Michael Mann’s favourite movie of 2025: “A massive achievement”
There were some fantastic films released in 2025, you could take your pick from movies like Weapons, Sinners, The Secret Agent, One Battle After Another, Train Dreams, Bugonia, the list goes on. But for Heat director Michael Mann there was one that stood out above all the others, even if it happens to be one not too many critics had at the top of their pile.
Now, we aren’t going to go against the word of a man who directed Thief, Collateral and The Insider, but Mann’s choice of three hours and 17 minutes worth of Avatar: Fire and Ash as the stand out among movies of that calibre is an interesting one to say the least, but that’s his opinion and he’s entitled to it.
Released right at the tail end of the year in December, the third Avatar movie seemed to fly under the radar a bit, and yet somehow despite distinctly middling reviews managed to pull in over a billion dollars at the box office. Do you remember anyone saying they were going to see it? How does this happen!
Anyway, it is now the 39th highest-grossing film of all time and continues James Cameron’s seemingly never-ending story of the giant dreadlocked people of the Na’avi tribe as they fly around the place on dragons, shooting people or something, I’ve no idea, I’ve only seen the first one, and that was in 2009.
Mann absolutely loved it, though, telling Variety magazine: “Jim Cameron’s third Avatar: Fire and Ash is a massive achievement. The towering originality of Jim’s visualization is a given; what makes Fire and Ash so potent is its believability.”
Quite how believable a story about nine-foot blue-tall humanoids with tails living on a distant moon is can be a question for another day, but Mann backs up his argument in choosing the film as the best of the year by adding: “No writer-director I can think of has invented as large a three-dimensional world of his own imagining as has Jim. Fire and Ash, on its own, is an incredible achievement. From some point in the future, when regarded historically, the whole of Avatar will be seen as the magnum opus it truly is.”
Which is high praise indeed, even if we aren’t going to find that out until at least 2031 which not only sounds like a year from science fiction, but is in fact the release date of the fifth and final Avatar film.
Rather more excitingly, unless you’re a fan of Avatar, is the moving forward of plans to make Heat 2, the follow-up to probably Mann’s greatest ever work and one of the finest thrillers ever made. Mann wrote the novel in 2022, and now the film adaptation looks like it will soon go into production with a frankly ludicrously talented cast, including Leonardo DiCaprio, Adam Driver, Christian Bale, Austin Butler and Bradley Cooper. Mann would once again take on directorial duties.
James Cameron, meanwhile, has done something very different in the few moments he has between Avatar films and directed a film capturing Billie Eilish’s last tour called Hit me Hard and Soft. Of course he wouldn’t be content with simply filming the pop star in lots of creative angles and recreating the experience of being at the concert, so he’s done it in 3D as well for anyone who likes to be forced to wear glasses in the cinema.
