The documentary often gets a bad rap. Maybe you watched a few boring (or prescriptive) ones in school, in which talking heads drone on about what you ought to think or feel. However, despite its reputation as constrained retelling—emphasis on the “telling”—the medium also offers storytellers practically limitless formal flexibility, and the power to show us reality in dazzling new hues.
This was a year of numerous stunning nonfiction releases, as well as many festival premieres of works yet to be distributed. When viewing them in unison, it’s clear that the medium’s stylistic and thematic ingenuity could not be in better hands. These 25 films from 2025, hailing from all across the globe, represent the very best of what documentary cinema has to offer.
Fiction has a way of probing the reality of a particular moment in history that you can’t always get from pure fact. Whether it’s a tale of historical fiction or something altogether imagined but imbued with political truth, the best political novels tend to resonate on a deep emotional level, affecting the reader and imparting a sense of the stakes beyond what can be gleaned from mere dates, figures and even the events themselves.
To that end, here’s a brief list of must-read political novels from the past hundred years that have something vital to impart about the world we live in today. They span a range of countries and contexts, but all address the world’s most looming issues in unique and engaging ways. This list is by no means intended to be comprehensive, so feel free to let us know what essential titles we’ve missed.
Sandra Newman’s Julia (Mariner Books), a retelling of George Orwell’s 1984 from the POV of our favorite Anti-Sex League comrade, was one of 2023’s more intriguing titles. What could’ve simply been “1984, but feminist” not only illuminates both Winston and Julia, but human beings in general under fascism.
As a sucker for dystopian fiction, Orwell’s 1984 is one of my favorite novels. When I heard about Julia, I snagged a copy immediately and decided to read the two books side-by-side, alternating chapters. I’d highly recommend this to anyone who’s already a fan of 1984 and wants to enhance their experience of that book. Julia lines up perfectly with 1984 and expands the world in really interesting ways.
Julia is a “feminist 1984″
(Virgin Film)
1984, told from the point of view of its male protagonist, Winston Smith, is necessarily patriarchal. Regulating people’s sex lives is one of The Party’s tools in maintaining patriotic fervor among Oceania’s citizens. If sex and marriage only exist to create new citizens, and if romantic and familial ties are not only severed but eliminated, any feelings of love and devotion can be redirected to The Party.
Winston, having been mostly raised under Big Brother’s regime with only vague memories of pre-Party life, has been conditioned to hate women. From his own mother, to his wife, Katherine, he’s learned to think the worst of women and their intentions. Therefore, his view of Julia, despite “loving” her, is a hateful one—one in which he barely cares at all about what she does if it’s not in relation to him, let alone why she does it.
When he sleeps with Julia, he’s not only giving in to his basic human drives, but he’s doing so in the most sexist way possible: Julia is much younger, thin, and attractive in a way that adheres to a mainstream, male-gazey beauty standard.
Giving Julia an inner life at all is, in and of itself, a feminist act, and Julia fills in her life’s blanks. To start, it gives her a last name—Worthing—which isn’t in the original novel. The BBC’s 1954 TV adaptation of 1984 calls her “Julia Dixon,” but Newman’s novel, having been approved by Orwell’s estate, basically makes “Worthing” canon. Julia also takes societal details that 1984 mentions in passing, like the Anti-Sex League and “artsem” (artificial insemination, The Party’s preferred method of procreation), and shows us their inner workings more fully thanks to the perspective provided by a female protagonist.
Julia also takes us beyond the events covered in 1984. By expanding what we know about the character, we learn more about Oceania and its politics. The novel sheds light not only on Oceania’s non-white citizens, but its queer citizens, too. There are characters across the LGBTQIA+ spectrum, Julia herself among them.
We learn about Women’s 21, the hostel where she lives with other young, unmarried Party women in dorms, and the very particular way that women’s lives are impacted by Party rule: from abortion, to sexual assault, to the imbalance of power between genders both in the home and at work.
So yes, Julia is a “feminist 1984,” but it being that, it also illuminates something much larger than gender.
Julia illuminates today’s world
(Virgin Films)
1984 shows us Julia through Winston’s eyes, so Winston seems like the big revolutionary who’s tragically cut down by The Party, and Julia seems like a hanger-on who completes the picture Winston has for his own revolutionary life, but doesn’t herself seem particularly interested in the politics of everything.
Julia doesn’t contradict that, but it does provide the character greater context and nuance. We learn about her childhood, having been born into early Party rule. We see how she engages with the Party when Winston isn’t around, definitely playing the role of a Party faithful, but too “pragmatic” to be interested in revolution—more about getting away with things long enough to live another day.
For someone in the Anti-Sex League, she sure has a lot of sex, yet sex isn’t something Julia does to “stick it to The Man.” It’s something she does for personal pleasure, or to drown out the world. As the events of Julia get closer to Julia and Winston’s arrest, the Party uses Julia and her sexual exploits to suit their own ends.
Seeing Winston through Julia’s eyes puts his words and actions from 1984 into a new context, too. Julia’s Winston is a naïve dilettante. He talks a big game about revolution and Truth, but isn’t smart or courageous enough to pursue revolution until someone more brazen than he is comes along. Even then, he comes to the conclusion that only the proles can save them, fetishizing their political potential even as he patronizes them.
Julia shows us that neither character is as smart or revolutionary as they think they are, and both are taken in by the Party in one way or another. Winston comes to love Big Brother. Julia comes to hate Big Brother, but in finding “liberation,” ends up buying into what amounts to The Party in a different outfit.
Getting to know both characters so intimately, I wanted to shake them for their myopia. However, as I read both novels, I recognized that Winston and Julia represent most of us, which makes these books slightly depressing. We’d all like to think we’d be revolutionaries. The truth is that most people just want to get by as comfortably as possible, in as much safety as possible for ourselves and our immediate loved ones.
Most of us would be a Winston or a Julia, and no matter which we are, The Party—or a Party-like alternative—will always be in control.
The value in these books, however, is that when we become infuriated about what these characters do or don’t do in the face of their fascist regime, we can see the big picture of how their government operates around them. Hopefully this allows us to think about the big picture of our own government and how their actions affect our people as a whole, beyond our own personal interests.
After his decisive victory in the Florida governor’s race last week, Ron DeSantis dubbed the Sunshine State as the place “where ‘woke’ goes to die.” But a federal judge on Thursday pushed back against that notion, blocking the State University System of Florida from enforcing through regulation a new law that puts strict limits on what professors can teach or say about race in the classroom.
In a searing 139-page order, Judge Mark E. Walker of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida cast as Orwellian the state’s defense of the Individual Freedom Act, also known as the “Stop WOKE” Act. The order comes in response to litigation from university professors and college students, who have argued that provisions of the law prohibiting the expression of certain viewpoints, such as those related to sex and race, are unconstitutional. Defending the law, the State University System has argued that public university professors do not have free speech rights when it comes to what they teach. In his order, Walker took strong exception to that argument.
“Defendants argue that, under this Act, professors enjoy ‘academic freedom’ so long as they express only those viewpoints of which the State approves,” Walker wrote. “This is positively dystopian.”
Walker, who was nominated to the bench in 2012 by President Barack Obama, is known for his rhetorical flourishes. In the opening line of his order, granting in part a preliminary injunction to the plaintiffs, the federal judge quoted from George Orwell’s 1984. “‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen,’” Walker wrote, “and the powers in charge of Florida’s public university system have declared the State has unfettered authority to muzzle its professors in the name of ‘freedom.’”
Under the Individual Freedom Act, professors are prohibited from “training or instruction that espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels … student[s] or employee[s] to believe” eight specified concepts. Among others, those concepts include promoting a belief that “A person, by virtue of his or her race, color, national origin, or sex is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.”
Florida’s law is part of a broader conservative pushback against “woke” liberalism and critical race theory in colleges and schools. DeSantis, who is widely expected to be a contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, has made these issues central to his political identity. As governor, DeSantis is empowered to appoint most members of the state’s Board of Governors, the systemwide university governing body. Under the law, it falls to the board to ferret out unchecked “wokeness” and enforce prohibitions against it. (Violations of the law could result in forfeiture of performance-based funding from the state.)
Walker’s order, however, enjoins the board from enforcing its regulation. Jerry C. Edwards, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, who represented some of the plaintiffs, said the order sent a strong signal to public colleges and the Legislature.
“We are very happy with this ruling,” he said. “Judge Walker enjoined the Florida Board of Governors from being able to enforce this law, which he called ‘positively dystopian.’ And we totally agree that it is positively dystopian, violates the First Amendment, and is unconstitutionally vague under the Fourteenth Amendment.”
A spokeswoman for the Board of Governors said in an email that the board had “no comment, as it is our policy not to comment on pending litigation.”
This is at least the second case this year in which Walker has written a strong order related to First Amendment issues at public universities. In January he issued a blistering order against the University of Florida, saying it could not enforce a policy that had blocked university professors from participating in litigation against the state.
Walker’s order on Thursday took strong umbrage at what the judge characterized as a troubling notion that the state can ban speech it does not like.
“Defendants respond that the First Amendment offers no protection here,” Walker wrote. “They argue that because university professors are public employees, they are simply the State’s mouthpieces in university classrooms. As a result, Defendants claim, the State has unfettered authority to limit what professors may say in class, even at the university level. According to Defendants, so long as professors work for the State, they must all read from the same music.”
Edwards, the ACLU lawyer, said Walker’s two orders signal a judicial check on efforts to encroach on professors’ speech rights. “What this ruling and the other ruling says is that the State of Florida has not been good about protecting free-speech rights on college campuses and promoting free speech on college campuses, and that the courts aren’t having it,” Edwards said. “They are pushing back and saying you need to respect the First Amendment. You need to respect academic freedom.”
