An adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, following Zoyd Wheeler — a former political radical navigating the wreckage of the Reagan era in Northern California. With a sprawling cast including Leonardo DiCaprio, Teyana Taylor, Sean Penn, and Benicio del Toro, PTA reconstructs Pynchon’s paranoid, nostalgic world with the formal confidence of his best work. It is simultaneously a Reagan-era elegy, a spy film, a comedy, and a meditation on what the counterculture became.
Set in 1932 Mississippi Delta, twin brothers (both played by Michael B. Jordan) return home from Chicago to open a juke joint — only to encounter an evil older and more consuming than anything they left behind. A supernatural horror film built on blues mythology, Black American history, and the specific textures of the Deep South between the wars. Ludwig Göransson’s score fuses the blues tradition with orchestral composition in a way critics have called unlike anything in recent cinema.
Timothée Chalamet plays Marty Reisman, a real-life ping-pong prodigy whose obsessive pursuit of greatness consumed his relationships, his health, and his judgment. Shot in the kinetic, close-quarters style that defined the Safdie Brothers’ Good Time and Uncut Gems, Marty Supreme is a portrait of obsession that uses the singular world of competitive table tennis to say something universal about the price of excellence.
Based on Maggie O’Farrell’s award-winning novel, Hamnet follows Agnes — the woman who would become Shakespeare’s wife — and the grief that consumed her after the death of their eleven-year-old son. Jessie Buckley stars in a performance of terrifying emotional precision. Zhao brings to the Elizabethan English countryside the same elemental stillness she brought to the American West in Nomadland. A quiet, devastating film about loss and the art it produces.
Del Toro’s long-gestating adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel stars Oscar Isaac as the creature — not the scientist — in a film that centers the monster’s perspective for the first time. A gothic fable about creation, rejection, and what it means to be human when humanity refuses to claim you. Jacob Elordi plays Victor Frankenstein. The production design, shot entirely on practical sets in the del Toro tradition, has been called the most beautiful horror environment since Pan’s Labyrinth.
An aging Norwegian filmmaker (Stellan Skarsgård) reconnects with his two daughters — played by Renate Reinsve and Elle Fanning — as he prepares a final film. Trier’s most personal work, exploring the uncomfortable relationship between art-making and the people artists leave behind. Nominated for both Best Picture and Best International Feature — only the third Norwegian film in history to receive a Best Picture nomination.
Based on Denis Johnson’s Pulitzer-shortlisted novella, Train Dreams follows Robert Grainier, an Idaho laborer whose quiet life across the first half of the 20th century contains ordinary joy and unimaginable loss. A deliberately paced film that uses the rhythms of American rural labor — logging camps, rail lines, the vast Idaho wilderness — to build an elegiac portrait of a man and a vanished world. Cinematography that the ASC called among the best of the decade.
A darkly comic film starring Emma Stone as a woman who becomes convinced that her mundane suburban life is a corporate simulation. Written by Will Tracy, whose credits include The Menu and Succession, Bugonia operates in the tradition of satirical absurdism — finding genuine dread inside the surfaces of ordinary American comfort. Stone’s performance has been called the funniest and most unsettling work of her career.
A Brazilian political thriller starring Wagner Moura as a former intelligence operative pulled back into the machinery of state power he thought he had escaped. Double-nominated for Best Picture and Best International Feature, the film draws on Brazil’s recent history of democratic fragility and institutional corruption. Moura — globally known for Narcos — delivers a physically and emotionally exhausted performance that carries the film’s full weight.
Brad Pitt stars as a retired Formula 1 driver who returns to the grid as a mentor to a young rookie. Shot at actual F1 races across the 2023 and 2024 seasons using purpose-built camera cars, the film’s technical achievement in sound and visual effects is the primary reason for its Oscar presence. As a piece of filmmaking craft — putting an audience inside a racing cockpit at 200mph — it has few peers. As a narrative, it delivers exactly what it promises.