The Most Anticipated Movies at Miami Film Festival Gems 2025

Fall means a slight chill in the air, pumpkin spice in your coffee, and, oh yeah, all the best movies finally coming to Florida.

Miami Film Festival Gems is back with a new slate of awards season contenders, harvested like pumpkins from the major film festivals, including Cannes, Toronto, and New York. This is your chance to get a sneak peek at some of the films that will be in the running for Oscars, Golden Globes, and other top honors early next year.

It’s also a chance to see some major stars in the flesh. Julie Delpy was scheduled to appear at MFF earlier this year, but was forced to cancel at the last minute. Now, her Before Trilogy castmate Ethan Hawke, star of First Reformed, Gattaca, Dead Poets Society, and countless other films, will attend Gems to receive the Variety Virtuoso Award at the festival. His new film, Blue Moon, his latest collab with director Richard Linklater, will also screen at the festival. Dylan O’Brien of Maze Runner fame will also receive an award. Mona May, costume designer of Clueless, will attend for a 30th anniversary screening of the classic high school rom-com, and Gus Van Sant will attend to receive the festival’s prestigious Precious Gem Award.

Of course, the movies are the main attraction, with cinema from Brazil, Norway, Spain, Taiwan, and Hollywood screening this year. Here are 11 films you need to see at Gems 2025.

Arco

Though Japanese and American animation get more attention, France is one of the largest and most prolific markets for cartoons in the world, holding its own thanks to classics like Fantastic Planet and more recent films like Ernest and Celestine. This year, the country is giving Gems its only animated film, director Ugo Bienvenu’s sci-fi adventure Arco.

The Natalie Portman-produced film follows the titular Arco, a 10-year-old time-traveler from 2932 who becomes stranded in the slightly-less-distant year of 2075, where a climate crisis is in full effect. He makes friends with Iris, a girl his age, who tries to help him return home. Though Arco is Bienvenu’s first film, he’s already a well-established comic artist in France; the film’s animation style recalls recent Western sci-fi cartoons such as Scavengers Reign.

Both the French and English versions of the film are stacked with prominent actors, including Swan Arlaud (Anatomy of a Fall) and Louis Garrel (Little Women, The Dreamers) in the French original, and Portman joined by Will Ferrell, America Ferrera, Flea, Mark Ruffalo, and Andy Samberg in the English dub.

Blue Moon and Nouvelle Vague

Ethan Hawke will be on hand to present Blue Moon, in which he stars as songwriter Lorenz Hart on the eve of his former partner Richard Rodgers’ Oklahoma! debuting on Broadway. But the musical-adjacent film, co-starring Margaret Qualley, Bobby Cannavale, and Andrew Scott as Rodgers, isn’t the only movie Richard Linklater is bringing to Miami.

The proud Texan famous for the Before Trilogy, Dazed and Confused, Boyhood, and most recently Hit Man, is also showing Nouvelle Vague, his dramatization of the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s French New Wave film Breathless. It’s told in the same style as the influential crime caper, complete with black-and-white cinematography and character cameos from all your (weird cinephile cousin’s) French film favorites: Truffaut, Chabrol, Varda, Rohmer, Rivette, Cocteau, and even Roberto Rossellini. Zut alors!

Castration Movie Anthology i. The Fear of Having No One to Hold at the End of the World

A lo-fi, 275-minute docu-drama about trans people and incels in Vancouver? Sign us the fuck up. This first part of director Louise Weard’s Castration Movie saga is as idiosyncratic and personal as movies get, featuring the director herself in the lead role as a trans sex worker who, in the words of the director, “decides to reclaim some sense of control by seeking out a back alley orchiectomy.”

Featuring cameos from a who’s who of trans film creators, including Vera Drew (The People’s Joker), Jane Schoenbrun (I Saw The TV Glow), and Theda Hammel (Stress Positions), Castration Movie Anthology i is unlike anything else you’ll see this year.

Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein

Monster movies are what Guillermo Del Toro excels at, from his kaiju action franchise Pacific Rim to the Shape of Water, his Best Picture Oscar-winning riff on the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Now he’s going back to one of the original movie monsters with his own very distinctive take on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The 1818 novel, following a mad scientist’s attempt to create a living creature out of dead body parts, is considered a formative influence on both science fiction and horror, and Del Toro’s adaptation is reportedly more faithful than the classic Hollywood version starring Boris Karloff. Jacob Elordi, playing the Creature, plays a very different version of the Monster than audiences might be accustomed to from pop culture and spoofs like Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein. The rest of the cast is equally stacked with stars, with Oscar Isaac as Dr. Frankenstein and Mia Goth and Christoph Waltz in supporting roles. The film debuted at the Venice Film Festival and premiered in North America at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Hamnet

In recent years, Chloe Zhao has been responsible for both a controversial Best Picture Oscar-winner (Nomadland) and a notorious superhero flop (Marvel’s The Eternals), but in adapting Maggie O’Farrell’s acclaimed historical novel Hamnet, she may have found her best film yet. Based on the tragically short life of Hamnet, the son of William Shakespeare, who died at age 11, the story focuses on William (Paul Mescal) and his wife Agnes (Jessie Buckley). Their already fraught marriage is tested even more by tragedy, from which emerges a great masterwork, Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. The film has already won acclaim from appearances at Telluride and the Toronto International Film Festival, where it won the People’s Choice Award.

Left-Handed Girl

Even after sweeping the Oscars and Cannes with Anora, Sean Baker has been busy producing and co-scripting this Taipei-set film directed by Shih-Ching Tsou. The two previously partnered on Take Out, which is now in the Criterion Collection.

Shot on iPhone, much like Baker’s previous feature Tangerine, Tsou’s film follows elementary school-aged I-Jing (Nina Ye), who’s having trouble adjusting to city life with her mother Chu-Fen (Janel Tsai). Things get even worse when her grandfather tells her one day that her left-handedness is a sign of the devil. Full of the sights and sounds of urban Taiwan and telling a rewarding story about family and the struggles of working-class existence, Left-Handed Girl is an earthy, heartfelt addition to the Gems lineup.

Rental Family

The phenomenon of “rental people” in Japan has been documented in everything from memoirs (Rental Person Who Does Nothing) to manga (Rent-a-Girlfriend). Even Werner Herzog made a film about the trend, Family Romance LLC. Now comes Rental Family from Japanese director Hikari, best known for her work on the Netflix show Beef.

The film stars Brendan Fraser — fresh off his Oscar win for the Whale and a cameo in Killers of the Flower Moon — as Philip, a struggling actor in Tokyo hired by a firm that rents out actors to play real-life family members, friends, and other roles. Complications arise when Philip is asked to play the long-lost father of a young girl. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.

The Secret Agent

You’ve got to be pretty good at making movies to win one prize at Cannes. The Secret Agent won two: Best Director for Kleber Mendonça Filho and Best Actor for Wagner Moura, who starred in last year’s Civil War. Like last year’s Oscar-winning I’m Still Here, The Secret Agent takes us to the era of Brazil’s dictatorship, tracing the path of former professor Armando (Moura). On the run from the government and living under an alias, he’s searching for a way out of the country and a newfound connection with his estranged son. Things get complicated from there. Mendonça Filho meticulously recreates his hometown of Recife as he experienced it as a cinema-addled youth, when movies served as a sanctuary from a brutal world outside.

Sentimental Value

If you were emotionally destroyed by Joachim Trier’s oh-so-relatable previous feature, The Worst Person in the World, get ready for more trauma. Where his last film mined millennial aimlessness, this time the Norwegian director is back with a family drama: Sentimental Value, once again led by the spellbinding Renate Reinsve as Nora, an actress with a comfortable TV and stage career in Oslo. Her father is Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), a famous film director whom Nora and her sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) have never forgiven for abandoning them. All three are squabbling over the family home, which Gustav still owns and wants to use to shoot his next film in a bid to revive his flagging career. To make matters even more fraught, when Nora refuses to act in the film, he casts American starlet Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) to replace her. (And you thought your family was toxic.) With references to Michael Haneke and a bad dad worthy of the Royal Tenenbaums, this winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes is a must-see (and for what it’s worth, Charli XCX loves Joaquin Trier).

Sirāt

Burning Man meets Sorcerer in this propulsive thriller from Galician director Oliver Laxe, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes this year. Taking to the deserts of Morocco in search of his daughter Mar, middle-aged Luis (Sergi López) and his young son infiltrate a crew of illegal ravers trekking through the Atlas Mountains. The party doesn’t last long as news of war reaches the party, and their journey through the desolate landscape becomes even more hellish and unforgiving. With a name taken from an Arabic word describing the thin line between heaven and hell, Sirāt may be the most otherworldly cinematic trip you’ll take all year.

Gems 2025. Wednesday, October 29, through Wednesday, November 5. miamifilmfestival.com/festival/gems.