Considering that at this point, most of us live in deep caves of the Internet and succumb to some truly sombre pop-culture-fuelled watches in an attempt to stay amongst the zeitgeist, carving out time to indulge in arthouse films can be a rare occasion, and one that we need to do more of. If not for ourselves, then for the culture that is morphing into an unrecognisable beast at warp speed.
Of course, indulging in trash television is part of the way we live, and settling into a three-hour-long subtitled dissection of how deeply we can feel is not always what sounds most relaxing, but in the instance you're feeling as though it's time to dive into the latter, these are our top picks for the arthouse films we're looking forward to indulging in.
1. Sorry, Baby (2025)
When Eva Victor and A24 are involved, you know it's going to be good. Victor both stars in and directed this new dark comedy, which charts the harsh realities of life after sexual assault. Her character, Agnes, is an English professor, who we meet three years after the incident — which is deliberately only described as a "bad thing" in the trailer. What follows is a searingly honest and somehow hilarious discussion of continuing on in the wake of trauma.
2. Hot Milk (2025)
Hot Milk (2025) is a simmering psychological drama adapted from Deborah Levy’s novel by the same name, directed by Rebecca Lenkiewicz in her feature debut. Set in southern Spain, the film follows Sofia (Emma Mackey) as she navigates a tense, co-dependent relationship with her mother Rose (Fiona Shaw), who may or may not be truly ill. Visually rich and emotionally charged, the film explores themes of identity, power, and emotional paralysis, bringing new dimension to Levy's much-loved novel.
3. Anora (2024)
Nominated for six Academy Awards and taking home five – including best original screenplay, best film editing, best director, best actress in a leading role and best picture – it would be criminal if Anora wasn't high on this list. The film that snagged the coveted Palme d’Or prize at Cannes Film Festival follows the story of a sex worker who marries into wealth a la Russian Oligarch. It is heartbreaking, hilarious and brilliantly captivating all at once. A must-watch.
4. Poor Things (2023)
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The film that won Emma Stone her second Best Actress Oscar – and one of Guillermo Del Toro's greatest arthouse feats. Poor Things is a fever dream of surreal Victorian-era gothic with sci-fi art nouveau – and follows the story of an unorthodox scientist who Frankenstein's a young woman back to life – before she runs off with a lawyer to discover the world.
5. The Substance (2024)
The Substance might have gone on to serious critical and commercial success, but that doesn't mean the psychological thriller no longer qualifies as arthouse. Starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, the film takes on our society's obsession with ageing and female beauty with a story about an fading star who transforms into a a younger, hotter — temporarily — with the help of a new injectable drug.
6. Flow (2025)
You'd think an animated film where no one speaks, and we simply follow a caravanserai cast of animals through a Noah's-Ark level flood on an unknown planet in an unspecified era would make for bizarre watching, but in fact the film is as much adventure-packed as it is tender and challenging of our views of difference, friendship and who our real enemies are.
7. How to Have Sex (2023)
The 2023 coming-of-age drama was writer and director Molly Manning's directorial debut, and stars Mia McKenna-Bruce, Lara Peake, Samuel Bottomley, Shaun Thomas, Enva Lewis and Laura Ambler as a group of British 16-year-old friends headed to Crete for a rite-of-passage holiday partying, drinking and hooking up. But what should be the 'best summer of their lives' ends up being a grating portrayal of female coming of age, consent and the joys and pains of girlhood.
8. Talk to Me (2023)
While it may have been picked up by A24 and gained unprecedented popularity, this film started out as a low-budget Aussie horror flick by Adelaide brothers Danny and Michael Philippou (also known as RackaRacka). After taking their flick – starring Aussies up-and-comers like Sophie Wilde and Zoe Terakes – to Sundance, it became the talk of the festival, and quickly became the centre of a bidding war for distribution. Regardless, this terrifying tale of a group of teenagers, hooked on the thrill of a high-stakes party game that summons spirits, has quickly entered the echelons of all-time great indie horror flicks.
9. Triangle of Sadness (2023)
For a scathing critique of the super-rich, look no further. This satirical comedy from the mind of Palme d’Or-winning director Ruben Östlund doesn't hold back, as the film charts a cruise ship filled with guests from the upper echelons of society. But the journey is anything but smooth sailing, and the yacht eventually sinks leaving its passengers stranded. It's in this setting that conversations around class really take off. If you still need convincing, the film stars actors Woody Harrelson, and Harris Dickinson, as the alcoholic captian and the ultimate Instagram boyfriend, respectively.
10. Aftersun (2022)
Again, A24 has done well to pick up some of these arthouse films and propel them to audiences through their well-established distribution channels, but this one also remains to be an indie flick through-and-through. Aftersun is a haunting epitaph to a now 30-year-old Sophie's father, whom she remembers throughout the film through the vignettes of a Turkish holiday they spent together twenty years earlier. It's a story that hits like a gut-punch about loving, grieving, time and parenthood. You'll never hear David Bowie's Under Pressure the same way again.
11. Shiva Baby (2020)
Emma Seligman's seminal film about a young college student who has a run-in with her sugar daddy – and his wife and child – at a Jewish funeral service with her parents is equal parts hilarious and sobering. Seligman wrote the film as her thesis project while studying film at NYU, and cast fellow student Rachel Sennott in her breakout lead role. The film probably best falls into the niche of indie black comedy; at once claustrophobic and frantically funny.
12. The Lobster (2015)
Yorgos Lanthimos' film catalogue is finally reaching the eye-line of the masses, with Oscar-winning hits like The Favourite and more recently Poor Things. But some of his earlier work is just as delightfully weird and suffocatingly strange – most notably his classic film The Lobster. Starring Colin Farrell as 'David', the film centres on a near, dystopian future where single people are obliged to find a romantic partner or risk being turned into the animal of their choice (David's choice obviously being a lobster). What entails is a fantastical, surreal and dark sci-fi comedy that leaves you questioning the culture of modern romance.
13. Benedetta (2021)
Paul Verhoeven delivers the lesbian nun thriller of practically everyone's dreams with Benedetta. Based on Judith C. Brown’s erotic non-fiction Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy, starring Virginie Efira as Benedetta Carlini, a novice nun in the 17th century who joins an Italian convent and has a very horny love affair with another nun. If the nuns in question are headed straight to hell, we'll be following closely behind.
14. The Lost Daughter (2021)
Maggie Gyllenhaal's directorial debut, The Lost Daughter, based on a novel by Elena Ferrante, follows a college professor (Olivia Coleman) and mother who, while on holiday, is confronted by her past when she meets a young woman (Dakota Johnson) and her daughter on holiday. She forms a sort-of obsession with the young mother, while she grapples with the guilt of having lived on her own terms while the responsibility of motherhood bore down on her.
15. Memoria (2021)
Tilda Swinton stars in Memoria, the english language debut of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Shot in Colombia, Swinton plays Jessica, an insomniac Scottish woman who, while travelling to visit her sister in Bogotá, meets a number of people who could cure her insomnia.
16. Summer of 85 (2020)
French director Francoise Ozon's 19th film in 22 years of directing sees Summer of 85 come to life at a seaside resort in Normandy. When teenage Alexis' boat capsizes and almost drowns before being rescued by David, the two enter the entanglement of Alexis' dreams. Think Call Me By Your Namewith a dark twist, and without Armie Hammer.
17. Great Freedom (2021)
Premiering at Cannes film festival last year, Great Freedom is set in post-World War II Germany, where a queer man’s liberation from Auschwitz takes him directly to prison for violating the country’s anti-LGBTQ+ laws. Directed by Sebastian Meise, the film touches on repression, liberation, and that each can be found within the other.
18. The French Exit (2020)
Initially premiering at the New York Film Festival, Michelle Pfieffer plays a widowed socialite who moves from Manhattan to Paris to rinse the last of her dead husband's inheritance with her strangely attached son by her side. The film deals with grief, love, death and delusion.
19. The Scary of Sixty First (2020)
A thriller built on the Jeffery Epstein case. Two girls move into a strangely affordable New York apartment. In an attempt to understand the reason behind its rock-bottom price, they discover it's an old residence of Jeffrey Epstein. Disturbed by their findings, the “Epstein Didn't Kill Himself” theory spirals as a result of their DIY investigation.
20. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
In 18th-century France young painter Marianne, is commissioned to do the wedding portrait of noblewoman's Héloïse without her knowing. It's a thought-provoking drama and a profound exploration of the "female gaze", written and directed by Céline Sciamma.
21. Call Me By Your Name (2017)
Set in northern Italy in 1983, 17-year-old Elio Perlman meets a 24-year-old American graduate student amongst a sun-drenched, idyllic Italian countryside. Guadagnino's deeply sensual and powerfully affecting portrait of first love is at once a great escape and a tender love story – culminating in a wonderful monologue by Michael Stuhlbarg.
22. Kajillionaire (2020)
Part-comedy, part-satire, Miranda July's third film looks at a dysfunctional family of scam artists, played by Evan Rachel Wood, Debra Winger and Richard Jenkins. When they invite a stranger to accompany them on their next major heist, things start to get rocky. A heist film with character and depth.
23. Petite Maman (2021)
Brought to you by Portrait of a Lady on Fire's Celine Sciamma, Petite Maman follows a girl who begins to explore the back garden of her Grandmother's home. When her mother mysteriously disappears one day, a girl similar to her mother appears in the treehouse in the back garden that her mother used to play in.
24. Donnie Darko (2001)
Famously, Richard Kelly's sci-fi psychological thriller almost faced the ignominy of going straight-to-video entirely. Its surreal premise failed to connect with the initial 2001 festival crowds. But ultimately, thanks to the rise of DVD rentals and midnight screenings, it blossomed into a massive cult classic with an enduring fanbase. And Jake Gyllenhaal's breakout leading performance at just 19 years old remains iconic.
25. Night Nursery (2021)
A documentary set in the district town of Bobo-Dioulasso, near Burkina Faso’s capital Ouagadougou, where each night, sex workers leave their children to Mrs. Coda, an elderly woman who watches the children while the mothers work. Strolling through the “Black,” a lively alley in the city centre for work until dawn, when they return to pick up their children.
26. Somewhere (2010)
Sofia Coppola's underrated arthouse film follows a newly famous but passionless actor, as he recuperates from a minor injury at the Chateau Marmont – where his eleven-year-old daughter (played by Elle Fanning) surprises him with a visit. The film is all shot on 35mm film and is a bit of a quiet heartbreaker – ponderous, insightful and a faultless needle drop of Gwen Stefani's Cool.
27. Amélie (2001)
One of the most universally beloved flicks to have been swept into the cannon of 21st century arthouse films is French film Amélie, which premiered back in 2001. For all its flaws, it remains a perfectly imperfect tale of everyday romanticism and lighthearted fantasy – following a strange and childlike character, from whom the film takes its name, that decides her new calling in life is to make other people happy.
28. Pillion (2026)
One of the most underrated films to come out of 2026 is Pillion, which was directed by Harry Lighton, and stars Harry Melling and Alexander Skarsgard. It follows Colin, a shy gay man who gets besotted with Ray, a confident enigmatic biker, and the pair eventually enter a BDSM relationship. Pillion explores the beauty and affirmation found within a BDSM LGBTQI+ community in a way that film has not previously touched on.
29. Paris, Texas (1984)
This quintessentially arthouse film is about a man who stumbles out of the desert not knowing who he is. With the help of his brother to pull his memories back, he begins to remember the life he led before disappearing from his family for years. There's a reason most cinephiles say this is among their favourite films — it is an incredible piece of cinema.
30. Stealing Beauty (1996)
Very little actually happens in Stealing Beauty, though sexuality is a major theme. Written by Bertolucci and Susan Minot, the film is about a 19-year-old American girl who travels to a lush Tuscan villa near Siena to stay with family friends. It's a deeply-refreshing look at female virginity, starring a young Liv Tyler as she drifts through an endless house party in Tuscany.
31. The Worst Person in the World (2021)
Renate Reinsve leads this Nordic romcom set in Oslo; an achingly human portrait of an entire generation's existential crisis. It's about the quest for love as much as it's about a quest for meaning.
32. La Bola Negra (2026)
Receiving a commanding 20-minute standing ovation at this year's Cannes Film Festival, La Bola Negra follows three interconnected stories set across different eras. It folds personal histories into the wider political and cultural tensions of Spain itself, each timeline centres on a gay man grappling with identity, longing, and emotional survival within vastly different social climates.
