This article is part of Film Comment’s Best of 2025 coverage. Read all the lists here.

Tuktuit (Caribou) (Lindsay McIntyre)

It’s likely the case that there were tens of thousands of short films released into the world this year. (Sundance alone fielded 11,153 short-film submissions.) Naturally, the reader will expect the author of this superlative list to have watched all of them. While that is far from the case, he can honestly claim to have watched hundreds—and certainly at least 10 that are worth your time, and which don’t require much of it. As ever, the following, in no particular order, are proof that brevity poses no limit to cinematic potency.

Caring Cabin (Chelsea McMullan and Douglas Nayler Jr., 12 min)

Prior to receiving a dementia diagnosis, trans icon and singer-songwriter Beverly Glenn-Copeland was in the process of creating a children’s show conceived by his partner Elizabeth Copeland. This glimpse at the project radiates with all the healing energy of Glenn-Copeland’s otherworldly music.

Morning Circle (Basma al-Sharif, 21 min)

The dreariness of exile gives way to hope for the next generation in Berlin-based Palestinian filmmaker al-Sharif’s disarmingly joyful new work.

An Impossible Address (Suneil Sanzgiri, 38 min)

A reflection on the life and legacy of Angolan revolutionary Sita Valles raises the specters of 20th-century Afro-Asian solidarity; the struggle for independence from colonialism; and the painful, enduring complexities of what comes after.

All Said Done (Micah Weber, 22 min)

An intimate interview with the filmmaker’s father forms the core of this abstract masterpiece, which Weber calls “an incomplete image of class relations and affective labor.”

Remote Views (Alexis McCrimmon, 15 min)

A mesmerizing found-footage film transmitting images of Black life as broadcast on television in ’80s America.

Tuktuit (Caribou) (Lindsay McIntyre, 15 min)

Using her own hand-processed celluloid made from caribou skin, McIntyre visualizes the Inuit relationship to land, lichen, and animal life.

We Were the Scenery (Christopher Radcliff, 15 min)

A young couple flee Vietnam and find themselves as extras on the set of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now; years later, they recount the experience.

Fiction Contract (Carolyn Lazard, 10 min)

A birthing simulation plays out with all the emotional stakes of the real thing, raising visceral questions about race, gender, object- and personhood, care, surveillance, and reality.

Carol & Joy (Nathan Silver, 39 min)

Silver’s moving documentary about actress Carol Kane and her mother Joy sits in the tradition of great interview films like Portrait of Jason, Numéro zero, and American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince.

Tessitura (Lydia Cornett and Brit Fryer, 18 min)

An elegant profile of three trans opera singers that conveys the art form’s ecstasy and rebuts conservative assumptions about its nature.

Inney Prakash is a film critic and programmer based in New York City. He is the curator of film at the Asia Society Museum and runs an annual festival called Prismatic Ground.