase Infiniti. The Academy later gave it 13 nominations and six wins: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor for Penn, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Film Editing, and Best Casting. Cahiers had already filed him second to a bullfight.

Three Critics Put a Botanist Film First

The collective ten is not a raw poll. Read the 18 signed lists and a different year appears. Afternoons of Solitude shows up on 13 of 18 ballots, the widest spread. One Battle After Another appears on 11 of 18. Nadav Lapid’s Yes is on 8 of 18. First-place votes tell another story.

HOW THE SIGNED BALLOTS BROKE

• Widest spread: Afternoons of Solitude is on 13 of 18 critic lists, the most of any title.
• Second spread: One Battle After Another is on 11 of 18 lists and sits second on the staff ranking.
• Most sole first places: 7 Walks with Mark Brown took three outright number-one votes, from Claire Allouche, Olivia Cooper-Hajdian, and Philippe Fauvel.
• Serra at one: Raphael Nieuwjaer and Jean-Marie Samocki put Afternoons of Solitude first on their own; Fernando Ganzo and Charlotte Garson each tied it at the top with another film.

Pierre Creton, a filmmaker and gardener in the Pays de Caux, and the sculptor Vincent Barré spent seven days walking with the British paleobotanist Mark Brown. Their 104-minute film had its world premiere in FID Marseille competition in June 2024, took the CNAP Prize, and opened in France on Jan. 15, 2025. Cooper-Hajdian, who ranked it first, moderated a public talk with the directors and Brown at MK2 Beaubourg the night before that opening.

The film splits in two. “The Shooting” follows the small crew from Aizier to Sainte-Marguerite-sur-Mer as Brown hunts endemic plants for a garden he calls The Dawn of Flowers. “The Herbarium” turns those specimens into 16mm close-ups, with Brown naming each one in a low voice. Creton and Barré have said they see it as a phytocentric road movie, made among friends, including producer Arnaud Dommerc on the walks. Brown had already appeared in Creton’s Un prince, which played Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes in 2023.

On a magazine whose official number one is a corrida, three writers still led with flowers on a Norman cliff.

Afternoons of Solitude Stays Inside the Ring

Serra filmed Roca Rey across 15 fights and refused the usual sermon. Animal-rights groups called the film a romanticized picture of cruelty. Critics who sat through it described a work that also records fear in the hotel room and the chatter of an all-male court in the car. The title nods, whether Serra meant it or not, at Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon. The method is closer to Serra’s earlier features than to television nature film: long takes, little explanation, a body at work.

I would like to thank the protagonists for their open-mindedness in allowing people like us into their world. The film has a genuine side that cannot be found in many other films. Only this kind of daring experimental cinema dares to get to the bottom of an issue like this.

Albert Serra, director, San Sebastián Film Festival

He also told reporters there that the prize recognized a way of filming documentaries that is not obvious, moralist, or childish. Cahiers has long backed that stance. Putting the film at number one, after the Golden Shell and before Anderson’s awards run, is the same bet in a different month.

Yes and The Secret Agent Follow Serra

Lapid’s Yes, titled Oui in France, premiered in Directors’ Fortnight on May 22, 2025, and opened in France on Sept. 17. The 150-minute satire follows Y., a pianist and comic played by Ariel Bronz, who is asked to write a new Israeli anthem after the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks. Lapid, who now lives in Paris, has said the commission let him ask what an artist does when his country is doing its worst. The film is a France-Israel-Cyprus-Germany production. Ariel Schweitzer and Marcos Uzal both put it first on their Cahiers ballots, and the staff ranked it third.

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent, or O Agente Secreto, premiered at Cannes on May 18, 2025, and took Best Director and Best Actor at Cannes for the director and for Wagner Moura, plus the FIPRESCI prize. Set in Recife in 1977, during Brazil’s military dictatorship, it follows Marcelo, an academic trying to reach his son while men hired by a corrupt politician close in. Mendonça Filho has said he wanted to explore how people operate inside an oppressive system, how they resist or submit, in a period when walls had ears. Thierry Méranger and Élodie Tamayo both ranked it first. The staff put it fourth, ahead of Pedro Pinho’s I Only Rest in the Storm, the Portuguese film Cahiers lists in French as Le Rire et le Couteau.

Those three titles, with Serra, make the top five a map of San Sebastián, Cannes, and Directors’ Fortnight. They are not the films that later dominated American awards night. They are the films the magazine’s writers kept in front of them.

Sophie Letourneur Opened Cannes With a Family Trip

L’Aventura opened the ACID parallel section at Cannes in May 2025 and reached French theaters on July 2. Letourneur acts opposite Philippe Katerine in a Sardinian family trip built from her own recordings, then replayed with other performers, including Bérénice Vernet as Claudine. She has described the film as being about the gift of self that comes with being a parent, not about holidays. It is the second part of a couple trilogy after Voyages en Italie. Eight of the 18 critics listed it. The staff ranked it sixth, the highest French fiction on the collective ten.

Laurent dans le vent, the ninth film, is the second feature by Anton Balekdjian, Léo Couture, and Mattéo Eustachon, who met at La CinéFabrique in Lyon. Baptiste Perusat plays Laurent, 29, jobless and unhoused, who lands in an off-season ski town and stays when the tourists arrive. Béatrice Dalle plays Sophia. The film played ACID at Cannes and opened in France on Dec. 31, 2025. Mathilde Grasset put it first. Seven critics listed it. The trio shot in Lyon and at the foot of Alpe d’Huez and cast some local residents after weeks of visits.

Two ACID films in one Cahiers ten is not a festival stunt. It is the magazine’s French year sitting in plain sight, between a Portuguese film and a German one, under an American title about Godard.

Linklater’s Godard Film Finished Eighth

Nouvelle Vague is a 106-minute black-and-white film, shot in the 4:3 ratio and spoken in French, about the making of Breathless. Guillaume Marbeck plays Godard. Zoey Deutch plays Jean Seberg. Aubry Dullin plays Jean-Paul Belmondo. It premiered in Cannes competition on May 17, 2025, then opened in France on Oct. 8 through ARP Sélection. Netflix released it in the United States after a limited theatrical run. Linklater has said that if you do it long enough you can make one film about making films, and that this one is his. Élie Raufaste ranked it first. The staff put it eighth.

The film turns the Cahiers generation into characters. Truffaut, Rivette, Chabrol, and the rest walk through the shoot. The magazine that those men built then filed the Hollywood movie about that birth below a Norman plant walk and a Sardinian family tape. Nouvelle Vague took in $2.5 million at the box office. Anderson’s film took in $213.1 million and the Oscar. Cahiers kept Linklater behind Creton.

At the 51st César Awards, Linklater became the second American filmmaker to win Best Director. That prize also arrived after the list was closed.

What the Collective Ranking Leaves Out

Several films that critics put first never reached the official ten. Vincent Malausa and Yal Sadat both led with Ari Aster’s Eddington. Pierre Eugène led with Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door. Romain Lefebvre led with Radu Jude’s Kontinental’25. Hong Sang-soo, Wes Anderson, Mike Leigh, Carson Lund’s Eephus, and David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds keep showing up on individual lists and stop short of the staff ten. That gap is the magazine doing what it always does: printing the dissent next to the ranking.

THE YEAR THAT FED THE LIST

1. Sept. 28, 2024: Serra wins the Golden Shell at San Sebastián for Afternoons of Solitude.
2. Jan. 15, 2025: 7 Walks with Mark Brown opens in France.
3. May 17, 2025: Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague premieres at Cannes.
4. May 18, 2025: The Secret Agent premieres at Cannes; Mendonça Filho and Moura win their prizes later in the festival.
5. May 22, 2025: Lapid’s Yes premieres in Directors’ Fortnight.
6. Sept. 26, 2025: One Battle After Another opens in the United States.
7. Nov. 28, 2025: Cahiers publishes the 2025 staff ten, with Serra first and Anderson second.
8. 98th Academy Awards: One Battle After Another wins Best Picture, Best Director, and four other Oscars.

The official ten also includes only one film directed by a woman, Letourneur’s L’Aventura. Individual ballots were less closed. Olivia Cooper-Hajdian listed Sepideh Farsi and Eva Victor. Charlotte Garson listed Mona Convert. Mathilde Grasset listed Valentine Cadic. The staff ranking did not carry those names across.

Cahiers locked the order on Nov. 28, 2025. The Academy voted later. Serra is still number one on that list, and Linklater’s Godard remains eighth.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do Cahiers du cinéma critics vote for the top 10?

Each of the 18 writers publishes a signed list of ten films, sometimes with a bonus section for extra titles or older work, and the magazine then prints a separate staff ranking of ten. The 2025 issue names Claire Allouche through Marcos Uzal beside that collective ten; ties on a personal ballot, such as Ganzo’s pairing of José Luis Guerín with Serra, are printed as ties rather than broken.

Which film topped the Cahiers list in 2024?

Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia was number one on the 2024 staff list, ahead of Todd Haynes’s May December, with the ranking posted in late November 2024. Guiraudie had also led the magazine’s year before, with Stranger by the Lake in 2013, so the 2025 turn toward Serra is a change of title, not a change of habit toward French auteur cinema.

What other prizes did Afternoons of Solitude win?

Besides the Golden Shell, the film took the Feroz Zinemaldia critics prize and the Ateneo Guipuzcoano award at San Sebastián, then documentary prizes at Guadalajara and Cartagena that made it eligible for the Academy Awards, and it shared Spain’s Premio Nacional de Tauromaquia 2024. It did not become the Oscars’ documentary story; Cahiers treated it as the year’s best film, full stop.

When did Nouvelle Vague arrive on Netflix in the United States?

After a Cannes premiere on May 17, 2025, and a French theatrical opening on Oct. 8, the film had a limited United States theatrical run from Oct. 31, 2025, then began streaming on Netflix on Nov. 14, 2025, two weeks before Cahiers published the list that ranked it eighth.

Did Richard Linklater win a César Award for Nouvelle Vague?

Yes. At the 51st César Awards he became the second American filmmaker to win Best Director, a French industry prize that arrived after Cahiers had already placed the film eighth behind Serra, Anderson, Lapid, Mendonça Filho, Pinho, Letourneur, and Creton and Barré.