Calling 2024 a year of change and trepidation in Hollywood would be an understatement. But through the lens of the 50 films nominated for at least one Academy Award this year — features, shorts, documentaries, and international films — the film industry is still humming with talent. This is on balance a very strong Oscar year. While a ranking is necessarily an occasion to exalt the greatest and shame the worst, with very few exceptions there’s something to like in every single one of these films, and a few of them even hit greatness.
As I do every year, I have somehow evaluated and contrasted 50 films of widely divergent types, genres, intended audiences, and essential vibes. These are apples, oranges, bananas, and pomegranates (and one sacred fig), and yet I have settled on this definitive order of quality. (Now, let me rearrange the middle third of the list one more time before we get going.)
50. The Six Triple Eight
Tyler Perry’s first Oscar-nominated movie arrives on the back of Diane Warren’s latest Best Original Song nomination. “The Journey” sounds like a warmed-over (and less lyrically ambitious) “The Climb,” but it’s over in under four and a half minutes. The Six Triple Eight, however, is 128 minutes of hokey dialogue, two-dimensional characterizations, and Susan Sarandon as Eleanor Roosevelt wearing false teeth straight out of a Party City going-out-of-business sale. The real women of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion — the only all-Black women’s army battalion sent overseas during World War II, and who we see at the end of the movie in real-life footage — deserved a portrayal of depth, nuance, and insight. They’re still waiting for one.
49. Elton John: Never Too Late
Directed by: R.J. Cutler, David Furnish
Nominations: (1) Best Original Song
The Oscars have largely steered the Best Documentary Feature category away from the self-serving celebrity-autobiography docs that have sprung up everywhere on streaming platforms, but the songwriters could not be stopped from throwing out another nod to Elton John and Bernie Taupin (and Brandi Carlisle and Andrew Watt). I’m more lenient than most when it comes to these movies, especially when they accidentally reveal something of their subjects by virtue of how they choose to manicure their own image. But Elton John already had that version of his biography, in the dishy and revealing Tantrums and Tiaras from 1997 (also directed by Furnish, John’s longtime partner). Never Too Late addresses John’s thoughts on aging and passing things along to the next generation, but it never really justifies itself as a film in its own right.
48. Beautiful Men
Directed by: Nicolas Keppens
Nominations: (1) Best Animated Short
I’m always saying I would like the short-film nominees to not be so dependent on weighty themes, and then when a movie about three brothers seeking hair transplants in Turkey comes along, I rank it low. But I just couldn’t find a second gear with this one, which plays like if Force Majeure had lower stakes and no women. There’s some comedy in there, but all the laughs are so blunted by a determined melancholy that nothing really lands. Lotta penises in this one, though!
47. Alien: Romulus
Directed by: Fede Álvarez
Nominations: (1) Best Visual Effects
If you somehow thought the Alien franchise was far too subtle with its phallic and vaginal imagery up to this point, Romulus is the movie for you. When he’s not busy letting the facehuggers hang dong, Álvarez seems to position this movie as the Rogue One of the greater Alien franchise. And while there’s a welcome griminess to this film, the characterizations all feel pretty limp. And that’s not even getting into the AI abomination that this movie does to the soul (and visage) of the late Ian Holm.
46. Inside Out 2
Directed by: Kelsey Mann
Nominations: (1) Best Animated Feature
The original Inside Out was great, a clear highlight amid an uneven (at best) last decade for Pixar. But even Inside Out’s biggest fans can admit the movie was already barely hanging onto its internal logic of personality elements working as an uneasy team to create a child’s psyche. The sequel’s attempt to up the ante and break down this now 13-year-old girl’s personality into ever-more-specific components (Anxiety! Envy! Ennui!) is utter folly, and the harder the film works to make it make sense, the less time it has to tell a compelling story. Perhaps appropriately (if unfortunately), Inside Out 2 can’t get out of its own head.
45. I’m Not a Robot
Directed by: Victoria Warmerdam
Nominations: (1) Best Live Action Short
The Oscar-nominated shorts tend to be a rather heavy lot. So often, a film that’s lighter in subject matter will feel like a welcome relief. That ought to have been the case for I’m Not a Robot, a lightly comedic mini–Black Mirror where an office worker’s struggles with a CAPTCHA present her with the seemingly ludicrous notion that she is, in fact, a robot. But what ensues is neither hilarious nor ludicrous, just sort of lightly strange, leading to an ending that amounts to a shrug.
44. Gladiator II
Directed by: Ridley Scott
Nominations: (1) Best Costume Design
Despite its Best Picture triumph at the Oscars 24 years ago, the original Gladiator was a big, silly spectacle that took itself incredibly seriously, what with its Elysian fields of wheat and Russell Crowe growling about avenging his wife and child. Gladiator II is an even sillier spectacle and takes itself quite a bit less seriously. From one perspective, that’s an improvement on the original. Too bad it looks demonstrably worse in almost every way. Paul Mescal is handed the unenviable task of having to live up to Crowe’s larger-than-life Maximus, while Pedro Pascal kind of hangs out superfluously on the periphery. There is plenty of fun to be had with Denzel Washington’s peacocking villain (or … is he?) Macrinus, not to mention Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger as a pair of fancy-lad co-emperors, but there’s only so far a silly little pet monkey can take a film.
43. Maria
Directed by: Pablo Larraín
Nominations: (1) Best Cinematography
Recognizing only Ed Lachman’s gorgeous cinematography for Maria is a very “great gowns, beautiful gowns” way to honor this movie, but Lachman truly is the film’s MVP. Pablo Larraín couldn’t get a third Best Actress nomination out of his triptych of biopics about isolated 20th-century women, after Jackie’s Natalie Portman and Spencer’s Kristen Stewart. Angelina Jolie isn’t the problem here so much as the fact that Larraín doesn’t seem to have a distinct take on Maria Callas at all.
42. Emilia Pérez
Directed by: Jacques Audiard
Nominations: (13) Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best International Feature, Best Original Score, Best Original Song x2, Best Sound, Best Cinematography, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, Best Film Editing
So here’s the thing … this is a movie that is very French. Before it’s a movie about a transgender cartel leader whose attempts to launder her life of murder and mayhem are complicated by increasingly possessive feelings about her ex-wife and children, it is a movie that is French. Before it’s a musical without any memorable songs, it is a movie that is French. It doesn’t excuse anything, and the people speaking out about how this film misrepresents everyone from trans people to Mexicans aren’t wrong to do so. But, again, this is a French movie that values audacity above all, while dabbling in subject matter and genres it doesn’t understand well enough to make that audacity mean anything.
41. The Last Ranger
Directed by: Cindy Lee
Nominations: (1) Best Live Action Short
Certain live-action shorts (the ones that get nominated for the Oscar, at least) feel like a feature-length movie boiled down to The Moment That Changes Everything. Because of the time constraints, you see the moment coming a mile away and it all starts to feel a bit airless. Such, unfortunately, is the case with The Last Ranger, a film about a ranger and her young protégé on a South African game reserve who are suddenly set upon by rhino poachers. Avumile Qongqo is compelling as the ranger, which takes the film a long way, even as it rolls into its inevitable harrowing conclusion.
40. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
Directed by: Wes Ball
Nominations: (1) Best Visual Effects
Oscar voters can’t get enough of this franchise, having nominated Rise, Dawn, War, and now Kingdom all for the VFX award. It is, indeed, impressive motion-capture work. But as each successive film attempts to world-build out from Caesar and his teachings about ape solidarity — heavy with allegory though they are — they start to blend together. It’s sturdy craftsmanship, even as the storytelling makes less and less of an impact.
39. Anuja
Directed by: Adam J. Graves
Nominations: (1) Best Live Action Short
Mindy Kaling’s producer credit got a lot of attention when this was announced as a nominee, and its Netflix distribution also likely helped spur its awards campaign along. The film itself, about a 9-year-old girl in New Delhi who works in a garment factory and is given the opportunity to attend a school instead, veers between a compelling portrait of two sisters who have to face life-changing decisions far too young and a more airy, almost storybook directorial vision. It works sometimes, but not always, and keeps the story at more of an arm’s length than it should.
38. In the Shadow of the Cypress
Directed by: Hossein Molayemi, Shirin Sohani
Nominations: (1) Best Animated Short
In this sparse Iranian short, an old man lives with his daughter along the sea; one day, a whale beaches near them. While the daughter tries to save it, the father struggles with his PTSD from his days as a ship captain. Directors Molayemi and Sohani have said that the short is a tribute to veterans of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, and while the film trades on some of the tropes familiar to annual viewers of the animated shorts — no dialogue, incongruously weighty themes — it all comes to a moving and ethereal conclusion.
37. Better Man
Directed by: Michael Gracey
Nominations: (1) Best Visual Effects
The music biopic may well be the single most stale genre in all of filmmaking; a recitation of rise-and-fall beats that could be mapped out on the back of a child’s placemat at Denny’s. This Britpop bio about Robbie Williams purports to turn the whole genre on its ear by having Williams voice the lead role himself but appear as a CGI monkey. The problem is, monkey or no, Better Man still marches through those same biopic paces, leaning heavily on the star’s One Fatal Flaw (he hates himself!) as he self-destructs his way through fame and fortune before emerging a wiser and more reflective man. Gracey injects some admirable energy into some of the musical sequences — the “Rock DJ” number is big and colorful and full of dancing — but can’t pull Williams’ life story out of a well-worn cliché.
36. Memoir of a Snail
Directed by: Adam Elliot
Nominations: (1) Best Animated Feature
When I say that this movie is the A Little Life of stop-motion animation, know that I’m far closer to meaning that literally than I would like to be. Adam Elliot’s movie is, to its credit, a fully realized vision, expressively animated and featuring nimble vocal performances by Sarah Snook and Jacki Weaver. It is also so incredibly bleak, careening its main character from one tragic, devastating circumstance to the next, and at some point that cruelty stops feeling meaningful.
35. Death by Numbers
Directed by: Kim A. Snyder
Nominations: (1) Best Documentary Short
The macabre prevalence of school shootings in modern American society has become a recurring theme for Oscar-nominated shorts (including the 2021 Animated Short winner If Anything Happens I Love You and the 2017 Live Action nominee DeKalb Elementary). This film pairs the grim reality of the sentencing of the Parkland school shooter with the poetic resilience of one of his victims, Sam Fuentes. While the filmmakers give Fuentes ample space to articulate her grief, rage, and attempts to find perspective, their grappling with bigger-picture issues like the judicial process for a case like this prove to be more elusive.
34. Magic Candies
Directed by: Daisuke Nishio
Nominations: (1) Best Animated Short
Stories of solitary kids with big imaginations are the bread and butter of Oscar-nominated animated shorts. But if Magic Candies doesn’t break new ground with its tale of a Japanese boy who likes to play with marbles, it at least revels in its plot twist: When the boy buys a bag of marble-shaped candies instead, and eats them, things like the sofa and the family dog start talking to him. Yes, it’s a movie about a little kid tripping balls, but it’s also rich and colorful and about seeing the world differently.
33. A Lien
Directed by: David Cutler-Kreutz, Sam Cutler-Kreutz
Nominations: (1) Best Live Action Short
An American couple and their young child hustle to make it to the immigration office so the husband — Salvadoran by birth but raised in the United States as far back as he can remember — can undergo his green-card interview. Once there, the office is raided by ICE, and the panicked couple struggle to keep their family from being ripped apart. The pertinence of this story to current events will likely be the first thing anyone focuses on, and rightly so, but the directors also deserve credit for the film’s tightly coiled, deeply felt terror, panic, and betrayal.
32. The Apprentice
Directed by: Ali Abbasi
Nominations: (2) Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor
If we’re going to be stuck with the guy as president for [terrified to even put a number on it] more years anyway, there might as well be a movie that forgoes a grandiose, Citizen Kane–style origin story and instead shows public menace Donald Trump as sprung from the bronzed forehead of maniac narcissist Roy Cohn. Sebastian Stan and especially Jeremy Strong are unsparing in their portrayals of two men who nourished themselves on the forced domination of the world around them, depicted in the ugly video resolution of 1980s America.
31. Wicked
Directed by: Jon M. Chu
Nominations: (10) Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, Best Original Score, Best Sound, Best Production Design, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, Best Costume Design, Best Film Editing, Best Visual Effects
As the 2025 Oscar nominee with the most fan enthusiasm behind it, it’s only right that Wicked is at its best when depicting Galinda (a terrifyingly bubbly Ariana Grande) and her cult of confidence. There’s even something timely in there about toxic positivity, at least before we hit the Emerald City and the eugenics kick in. The evaluation of Wicked the screen musical was always going to depend on how well it lived up to the stage show (and whether or not you think the stage show is something worth living up to). In that regard: Cynthia Erivo delivers in her two crucial numbers, the energy is high, the humor is silly, Jonathan Bailey’s Fiyero is cheeky, and the themes are obvious. Only Grande goes above and beyond what’s asked of her, while the direction is at times puzzling (not to hop onto an already crowded bandwagon, but that backlighting in “Dancing Through Life” is a killer) and other times aggravating. I understand we’re stretching a two-and-a-half-hour musical into two long movies, but does every scene, song, and note need to be soooooooo protracted?
30. I Am Ready, Warden
Directed by: Smriti Mundhra
Nominations: (1) Best Documentary Short
Mundhra — previously nominated in this same category for 2019’s St. Louis Superman — works hard to thread together multiple perspectives on convicted murderer John Henry Ramirez and his impending execution. We hear from Ramirez himself, who speaks with clarity about his crime and his ostensible reformation in prison. We see the Texas DA, who has to decide whether to insert his own anti-death penalty stance into a case where death has already been decided. Most impactful is the film’s focus on the adult son of Ramirez’s victim, whose anger seems so unyielding. The intimacy that Mundhra finds in the final few minutes of this film feel like a reward for a project taken on with a rigorous sense of morality.
29. The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent
Directed by: Nebojša Slijepčević
Nominations: (1) Best Live Action Short
This short film from Croatia dramatizes the events of the 1993 Štrpci massacre, where a Serbian paramilitary group boarded a train, removed 18 Bosnian Muslims, and massacred them. The 19th victim was a retired Croatian military officer who spoke out against the unlawful police action. Slijepčević’s direction is stark yet unfussy as he focuses tightly on one train car where a handful of people sit in fear, waiting for the police to ask for their papers. The ultimate emergence of the defiant title character is the film’s one flourish, and an effective one at that, at once underlining the risks of bravery and the hell of compliance.
28. Porcelain War
The war in Ukraine has become the focal point for multiple Oscar nominees over the last few years, including last year’s Documentary Feature winner 20 Days in Mariupol. And while both that film and Porcelain War share up-close depictions of the battle between Russian aggressors and Ukrainian citizens defending their territory, Porcelain War zooms in on a handful of people to illuminate not only who is fighting but what they’re fighting for. These are not soldiers but regular citizens who have had their lives hijacked by the war, conscripted now — and perhaps for the rest of their lives — into soldiers, experts with weapons and tactics, cool-headed in the presence of things like landmines and injuries in the battlefield. At the same time, we see co-director Slava Leontyev’s family strive to maintain some sense of normalcy, with his wife’s painted porcelain figures of snails serving as a symbol of life and creativity enduring through the chaos of war. The film sometimes struggles to balance these two visions of life in Ukraine, but when it succeeds — as it usually does when embedded with the ad-hoc fighting forces who Slava has trained in weaponry — it really packs a punch.
27. The Only Girl in the Orchestra
Directed by: Molly O’Brien
Nominations: (1) Best Documentary Short
In 1966, Orin O’Brien became the first woman to join the New York Philharmonic orchestra, and on the occasion of her retirement at age 85, her niece made a movie about her. You won’t find the harrowing gravity of some of the other documentary shorts here, but this film’s not-so-secret weapon here is Orin herself, a deeply rad woman whose affection for her instrument of choice, the double bass, is matched only by her ambivalence about being labeled a pioneer. Molly O’Brien’s admiration for her aunt, meanwhile, is echoed by everyone from Orin’s students to the words of the late Leonard Bernstein. The way Orin describes the double bass as the sturdy floor of the orchestra is inspiring — without it, the whole concert will fall, but it’s also not meant to be noticed.
26. Nosferatu
Directed by: Robert Eggers
Nominations: (4) Best Cinematography, Best Production Design, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, Best Costume Design
Eggers is a filmmaker who takes such obvious pleasure in building the worlds of his films that it feels somewhat beside the point if his narratives leave me nonplussed. Orlok’s castle is sinister, his shadow inescapable, his vibes truly awful. Does it matter that I can’t begin to understand how I’m meant to feel about Lily-Rose Depp’s character? Or that what’s to be done about Orklok isn’t fully expressed until the film’s closing moments? I guess not! But I mostly wanted to watch Coppola’s Dracula once this was over.
25. September 5
Directed by: Tim Fehlbaum
Nominations: (1) Best Original Screenplay
Is it possible to take a historical event as oft-depicted and thorny with contrasting interpretations as the terrorist abductions at the 1972 Munich Olympics and make a movie that is “just” a control-room drama about reporting it live on national television? If it is, September 5 does it as well you could hope for. The tension is thick, the instruments are unreliable, the workarounds are inventive and ballsy, and the acting by the likes of John Magaro, Peter Sarsgaard, Ben Chaplin, and Leonie Benesch is unimpeachable. As solid as the screenplay by Moritz Binder, Tim Fehlbaum, and Alex David is, I’d have preferred a nomination for editing or Magaro’s performance instead. But ultimately, this is a movie whose primary sociopolitical lens is post-WWII Germany’s bid for redemption, a lens that could not have felt more superfluous in 2024.
24. Instruments of a Beating Heart
Directed by: Ema Ryan Yamazaki
Nominations: (1) Best Documentary Short
You can have your genius László Tóths, your spitfire Anoras, your enigmatic Bob Dylans, but the most captivating protagonist on this year’s Oscar ballot is Japanese second-grader Ayame, whose struggle to master the handful of cymbal crashes required of her in her class performance of “Ode to Joy” becomes a tale of determination, community, and care. What director Ema Ryan Yamazaki lacks in formal ambition, she more than makes up for with her ability to make the cameras disappear in classrooms full of children and their teachers, allowing her to capture some genuinely unguarded moments. There’s a big emphasis on discipline as the students learn how small, individual movements — a bang on a drum, a clang on a triangle — can converge into something greater than themselves if they listen and show up for each other.
23. Black Box Diaries
Directed by: Shiori Itō
Nominations: (1) Best Documentary Feature
First-person accounts of battling institutional injustice are a very popular subgenre among Oscar-nominated documentaries. Where Black Box Diaries often asserts itself above the masses of similar documentaries is that it depicts Shiori Itō’s push for justice in the wake of her own rape as an act of dogged journalism. Without ever making it feel like she’s ostentatiously flaying herself open, Itō shows how the act of simply stepping forward, saying you were raped, and naming your accuser, while courageous, is not enough, and that it takes running your own investigative campaign to even hope to achieve justice. It’s daunting and unfair, and the most affecting moments of Black Box Diaries are when Itō has to endure the many instances where male hegemony works against her. And yet! Itō refuses to allow her film to wallow in despair; hers is a task-oriented resilience, and Black Box Diaries captures that spirit so effectively.
22. A Complete Unknown
Directed by: James Mangold
Nominations: (8) Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Sound, Best Costume Design
Aside from giving every red-carpet awards-season reporter a flawless ice-breaker to approach nominated cast and crew with (“How does it feel?”), A Complete Unknown also surprised a lot of people by, frankly, not sucking. There was plenty of pre-applied scorn when the initial set photos and trailers emerged, with li’l Timmy Chalamet looking overwhelmed in his Bob Dylan drag. But Mangold’s film embraces the determined unknowability of Dylan, which in turn helps it elide all of the worst biopic clichés and rhythms. Meanwhile, Chalamet’s committed performance (he does so much singing!) was far from the cartoonish portrayal many had feared. The film has its drawbacks — especially a pair of underwritten romantic arcs with Elle Fanning’s composite character and Monica Barbaro’s Joan Baez. But it makes up for that with the satisfyingly complex relationships Dylan has with Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), and Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook), which don’t so much solve the puzzle of Bob Dylan as they embody the world where his music was birthed.
21. Conclave
Directed by: Edward Berger
Nominations: (8) Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Score, Best Production Design, Best Costume Design, Best Film Editing
I’ll never stop being flabbergasted that in a year where Pedro Almodóvar made a movie starring Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, and Nicole Kidman lapped milk out of a saucer, that the movie most enthusiastically celebrated by queer social media and alt-comedy tastemakers would be Conclave. Which isn’t to say Conclave is undeserving of its status as a crypto-queer classic. It’s a movie about gossip, soft power, bold colors, and big reveals. On the outside, it’s a process movie, but on the inside it’s all about tense group dynamics and the wielding of receipts. It’s a Real Housewives reunion, essentially, only instead of Meredith Marks, we get god-tier actors like Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, and Isabella Rossellini. (It’s also low-key a pretty great examination of the political struggles within the Catholic Church over whether to acclimate itself to the modern world or retreat into reactionary conservatism, but that stuff is less meme-friendly.)
20. Wander to Wonder
Directed by: Nina Gantz
Nominations: (1) Best Animated Short
This is a movie that gets under your skin, as if Ari Aster had taken up stop-motion and started wondering what might happen to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood if that show’s namesake up and died and left his creations abandoned, trapped, and starving. There’s humor and horror as Gantz explores her premise to its apocalyptic end, with a filmmaking point-of-view that has me dying to see what she’d do with a feature.
19. Yuck!
Directed by: Loïc Espuche
Nominations: (1) Best Animated Short
After movies like Babygirl and Challengers got snubbed for nominations, the Oscar ballot was facing a deficit of kissing. Enter Yuck!, the French-language short about a bunch of kids at summer camp who think kissing is soooooo gross, but whose lips start glowing a telltale pink whenever they’ve got kissing of their own in mind. There are notes of societal repression and shame in the film, but Espuche never presses on them too hard, allowing his glowing-lip conceit to suffuse the film with nimble good humor.
18. The Wild Robot
Directed by: Chris Sanders
Nominations: (3) Best Animated Feature, Best Original Song, Best Sound
I’ve decided to take back “manipulative” as a universal pejorative when it comes to movies. Because The Wild Robot is manipulative as hell, and I loved every second of it. It’s the story of a helper robot who washes ashore on an island full of unfamiliar wildlife, and who eventually not only learns to live among them but also learns values like love, fellowship, and sacrifice, all while raising an abandoned little duckling, a duckling that we all know will one day have to fly away. Everything from Lupita Nyong’o’s well-modulated vocal performance to Chris Sanders’s vibrant direction to Kris Bowers’s nimble score works towards guiding the audience through an emotional wringer. We laugh, clap, cheer, “aw,” and cry all exactly when we’re supposed to. It’s a closed system of a movie, to put it in technological terms, but it’s also a fully realized piece of emotional storytelling, and by the end, The Wild Robot delivers on its promise.
17. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat
Directed by: Johan Grimonprez
Nominations: (1) Best Documentary Feature
We tend to remember historical events in isolation, in part because our films and TV shows about them are inherently isolating. The whole interconnected picture of global and local history even within a short time period is just too vast. Which is what makes Johan Grimonprez’s film so simultaneously impressive and daunting. The 1960 assassination of Congolese president Patrice Lumumba connects to efforts by the United States (via the CIA), Belgium, and interests within the U.N. to manipulate post-colonial Africa, which connects to Africa becoming an extension of the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, which connects to the civil-rights movement in the United States, which connects to the Black artists like Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, and Nina Simone serving as conflicted ambassadors to Africa, which connects to movements like pan-Africanism. It’s rare for me to say I wish a movie were a TV series instead, but part of me wanted ten hours to dig into the longer versions of anecdotes like Malcolm X hosting Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro in Harlem. But the impact of Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is in just how overwhelming it is to watch colonialism try to co-opt everything it touches, including the music and culture dedicated to defying it.
16. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
Directed by: Nick Park, Merlin Crossingham
Nominations: (1) Best Animated Feature
This is the sixth film overall and the second feature-length one starring Wallace (an affable inventor and clueless cheese partisan) and his pet dog, Gromit (a brilliant, patient beagle), the claymation creations of director Nick Park. In this one, old foe and criminal mastermind Feathers McGraw (giving the best bird performance in a year full of them) returns to exact elaborate revenge on the man and dog who got him locked up. As we’ve come to expect from this franchise, the film is clever, silly, and brisk. Exactly what the doctor ordered right at the end of awards season.
15. The Girl With the Needle
Directed by: Magnus von Horn
Nominations: (1) Best International Feature
Based on the true story of early 20th-century Danish serial killer Dagmar Overbye, it’s no surprise that this film is a dark affair. Still, Von Horn infuses his film with menace and dread that extends beyond the film’s grim revelation. The black-and-white cinematography is effectively murky, painting everything from circus sideshows to public baths with impenetrable inky corners. Of all the filmmakers in Oscar’s class of 2024, Von Horn is among the handful I’m most excited to see what they do next.
14. Flow
Directed by: Gints Zilbalodis
Nominations: (2) Best Animated Feature, Best International Feature
One unlikely team put all superhero collectives to shame last year: a black cat, a no-nonsense capybara, an injured secretarybird, a curious lemur, and a bounding yellow Labrador. Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis used 3-D animation to create characters and environments that look meticulously crafted and cared for. The animation of the water alone is thoroughly mesmerizing. Without any dialogue, Zilbalodis tells an uncluttered yet emotionally complex story (why must these dogs be such dogs about everything??) amid floods and storms and stampedes. A logistical wonder and a cute animal movie!
13. Sugarcane
Directed by: Julian Brave NoiseKat, Emily Kassie
Nominations: (1) Best Documentary Feature
Directors NoiseKat and Kassie document the fight for justice against the horrifying legacy of the Canadian Indian residential school system with journalistic rigor and a lacerating series of firsthand accounts. For over a century, Indigenous children were sent to live at boarding schools operated by the Catholic Church, where they were subject to abuse and where children — including infants — were murdered and dumped in unmarked graves. The scope of the atrocity is daunting, even more so because of NoiseKat’s personal connection to the schools through his father. The survivors’ willingness to excavate their shame and trauma make this film tough but mandatory viewing.
12. The Seed of the Sacred Fig
Directed by: Mohammad Rasoulof
Nominations: (1) Best International Feature
Most of the conversation around this film, especially when it premiered at Cannes in May, was around Rasoulof having to film in Iran in secret, finish the film in Germany (the country which submitted the film for Oscar consideration), and ultimately escape his home country, where he’s been imprisoned multiple times for defying the state. That spirit of defiance is present throughout The Seed of the Sacred Fig, a movie which starts warily observing the 2022 student protests in Tehran before bringing that conflict into the home and family of an Iranian judge who’s been signing off on death sentences for the protesters by the hundreds, only to find out his two daughters are closer to the front lines than he thought. By making the political so intensely personal, Rasoulof shows the kind of courage and conviction it’s taken for the women of Iran in particular to take to the streets. It’s an act of political filmmaking that refuses to hold the politics at any kind of a remove. (Not for nothing, but this would make an incredible back-to-back viewing with I’m Still Here.)
11. Sing Sing
Directed by: Greg Kwedar
Nominations: (3) Best Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Song
There is a hook to Sing Sing that in less disciplined hands could have easily crossed the line into gimmickery. The film, co-written by real life inmates in Sing Sing prison who really did participate in a Rehabilitation Through Arts program there, also stars a cast that is majority real-life formerly incarcerated men, alongside a handful of actors like Colman Domingo and Paul Raci. But rather than have Domingo try to match the rawness of co-stars like Clarence Maclin — an acting challenge, certainly, but something far more expected — the film gives Domingo’s character a softness that sets him apart. Subplots about parole boards are far less impactful here than the scenes where the inmates sit in a circle and dissect their own work. If you liked the internal politics and soft power on display in Conclave, I really hope you didn’t let Sing Sing pass you by.
10. A Real Pain
Directed by: Jesse Eisenberg
Nominations: (2) Best Supporting Actor, Best Original Screenplay
A pair of cousins (played by writer-director Eisenberg and Oscar nominee Kieran Culkin) embark on a trip to visit the Holocaust sites in Poland, an act of remembrance and tribute to their recently deceased grandmother. The cousins’ former closeness and current soft estrangement is really carefully sketched out, both by Eisenberg’s script and the actors’ performances, and it fans out into a rather lovely, multilevel examination of grief. And then at the fringes you get this very funny ensemble comedy about a tour group, which lends the movie a bit of a throwback appeal. There are so many ways a film like this could have plunged heavily into darkness, but Eisenberg has a firm handle on tone in only his second film.
9. Incident
Directed by: Bill Morrison
Nominations: (1) Best Documentary Short
This is the kind of film that demands descriptors like “powerful” and “important,” even as those words don’t quite do justice to what Morrison has produced here. Assembled from public surveillance and police body-cam footage, Incident depicts the 2018 Chicago police killing of Harith “Snoop” Augustus. And while the shooting itself is neither obfuscated nor ameliorated, Morrison expands outward from that moment: There’s the fleeing officer whose palpable horror at what he’s done isn’t allowed to progress to responsibility due to the police apparatus racing to justify and insulate his actions; the community members flocking to the all-too-familiar scene; law enforcement getting their stories straight. Morrison’s collage is both intentionally overwhelming yet skillful in the way it directs the audience’s attention and tells a deeper, more systemic story. Powerful, important, and a testament to how applying cinematic techniques can draw out a larger truth.
8. Anora
Directed by: Sean Baker
Nominations: (6) Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Original Screenplay, Best Film Editing
The Oscars can often be a moment when an actor or filmmaker sees many years of coherent career-building arrive at a moment where it all comes together. There doesn’t seem to be much of a consensus as to whether Anora is Sean Baker’s best film, but it’s hard to deny that it’s a distillation of so many of the themes he’s been working on. Ani’s defiant self-reliance as a sex worker recalls Tangerine; its working-class struggles adjacent to extravagant commerce and wealth reflects the Magic Kingdom on the periphery of The Florida Project; the self-delusion that overtakes Ani in the film’s middle portion is a more empathetic version of Simon Rex’s pipe dreams (no pun intended) in Red Rocket. If Baker & Co. win for bringing those themes together in a burst of sparkle, profanity, and madcap scrambling through various Brighton Beach establishments, it would be a much deserved achievement indeed.
7. The Substance
Directed by: Coralie Fargeat
Nominations: (5) Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Original Screenplay, Best Makeup and Hairstyling
Grand Guignol body horror will finally have its moment in the Oscar spotlight. Coralie Fargeat gleefully tossed subtlety out the window with a movie about a physical manifestation of the war on aging women — and the war women wage against themselves and their bodies. Demi Moore stars in one of those once-in-a-lifetime perfect roles where she brings an entire career’s worth of firsthand perspective and then expels it like bile from her system. All the while, Fargeat, Moore, Margaret Qualley, and the crafts departments are all in sync on what’s so surreal, sinister, and screamingly funny about it all. The final 20 minutes are a tear-it-all-down carnival of gore that represented the best in-theater experience of the year.
6. I’m Still Here
Directed by: Walter Salles
Nominations: (3) Best Picture, Best Actress, Best International Feature
I caught this movie mere days after the election, which seems like a potentially awful idea. And yes, there was certainly added resonance to this story of a Brazilian family in political opposition to the emergent fascist regime of the 1970s. But rather than sink into the hopelessness of the moment, I’m Still Here is instead a gripping embrace of resistance and standing up to intimidation, all centered around Fernanda Torres’s steel-spined performance. The film isn’t trying to provide a blueprint for such a situation; instead, it is a caffeinated infusion of personal fortitude.
5. Dune: Part Two
Directed by: Denis Villeneuve
Nominations: (5) Best Picture, Best Sound, Best Production Design, Best Cinematography, Best Visual Effects
With his first Dune film, Villeneuve put his stamp on author Frank Herbert’s world — the planets of Arrakis and Caladan and the Harkonnen stronghold on Geidi Prime, the brooding aesthetic of the Bene Gesserit and the piercing eyes of the Fremen. Awards voters were less compelled to fete this second part. But real intelligence and guts went into Villeneuve’s Part Two changes; the way he re-fashioned the Paul-and-Chani relationship (both Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya’s performances were deeply underrated); the bonkers art-freak aesthetic of Geidi Prime as a place drained of all vitality by the vampiric Feyd-Rautha (a bugnuts fantastic Austin Butler); Rebecca Ferguson’s transformation into the Stevie Nicks of the desert as Lady Jessica. I don’t want this series to stop until Villeneuve imagines his way through the entire known universe.
4. Nickel Boys
Directed by: RaMell Ross
Nominations: (2) Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay
There are so many different ways to be impressed by what RaMell Ross has done with Nickel Boys. It’s a bold and confident interpretation of Colson Whitehead’s book, one that had a lot of expectation attached to it. His visual premise to track the story through dual POV shots was incredibly risky and probably did leave some audience members on the outside looking in. But real art is always going to risk universal understanding, and I actually don’t think it takes that much effort to settle into Ross’s visual rhythms and find your way to the storytelling here. He’s bolstered by Jomo Fray’s intuitive cinematography, stellar performances, including the sadly Oscar-snubbed Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, and at the center, Brandon Wilson and Ethan Herisse, whose oft-elusive faces communicate so much hope and fear whenever we do get to see them.
3. A Different Man
Directed by: Aaron Schimberg
Nominations: (1) Best Makeup and Hairstyling
It’s such a joy to discover fairly early on in a movie that you really have no idea where this is all going. Sebastian Stan (Oscar-nominated this year for a movie that isn’t this one, which is frankly insane) plays Edward, a man afflicted with neurofibromatosis, and who as a result lives mostly in seclusion, until he one day learns about an experimental treatment that rapidly rids him of the tumors that had been obscuring his appearance. Writer-director Schimberg never shrugs off the emotional truth of Edward’s life experiences, but the movie that results is a sharply, unsparingly funny look at how unsatisfying Edward’s new lease on life is. He’s no longer plagued by tumors on his face but instead by the self-serving playwright next door (Renate Reinsve) trying to find artistic glory in cribbing Edward’s life story, or by the infuriatingly magnetic Oswald (Adam Pearson), a charismatic stranger with the same affliction Edward once had. Oswald’s every positive interaction with anyone is a knife in Edward’s back, and his increasing frustration becomes a mania that feels like if Charlie Kaufman ever allowed himself to just scream into the air for five minutes.
2. No Other Land
Directed by: Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor
Nominations: (1) Best Documentary Feature
Much of the conversation surrounding No Other Land across this Oscar season has revolved around its lack of a distributor, what that said about the cowardice of American film studios, and how people would actually be able to see the film. It’s a vital concern, made all the more evident once you see how clearly, urgently, and desperately the film speaks to the need for the world to step in and help the Palestinian people who are being forcibly removed from their land. But what shouldn’t get lost in at least the Oscar conversation is how effectively filmmakers Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor are able to craft their message. The relationship between Adra, a Palestinian living in the West Bank, and Abraham, an Israeli activist fighting against the occupation, is afforded the kind of complexity that most scripted dramas would struggle to convey. The filmmakers risk their own lives to capture the bulldozing of Palestinian homes and schools and the people being marched off their land at the point of a gun. No Other Land is a living document of a people being systematically erased, as well as a cry for intervention, one that grows more hopeless and dispirited as the film goes on.
1. The Brutalist
Directed by: Brady Corbet
Nominations: (10) Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Original Screenplay, Best Original Score, Best Production Design, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing
For so many years, the idea of bigness in cinema has been colonized by CGI action epics, superhero sagas, and IP-driven blowouts. You almost have to force yourself to remember when big movies could also be about … architects. And weirdly this year we got two of them! (I don’t want to hear about how Ayn Rand been knew.) But while Megalopolis wouldn’t top my list even if it weren’t blanked by the Academy, the vastness of Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is a vision I could not shake since I saw it in September. Hungarian refugee László Tóth (Adrien Brody), with all his vision and talent (that library scene!), subjects himself to first the alienation of American society and then to its predatory acquisition. Brody may well win the Oscar, and he’s great, but the film’s most indelible performance is Guy Pearce as the embodiment of America’s attraction to and contempt for talent at nearly all levels of existence. You can see the danger he poses coming from a mile away, but with his wealth and conditional approval, he’s hard to resist. Does the film wobble in its post-intermission half? Certainly. But those imperfections are the flaws that mark The Brutalist as a work of human hands — an original screenplay, told in novelistic scope with bold visuals, a hypnotizing score, and the ambition to make an American movie of the kind that stopped existing decades ago. No film made me more thrilled about what movies are still capable of in 2025 and beyond than this one.