The Best Scripts & Hidden Gem Movies of 2025 [Podcast]
What actually happens to your script after the competition ends?
In this End-of-Year episode, John and Danny pull back the curtain on Kinolime’s busiest year yet. They unpack record-breaking competitions, reveal which projects are moving into production, and share insider details on the films currently on Kinolime’s slate. You’ll also hear the debut of the Limelist, three unforgettable screenplays that didn’t win but couldn’t be ignored, plus a hand-picked list of under-the-radar films you should be watching right now.
Full Transcript: Kinolime Podcast Episode 31: The Best Scripts & Hidden Gem Movies of 2025
Participants
John Schramm - Head of Development, Kinolime
Danny Murray - Creative Executive, Kinolime
Welcome & Year-End Thanks
John: Hello everybody, welcome to the Kinolime End-of-the-Year Podcast. It’s sad, Danny. End of the year, bro. This is it. The holiday wrap.
Danny: I’m so ready for this year to be over.
John: Dude’s in a t-shirt. I’m in a t-shirt. It’s 25 degrees in New York.
Danny: I’m flying back, no bag, I’m just coming like this.
John: He literally has a shopping bag.
Danny: Yeah… that I’m not bringing. I’m not taking that through airport security.
John: But seriously, welcome. First, from the bottom of our hearts, thank you to everyone who watches, tunes in, and supports Kinolime. Without you, we wouldn’t be where we are. You’re truly the reason we do this.
John: When Oleg, our CEO and founder, wanted to build this company, it was about merging filmmaking with the audience. A novel idea, right? Why not ask the people who pay what they actually want to see?
John: It’s been a true blessing. So before we start: thank you so much.
Danny: Yeah. Thank you.
This Episode
John: Today we’re doing an end-of-year conversation: what we did as a company, your favorite movies, and you cannot say “One Battle After Another.”
Danny: (laughs)
John: We’ll also talk about our first annual Limelist, the best screenplays we read in this year’s feature competition that didn’t win and didn’t even make the finals. Scripts we think you should go read… and maybe will into existence. The power of the mind.
John: Shall we get into it?
Danny: Let’s do it.
Kinolime 2025 Recap (Competitions & Growth)
John: Let’s rewind to January 2025. We launched Feature Film Competition 2.0, record submissions. Somewhere around 3,000 feature scripts from all over the world. You, me, Meara, the whole team read every single one and narrowed it down.
John: From a company standpoint, seeing the jump from 1.0 to 2.0 was incredible. What were your thoughts on that process? Because I was working you to the bone.
Danny: I mean, it’s great. It’s work I actually love doing. It’s an immense privilege to read screenplays, work on movies, talk about movies as a job. I couldn’t ask for anything better.
Danny: And the quality is getting better every competition. The more we do this, the more our name gets out there, and the stronger the stories we get. We were already getting strong scripts, but now we’re getting more, and stronger ones.
John: Totally. And we did see a leap, especially as readers.
Danny: People always ask, “Where’s your movie?” And the answer is: it takes time.
John: It takes time to make a good movie.
Danny: We’ve had opportunities to make something fast, just to make something. But…
Danny: …the patience matters. This year especially, as our slate really started moving, I appreciate more every day how intentional we’ve been. We don’t just take whatever the market will give us, we want the script to be as strong as possible, the director to be right, everything to be right.
John: I say this all the time: we’re story freaks. We’ll sit and hone the screenplay until it’s the best words on the page, for us, for the audience, and for the filmmakers. If we’re going to take a swing, we want to do it right.
John: As a writer, I always found it odd how quickly some people rush into production. If the words aren’t there, you’re walking into a battle without a plan.
Winner: Mob Mentality
John: Then we crowned our winner: Mob Mentality. Such a great script. Eric Landau, you’re the man. He’s crushing it.
Danny: Yeah, rewrite coming soon. Even funnier than before.
John: The finals had great scripts, but Mob was a personal favorite for both of us and it won with the audience vote. We’re excited.
Shorts Competition & Pushing Daisy
John: Then we said, feature films always get the spotlight. Why not shorts? After talking with you and Mike Gabrawy, consultant, friend, producing partner, he reminded us shorts used to be how you found and broke directors.
John: So we launched a shorts competition… and the response exceeded my expectations tenfold.
Danny: Thousands of submissions. And really strong writing across the board. Shorts are also more digestible. As a judge, it’s easier to interpret a great eight-page short than to evaluate a feature over 120 pages.
John: And our winner, Pushing Daisy, is already shot. Edward already filmed it. That’s huge.
Social Media Growth
John: Internally, we also have to shout out Kole Lee, busting his butt on social. If you’re not following him, his handle is Screenwriting in LA. We hired him to help with our socials and we crossed 40,000 followers, now we’re around 43K. That’s wild.
Danny: Kole shares what we all share here. He’s genuinely excited about movies and story and people feel that.
Projects in Development (The Slate)
John: We don’t talk about this much, but we’ll bring you inside Kinolime today. Beyond the winning scripts, we have a slate - projects we’ve optioned, invested in, or partnered on.
The Waif
John: First: The Waif, Adam Hampton’s script, with Stephen Fingleton attached. Final draft came in last night. We’re going out to cast at the top of the year. Planning to shoot in spring.
Danny: I can’t wait to see what Stephen does with that story.
Mob Mentality
John: Then, Mob Mentality, Eric’s finishing the rewrite, and we’ll be meeting directors at the top of the year.
John: If you had to pick a comedy director right now, who do you want?
Danny: Tough. We won’t get him, but it screams Adam McKay… like 10 years ago.
John: Shot in the dark, Jonah Hill. He could even play the dad. He was great in Mid90s.
Danny: That’d be amazing.
Something Like Molasses
John: Next: Something Like Molasses. We’ve been working with Adze Ugah, director from Shaka (the “Game of Thrones of South Africa”). If you haven’t seen it, it’s incredible.
John: Nina (the writer) is sharpening the script with our team. Budgets are moving with South African production partners. It’s going.
John: That story is one of your personal favorites.
Danny: It is.
Danny: And honestly, we read more specs than probably any other production company. For how small our dev team is, the scripts-per-exec ratio is insane. And the common thread in these stories is the visceral reaction, I cried reading Something Like Molasses. I laughed out loud through Mob Mentality.
John: Our production partner in South Africa, Oscar-nominated, called it one of the best scripts they’d read in 30 years.
Japanese Franchise
John: We’re also working on a Japanese franchise, big hit in Japan, with a major distributor. Two scripts in motion. We can’t say more yet.
Falling Man
John: And we have Falling Man, with Niv Fichman (BlackBerry, The Red Violin). Powerful 9/11 story. We got the highest Canadian Telefilm subsidy ever awarded to a feature, and we’re making offers to leads right now.
Why the Competitions Matter
John: Just to show you: we’re busy outside the competitions. We’re always developing and making movies.
Danny: Yeah, the competitions are a lane for us to acquire screenplays. The job is converting scripts into movies. But the competitions are special because we find real new voices and original stories.
John: And you get to vote. That still blows my mind.
Danny: When we started, part of me wondered if it was a gimmick. But it works. The model works. Please keep sending your scripts.
John: We read everything. And today we’re introducing the Limelist, three favorite scripts from Feature Competition 2.0 that didn’t win and didn’t make the finals.
The Limelist (Best Unfinaled Scripts)
1) The Seahorse
John: Danny, you go first. Out of thousands, what stuck with you?
Danny: The Seahorse. I remember reading it in the library near my house, gorgeous stained glass windows. I’d already read three features that day and wasn’t in the mood to like anything… and then this one just grabbed me. I reread it when I finished.
John: What is it?
Danny: Tonally it felt like The Holdovers. It’s warm. It hugs you. It’s about two people falling in love in a way that’s not romantic, father and daughter.
Danny: He’s a terrible father who was never there. He gets diagnosed with dementia, and the daughter becomes his caretaker. There’s resentment, then they start to care for each other, and right when they finally connect… he slips away.
Danny: It’s funny, it’s beautiful, it’s confident writing. You should study it, structure, character arc, all of it.
John: If you want to read it, go to Kinolime.com, sign in or create an account, and check out the backlist.
2) The Muellers (Meara’s Pick)
John: Meara, who’s in Ireland, phoned in his Limelist pick: The Muellers.
John: It’s a throwback comedy, college, parents’ weekend. Dad shows up in all black, philosophy guy, very downer, Nietzsche energy. It sounds like it could be cliché, but it’s apparently hysterical, and Meara raves about it constantly.
Danny: And it’s that father-daughter dynamic again, different worldviews, bonding through friction.
3) Dork Whore
John: Third Limelist entry, one I think about all the time: Dork Whore. D-O-R-K… W-H-O-R-E.
Danny: (laughs) How do you spell that one?
John: W-H-O-R-E.
John: It’s a hysterical road-trip coming-of-age story. A young woman leaves the military and goes on a trip, Europe into South Asia, to find herself. It’s written in this brutally funny, lived-in way.
John: She’s basically trying to get laid on this journey across South Asia and it’s got everything, heart, laughs, goosebumps. We don’t make road-trip movies anymore, and this one really hits.
Danny: All three of those scripts are about young women.
John: True. Not movies yet, screenplays. But in one way or another, they’re about young women trying to cultivate identity.
Danny: That’s actually kind of amazing.
Under the Radar Danny’s Movie Recommendations
John: Alright, cinema. This year was a little meh, but there were some good ones.
Danny: It was a great year for me.
John: You cannot talk about One Battle After Another.
Danny: I won’t say a word.
John: Let’s do Danny’s Recap. You watch everything. What are some movies people probably missed that they should see?
Danny: I’ve got ten, movies that didn’t get a wide release but really deserve attention.
Danny’s 10 Picks:
The Surfer - Australian psychological nightmare on a gorgeous beach. Nick Cage kills it.
Eephus - Carson Lund. The purest baseball movie; grounded and human.
Universal Language - Matt Rankin. Mythical “Iranian Canada”; dry humor, insanely creative, beautifully shot.
Left-Handed Girl - Shih-Ching Tsou. TIFF. Edited by Sean Baker. Great Taiwan family drama; standout kid performance.
Baltimorons - Jay Duplass. Low-budget Christmas movie; heart and warmth.
Blue Moon - Richard Linklater. Best Ethan Hawke performance (Danny’s take). Takes place in a bar; monologue-driven and gripping.
Familiar Touch - Sarah Friedland debut. Dementia story told with deep empathy; Kathleen Chalfant is phenomenal.
It Ends - Alexander Ullom debut. Contained horror in a car that can’t stop; turns into something bigger and more interpretive.
Vulcanizadora - Joel Potrykus. Wild, messed-up buddy comedy.
Kokuho - Japanese multi-decade epic about two friends-turned-brothers chasing kabuki greatness; messy and beautiful.
Shout-Outs & Closing Thanks
John: Another thing I’m thankful for is the crew behind the camera. I’m going to flip the camera around, sorry, guys.
John: Tom, what are you thankful for?
Tom: I’m thankful for you.
John: Matty Dobbs, what are you thankful for this year?
Matty: I’m thankful I found Kinolime this year.
John: Oh my gosh, they’re getting raises.
John: But truly, shout out to the team that makes it all happen. Ron will edit this to make it faster.
John: From the bottom of our hearts at Kinolime, thank you. Without you, we wouldn’t be growing at this pace. The movies we’re making in 2026 are going to be incredible, and it’s because of you.
John: Happy holidays. Be safe out there. We’ll see you in 2026.
Danny: See you in ’26.
John: Let’s roll.
