The 2025 awards season is taking shape, and the landscape looks genuinely exciting. Here are the films that critics, guild voters, and insiders are watching most closely.
1. The Brutalist (Brady Corbet)
Adrien Brody delivers a performance of staggering scope in Brady Corbet’s three-and-a-half-hour epic about a Hungarian architect rebuilding his life in postwar America. Already generating Best Picture and Best Actor buzz with the force of a front-runner.
2. Conclave (Edward Berger)
A papal thriller that functions as a masterclass in tension and institutional power. Ralph Fiennes is extraordinary in a film of exquisite compositional beauty.
3. A Complete Unknown (James Mangold)
Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan in the early Greenwich Village years. The biopic that refuses to be a biopic — formally playful, emotionally honest, and featuring the year’s most charismatic lead performance.
4. Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard)
The most formally audacious film of the year: a Spanish-language crime musical set in Mexico, featuring Zoe Saldaña in a career-transforming performance. Cannes Jury Prize winner.
5. Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross)
A formally radical adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize winner, shot entirely from a first-person perspective. The kind of film that expands what cinema can be.
6. September 5 (Tim Fehlbaum)
A tightly constructed thriller about the ABC Sports team covering the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre in real time. A film about the ethics of televising tragedy.
7. The Substance (Coralie Fargeat)
Demi Moore in the comeback performance of the decade in a body-horror film that functions as a scream about Hollywood’s treatment of women. Cannes’ Best Screenplay winner.
8. Flow (Gints Zilbalodis)
The animated film that proves the medium needs no dialogue to achieve emotional complexity. A wordless story about a cat navigating a post-human world. Extraordinary.
9. Sing Sing (Greg Kwedar)
Colman Domingo in a quietly devastating film about a prison theatre programme, featuring a cast of actual incarcerated individuals playing themselves.
10. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (Nick Park)
Because awards season needs joy, and nobody delivers it with more technical perfection than Aardman. The return of Feathers McGraw is everything.