There are 35 feature films nominated for the 2026 Academy Awards ceremony. We here at Swampflix have only reviewed half of the films nominated (so far!), which isn’t nearly a high enough ratio to comment on the quality of the selection with any authority. We’re still happy to see movies we enjoyed listed among the nominees, though, including 40% of our own Top 10 Films of 2025 list. The fact that most top prizes are likely to go to one of two titles in that overlap (Sinners or One Battle After Another, both scoring high numbers of nominations) is also an encouraging sign of improving tastes within The Academy, validating this year’s list of nominees as a decent sample of what 2025 cinema had to offer.
Listed below are the 18 Oscar-Nominated films from 2025 that we’ve covered on the site, loosely ranked based on our star ratings and internal voting. Each entry is accompanied by a blurb, a link to our corresponding review, and the listed awards the films were nominated for.
Nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Michael B. Jordan), Best Supporting Actress (Wunmi Mosaku), Best Supporting Actor (Delroy Lindo), Best Original Screenplay, Best Casting, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Production Design, Best Costume Design, Best Makeup & Hairstyling, Best Visual Effects, Best Sound, Best Original Score, and Best Original Song (“I Lied to You”)
“A truly American horror story: a beer & blues-fueled gangsters vs ghouls battle set against endless fields of cotton and all the commodified evil they represent. This is the movie that brought non-movie people out to the movies last year. There’s usually at least one, but they rarely become such a full-blown cultural phenomenon.”
Nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Timothée Chalamet), Best Original Screenplay, Best Casting, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Production Design, and Best Costume Design
“Josh Safdie’s ping-pong hustling saga is remarkably deranged for a sports drama, overloaded with an even more remarkable collection of vintage New Yawk accents & faces to scowl at our incorrigible antihero. The audience scowls too, while we struggle with our simultaneous desires to see Marty succeed and to watch him fail, miserably.”
Nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Leonardo DiCaprio), Best Supporting Actress (Teyana Taylor), Best Supporting Actor (Benicio del Toro), Best Supporting Actor (Sean Penn), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Casting, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Production Design, Best Sound, and Best Original Score
“2023’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline presented a rudimentary prototype for a kind of politically daring Hollywood blockbuster that a major studio would never actually touch, and then one of the last few standing put some real money behind making the real thing (before promptly being chopped up and sold for parts). After so many years of Hollywood studio action spectacle getting lost in the CG/IP wilderness, it’s encouraging to know the medium can still be thrilling & meaningful when the funding flows to the right people.”
Nominated for Best Makeup & Hairstyling
“A gnarly body-horror revision of the Cinderella story, now about the madness induced by the never-ending scam of self-improvement through cosmetics. It’s one of many recent revisionist fairy tales that rehabilitate a famous ‘villain’ who isn’t really a villain but a victim of circumstance. This particular one’s a cautionary tale about how ‘changing your outside to match your insides’ isn’t always the best idea, not if you’re willing to allow your insides to become monstrous in the process (and, by extension, about the dangers of tapeworm-based weight loss).”
Nominated for Best Supporting Actress (Amy Madigan)
“Semi-functional alcoholism, conspiracy theory paranoia, Ring camera surveillance, cops harassing the homeless, mob justice vigilantism, institutional scapegoats for abuses at home … Oh yeah, we’re rockin’ the suburbs.”
Nominated for Best Sound and Best International Feature
“When it’s time to party*, we will always party hard.
*distract ourselves from impending apocalypse and the ever-present desire to cry until we puke”
Nominated for Best Actress (Rose Byrne)
“A portrait of parenthood as being cursed with an imaginary friend that demands your constant attention 24/7.”
Nominated for Best Picture, Best Actress (Emma Stone), Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Original Score
“Our corporate-speak overlords are literal demons on Earth and all we can do about it is conspire & seethe online. No action, just endless talk talk talk until the biggest lunatic among us ineffectively lashes out. Weirdly, if this inspires any been-there-seen-that jadedness, it’s coming from Kinds of Kindness, not Save the Green Planet!; would’ve fit right in as another vignette in the anthology, if condensed.”
Nominated for Best Original Song (“Golden”) and Best Animated Feature
“The people yearn for the return of the music video.”
Nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor (Wagner Moura), Best Casting, and Best International Feature
“I witnessed two verifiable miracles that night: the scale & period detail afforded by this movie’s budget, and an earthly visit from an angel (Udo Kier).”
Nominated for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Casting, Best Production Design, Best Costume Design, and Best Original Score
“I expected this to exclusively be about one historically famous couple’s version of art therapy, but it hits on much broader themes about how we’ve all lost a genuine, Pagan relationship with the natural world and how making art can be a form of witchcraft that brings us back to it. It’s powerful stuff; cut right through my knee-jerk cynicism (except during one disastrously phony reading of ‘To be or not to be’ that temporarily broke the spell).”
Nominated for Best Original Screenplay and Best International Feature
“A surprisingly straightforward thriller, considering what’s usually publicized about Panahi’s recent work. The urgency of its politics hangs heavy on each plot beat & morbid punchline, though, which makes for interesting comparison points as a contemporary of One Battle After Another.”
Nominated for Best Documentary Feature
“A nightmare dispatch from the suburban US surveillance state. Probably amoral of me to say this about a documentary of a real-life tragedy, but this would be a helpful answer for anyone who was asking what Weapons is ‘about’. This country is terminally ill.”
Nominated for Best Animated Feature
“Between this, Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds, and Mars Express, it feels like there’s nice little new wave of sci-fi/fantasy films forming in French animation studios right now. Mars Express is a little more Blade Runner than Arco & Sirocco, which skew a little more Ghibli (making them less distinct in the process) but they’re all pleasant & enchanting enough in their own way.”
Nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress (Renate Reinsve), Best Supporting Actresses (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas & Elle Fanning), Best Supporting Actor (Stelan Skarsgard), Best Original Screenplay, Best Editing, and Best International Feature
“At times, a nice movie about a nice house; at other times, a sad movie about making a sad movie.”
Nominated for Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (Jacob Elordi), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Production Design, Best Makeup & Hairstyling, Best Sound, and Best Original Score
“A more refined, accomplished version of what Kenneth Branagh failed to fully give life. I’m excited to get to the point where Jack Pierce’s creature design is in the public domain so that every new version of this story isn’t so fussy & literary, but this still feels like an exceptional specimen of its ilk.”
Nominated for Best Makeup & Hairstyling
“The Rock has been famous for longer than he’s been an actor, so it was impressive to see him disappear into a role for the first time this deep into his career. I don’t know that there’s much else to the movie besides giving him the opportunity to flex his recently atrophied acting muscles, but he puts the spotlight to good use.”
Nominated for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, and Best Original Song (“Train Dreams”)
“More of an illustrated audiobook than a movie. Specifically, it’s illustrated with the visual language of a macho, all-American TV commercial for a whiskey brand (which at least makes it interesting for how vocally pro-worker & anti-ICE it is in its politics).
I would be curious to know how many people dug this but didn’t vibe with Hamnet, which hits on a lot of the same themes (re: Old World Nature, familial grief) but actually makes an effort to adapt its source material instead of just reciting it. Personally, I found Hamnet powerful and this one hokey, but I’m sure that’s exactly flipped for a lot of people.”
-The Swampflix Crew
Swampflix 