In 2025, as International Coverage expanded its movie and tv protection, it appeared that the geopolitical turbulence of latest years lastly made its approach to the massive display screen. This yr’s standard titles felt extra internationally minded than earlier ones, maybe reflecting a public want to higher perceive our risky world. Fortunately, FP contributors had been as much as the duty of critiquing these movies and unpacking their classes for at this time’s world thinker.
So seize your popcorn—and perhaps a notepad, as a result of the opinions beneath are certain to show you one thing new in regards to the world, whether or not they’re unraveling the tensions on the coronary heart of German safety debates or exploring what Superman might need to say in regards to the Trump administration’s international coverage.
In 2025, as International Coverage expanded its movie and tv protection, it appeared that the geopolitical turbulence of latest years lastly made its approach to the massive display screen. This yr’s standard titles felt extra internationally minded than earlier ones, maybe reflecting a public want to higher perceive our risky world. Fortunately, FP contributors had been as much as the duty of critiquing these movies and unpacking their classes for at this time’s world thinker.
So seize your popcorn—and perhaps a notepad, as a result of the opinions beneath are certain to show you one thing new in regards to the world, whether or not they’re unraveling the tensions on the coronary heart of German safety debates or exploring what Superman might need to say in regards to the Trump administration’s international coverage.
1. It’s (Nonetheless) Henry Kissinger’s World
By Julian E. Zelizer, Oct. 24
Lengthy earlier than his loss of life in 2023, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s legacy was already a controversial topic of debate: Was he an excellent diplomat, or a struggle legal? Kissinger, a two-part documentary launched this yr, “gives a refreshing different to the black-and-white lens by means of which many have debated his profession,” FP columnist Julian E. Zelizer writes.
From his childhood in an observant Jewish family in Weimar Germany to his peak affect on the worldwide stage, the movie examines the experiences that formed Kissinger and the way he, in flip, formed the worldview of generations of elected officers that adopted. It doesn’t draw back, nonetheless, from the devastation his realpolitik wrought in locations similar to Chile and Cambodia: “Not solely did he settle for rampant political violence and repression however crafted international insurance policies that strengthened these very forces,” Zelizer writes. “In doing so, his insurance policies intensified the precise sort of instability that he promised to keep away from.”
2. ‘September 5’ and the Pitfalls of German Idealism
By Allison Meakem, Feb. 27
The 1972 Munich Olympics bloodbath was not solely the largest tragedy in Olympic historical past—it was additionally the primary act of terrorism that the world watched in actual time, broadcast on tv.
September 5 is a fictional rendering of this harrowing hostage disaster from inside a chaotic ABC newsroom, whose staffers largely battle to fathom Germany’s lack of safety measures and armed police. It’s a deft media research, FP’s Allison Meakem writes, but additionally a revealing take a look at a basic stress in German safety coverage that endures to this present day: “When a lot of the nation’s historical past is rooted in army and police atrocities, how can fashionable Germany appropriate course whereas nonetheless assuming the essential defensive obligations of a state?”
3. Putin vs. the Press
By Anastasia Edel, Oct. 3
Olga Churakova, a topic within the documentary My Undesirable Pals, was once in Russia’s presidential press pool, again when it allowed impartial media. Now she is taken into account a international agent and lives in exile.Movie nonetheless from My Undesirable Pals.
Press freedoms had been actually on the thoughts this yr, notably for these of us dwelling in america. The documentary My Undesirable Pals: Half I – Final Air in Moscow serves as a warning of how rapidly a free press could be dismantled. It’s an intimate and chilling glimpse into Russia’s crackdown on the fourth property main as much as its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
The movie follows a gaggle of impartial feminine journalists “whose job is to inform the reality in a spot the place reality has been banned,” social historian Anastasia Edel writes. Although burdened by their designation as international brokers, they’re fearless, defiant, and decided to proceed their work. Edel’s assessment manages to seize simply how compelling and harrowing their story is: “It’s without delay a feminine odyssey, a historic document, and a tough take a look at an unraveling society on the sting of the abyss.”
4. Superman the Interventionist
By Jordan Hoffman, July 11
“It’s a hen, it’s a airplane—it’s the definitive popular culture consultant of American exceptionalism!” Together with his attribute humor, movie critic Jordan Hoffman opinions the blockbuster hit that was this yr’s Superman film. Although lighter fare than the others on this listing, it’s a surprisingly insightful look into the historical past behind the world’s most well-known superhero.
Created by two first-generation Jewish People, the unique Superman character was “a fantasy model of the American Dream” grounded within the Jewish and immigrant expertise. In U.S. President Donald Trump’s second time period, this symbolism has taken on new resonance. So too have Superman’s “interventionist” tendencies: Relying in your viewpoint, when Superman flies in and destroys a international nation’s tanks with out a single casualty, he “is both stepping as much as a heroism the U.S. authorities has no abdomen for, or is utilizing his may unilaterally with out authorities oversight,” Hoffman writes.
If nothing else, the film is bound to spark some debates with the foreign-policy wonks in your life.
5. What Occurs to China’s Surplus Males?
By Drew Gorman, Dec. 12
It’s laborious sufficient to seek out love, not to mention when the demographic odds are stacked towards you. The Relationship Sport is a documentary that follows a gaggle of Chinese language bachelors struggling to navigate the courting world within the wake of the one-child coverage. To enhance their prospects, they search out Hao, a courting coach whose blunt and cringeworthy strategies promise to assist them land a companion.
“It’s considerably confounding why hundreds of males are supposedly signing up for this terrible recommendation,” FP’s Drew Gorman writes. Nevertheless it makes extra sense once you perceive the immense marriage stress these males face, compounded by extreme financial challenges that “forged a depressing shadow over a complete era’s romantic prospects.” The movie supplies an insightful look into how state insurance policies have formed particular person folks’s lives, from former chief Deng Xiaoping’s industrialization push to the present youth unemployment disaster.
Because the bachelors’ journeys unfold, Gorman writes, viewers might start to “fear in regards to the social fallout from a courting system that, by failing to ship the success it guarantees, can drive males towards the harmful politics of resentment”—a rising problem in China and past.
