It’s time for the most prestigious vote of awards season: The Garden Cinema annual staff picks poll! Our team has voted on their favourite films, new and old, from our 2025 programme, with the winning selections returning to our screens during the festive break.
New releases
Immediately stretching the definition of ‘new’, our winning film is the restoration of Satoshi Kon’s venerable and mind-melting anime classic, Perfect Blue. Japanese dystopian cinema clearly struck a chord this year as Neo Sora’s powerful riposte to near-future authoritarianism, Happyend, is our runner-up. And another fiction feature debut, India Donaldson’s soothing yet disturbing Good One, completes our selection.
Classics
Our top two picks from our 2025 seasons return us to our summer of Noir International. Wim Wenders’ playful and sinister (mainly due to Dennis Hopper’s Tom Ripley) Patricia Highsmith adaptation, The American Friend, is our winner, with Elio Petri’s absurd social satire, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, finishing runner-up. And finally, the very seasonally appropriate, and ever spellbinding, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg remerges from our springtime survey of Jacques Demy, to complete our line-up.
