From The Wizard of Oz to Trainspotting: 25 films to watch before you turn 25
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- The Guardian curated a list of 25 films recommended by filmmakers, critics and industry names as essential viewing before age 25, framing the picks against an era of "AI slop and doom-scrolling" and invoking Orson Welles' advice to avoid being "marinated" in film.
- Edgar Wright named Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run (1998) as the film that sent him racing home from a 1999 matinee desperate to direct, calling it "brisk but profound" about how life can change in 20 minutes.
- Ken Loach broke from the nostalgic canon by recommending two 2025 documentaries — Gaza: Doctors Under Attack and Louis Theroux: The Settlers — for young viewers, writing that Israel's war on Gaza is "genocidal" and its actions in the West Bank constitute "ethnic cleansing."
- Naqqash Khalid offered an unconventional reading of the 2002 Scooby-Doo film, calling it "an autopsy of the American project post-9/11" and "a deeply felt exploration of the value of friendship under late capitalism."
- Elizabeth Karlsen, a producer, credited her assistant with getting her into John Hughes' Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986) about 10 years ago, saying she had avoided Hughes films in her own youth.
- Catherine Bray, expecting her first child in autumn, chose Disney's Fantasia (1940) as the film she most wants to share — "cinema is the fusion of sound and image into something greater than the sum of its parts."
- Prano Bailey-Bond said The Wizard of Oz (1939) "changed my life when I was six years old," recommending it as a "visual delight that expands imaginations."
Why it matters: The list draws on Wright, Loach, Bailey-Bond, Perretta and other British film figures, with Ken Loach's inclusion of two 2025 Gaza documentaries as 'essential' viewing injecting political urgency into a nostalgic canon roundup. His claim that 'pictures seen when young stay in the mind for a lifetime' is deployed to argue these atrocities must enter young viewers' visual memory.
