There’s a salient bit of wisdom I want to impart upon you that Hollywood would prefer you didn’t believe: not all the Oscar-nominated films are worth watching. This year, there are 50 different films up for an Academy Award across the many categories, and let’s face it, many of them will be forgotten by next year.
Of course it’s always down to a matter of taste, but this year, mine skews very anti-Emilia Perez. Jacques Audiard’s muddled, vaguely transphobic musical drama, which makes cartoons of social problems and the humans within them, is far and away the most baffling choice among this crop of Oscar noms, particularly given just how many it’s received.
If you really want the lowdown on the things you should see, the following handful – all but one of which (Sugarcane) are up for Best Picture – should steer you right.
If I had to choose one film of the 2025 nominees that you absolutely must watch, Brady Corbet’s staggering masterpiece about an immigrant architect living in mid-century America would be the one. Starring a devastating Adrien Brody as Lazslo Toth, a visionary whose existence is shattered by the Second World War – and who arrives in America with nothing but a desire to rebuild his life and reunite with his lost kin – this is powerful, unforgettable stuff.
Toth is hired by a wealthy American benefactor (Guy Pearce) who admires his maverick artistry, and the film charts their attempts to build a great structure together. It’s a film about trauma, about America, about manhood and ambition, about creative endeavour and its immortality. Yes, it’s long. But so is The Godfather, and The Brutalist moves with such momentum that you’re likely to forget about the running time. This is one I feel confident everyone will still be talking about in a decade or more.
Ramell Ross’s thoughtful and heartbreaking adaptation of the bestselling novel by Colson Whitehead is one of the best films of the past year, and its audacious, unusual use of first-person POV camera makes it all the more impressive. With its camera serving as its protagonist, moving through space and experience and giving the viewer an often-uncomfortable proximity to events, there are a lot of reasons why this visual approach might have seemed gimmicky, but isn’t.
The story moves back and forth between the 2010s and the 1960s, telling the life story of a young Black boy, Elwood (played young by Ethan Herisse and grown-up by Daveed Diggs), who is thrown into an awful segregated reform school during the racist Jim Crow-era in the American south. He has been wrongly accused of trying to steal a car, and his “punishment” will take him a lifetime to heal from. A story of survival and immersion in the brain and body of this unfortunate, courageous young man, it’s a brilliant work.
Sean Baker, director of Tangerine and The Florida Project, has become one of the great chroniclers of American underbellies. He won the Palme D’Or at Cannes Film Festival for this rollercoaster tale of a Cinderella story wedding-gone-awry. Starring newcomer Mikey Madison in an explosive and remarkable performance as a stripper and sex worker who weds a nepo baby Russian billionaire, the first half of the movie is exhilarating screwball comedy. The second descends into a queasy, nightmarish odyssey through nocturnal Brooklyn in search of an annulment. Anora is a beautiful piece of original filmmaking.
From German director Edward Berger, this tightly plotted adaptation of a novel about the internecine decision process to elect a new pope among the secretive, ritualistic, and frankly bitchy world of Vatican politics has turned out to be a sensation. And now, it’s also a Best Picture winner at the BAFTAs.
Partly, that’s down to its remarkable cast – a subtle, snarky performance from Ralph Fiennes and an ensemble of equally veteran actors like Stanley Tucci and John Lithgow. As conservative and liberal candidates for the popehood duke it out, Conclave soars in its Machiavellian, almost soap opera-esque twists and turns of personal loyalty and vengeance. This is truly a battlefield of epic proportions. If you don’t know the final twist, hold onto your popcorn.
Divisive, gross-out, and a great deal of fun, The Substance is one of those Oscar nominations that came out of left-field. The indie body horror directed by French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat was a sleeper box-office hit – but through sheer word-of-mouth and critical momentum seemed to reach a much larger audience than anyone initially anticipated.
Starring an increasingly deranged Demi Moore as a fading Hollywood actress and fitness guru whose career is stalling, the film follows her pursuit of youth and beauty in the form of a mysterious treatment that will allow her to create a hot, bouncy, younger avatar (played with porn-y relish by Margaret Qualley). As with so many newfangled beauty treatments, this is hardly the magic fix she hopes for – things go drastically awry. See it for its audacity, its deliciously crude lack of subtlety, and the sheer fun it has as a feminist provocation.
I wanted to draw attention to one of the smaller films that deserves credit in the Oscars roster; it’s been nominated for one award only, and that’s Best Documentary. Sugarcane, made by indigenous filmmaker Julian Brave NoiseCat and investigative journalist Emily Kassie, is a visually arresting investigation into the notorious Catholic-run state schools enforced upon indigenous children in Canada.
In 2021, the discovery of unmarked graves at one of these schools ignited an international reckoning with the appalling systemic abuse and mistreatment of Native communities at these “residential” schools. The filmmakers capture the anguish, the buried memories, the secrets, and ultimately the resilience of the reservation communities whose families underwent such trauma. The film is also a part of Oscars history: NoiseCat is the first North American indigenous filmmaker to ever receive a nomination in the show’s 97-year history.
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