As 2025 has now drawn to a close, the Academy Awards have named the 10 films they have nominated for Best Picture. Over the past few months, I have seen and ranked all of them, and my thoughts on the first five are down below.
№6= “Train Dreams” (2025)
“There were once passageways to the old world; strange trails, hidden paths. You’d turn a corner and suddenly find yourself face-to-face with the great mystery, the foundation of all things. And even though that old world is gone now, even though it’s been rolled up like a scroll and put somewhere, you can still feel the echo of it.”
One of the notable films that was snubbed for a Best Picture nomination last year was the A24 movie “Sing Sing” (2023) from filmmaking duo Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley, for which they received a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination. After premiering last year at Sundance, their next film, Train Dreams, was acquired by Netflix and eventually managed to get nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture.
The plot follows a man named Robert Grainier (played by Joel Edgerton) and his life as a logger in the Pacific Northwest at the turn of the 19th century. He falls in love and marries a woman named Gladys Olding (played by Felicity Jones, star of 2024’s “The Brutalist”), who starts a life together with him. They built a cabin along a river in the Idaho Panhandle and gave birth to a daughter named Kate.
The story is told through several different vignettes, which capture moments in time, the kind that stick with you through your life. Depictions of anti-Chinese racism, family tragedies or logging accidents gone wrong. It just sort of moves throughout time in a way that feels aimless, but is not too meandering.
The film was also nominated for Best Cinematography, and the way it captures the vast forests of the Pacific Northwest in a 4:3 aspect ratio is rather beautiful. I would not say that it deserves to win over the other nominees, but If you are aiming to watch a beautiful looking film, this might be what you are looking for.
My final rating for Train Dreams is a quaint 8/10.
№7= “F1” (2025)
“It’s rare, but sometimes, there’s this moment in the car where everything goes quiet, my heartbeat slows, it’s peaceful, and I can see everything, and no one, no one can touch me. And I am chasing that moment every time I get in the car. I don’t know when I’ll find it again, but, man, I want to. I want to. ‘Cause in that moment, I’m flying.”
The biggest surprise on Oscar nominations morning for Best Picture was that Warner Bros. was able to get a third movie of theirs nominated for Best Picture, with the help of Apple, over some other contenders with more precursor support. From the director of “Top Gun: Maverick” (2022) comes another crowd pleasing blockbuster that made its way into Best Picture.
The plot follows retired Formula 1 racer Sonny Hayes (played by Academy Award winner Brad Pitt, star of 2019’s “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood”) who reconnects with his old teammate Rubén Cervantes (played by Academy Award winner Javier Bardem, for 2007’s “No Country for Old Men”) and is a struggling owner of the F1 team, APXGP. Cervantes hires Hayes to help him win a single Grand Prix to keep his team from being sold against his will, which Hayes accepts. He is joined on his quest to win by teammate and rival Joshua Pearce (played by Damson Idris) and the team’s technical director Kate McKenna (played by Kerry Condon, who also had a small role in fellow Best Picture nominee “Train Dreams” this year). Together, they try to go the distance and win it all.
The most outstanding aspect of “F1” is its sound design during the racing scenes. The last racing film to win this award, the 2019 Best Picture nominee “Ford v Ferrari,” while a slightly better film than “F1,” did not accurately utilize its audio design for the racing scenes well and misrepresented what the cars sounded like. Doing more research, I can safely say that “F1” has some of the most accurate sound design for cars in a movie that I have seen and it would be a deserving winner of the Oscar for Best Sound.
The film is not particularly ambitious or ground breaking, it is just an overall good time. While there were some films that I would have preferred to be nominated over “F1,” I cannot really say that it is a truly bad nominee. If you want to watch a film that’s mostly just fun popcorn entertainment and have a good time with it, then this will probably be a decent pick for you. My final rating for “F1” is a solid 8/10.
№8= “The Secret Agent” (2025):
Original Language Title: “O Agente Secreto”
“‘This is like those American witness protection programs.’ ‘Over here, it’s all a bit improvised. Brazilian style.’”
After “I’m Still Here” was released last year in 2024, few expected it to be anything more than an International Feature Film Nominee and a Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama at the Golden Globes. What happened next is that people started watching the film, and loving it, resulting in one of the most shocking and well deserved nominations for Best Picture in the last few years. This year, Brazil is back in the awards season with yet another Best Picture Nominee, stylized much like the political thrillers and B movies of the 1970s.
The plot follows a former professor turned political dissident named Armando Solimões (played by Wagner Moura, star of 2024’s “Civil War” and 2022’s “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish”), who runs away to the Northern town of Recife during Carnival season. He meets with his young son, Fernando (played by Enzo Nunes), and gets a job at the police and records station under the alias “Marcello” in order to find proof documenting his mother’s own existence before he leaves the country for America.
I will say that the magical severed hairy leg that came out of a dead shark and proceeded to furiously kick gay people was an addition that seemed very out of left field. Apparently, it has a basis in newspaper slang to get around militaries’ censorship while still reporting on their crimes. Of course, there is always an issue when watching foreign films that something like this gets lost in translation.
When it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival this year, it won two awards, best director for Kleber Mendonça Filho and Best Actor for Moura. Later, it also won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, and Moura again won the Best Actor Drama award.
Although the film is overall well made, it does have some rather extreme issues with pacing and navigating its gargantuan ensemble cast. Parts of the film just fly by while others grind the story to a nigh insurmountable halt, and this is exacerbated by a two hour and 40 minute runtime. It also feels the need to try to introduce a new character every five minutes for the first half of the movie, and while it is impressive how well the Oscar nominated cast works together, it just made the story too convoluted. The fact that you could have cut out about 50 minutes of the runtime and not lost that much speaks to this issue.
That does not mean the film was bad. In fact, Moura is rather exceptional in the film, but there is a reason it is not in the top half of this list. If you are at all interested in spy movies and don’t mind it taking a while to finish, I would recommend you check this one out. My final rating for “The Secret Agent” is an admirable 8/10.
№9= “Frankenstein” (2025):
“My maker told his tale. And I… will tell you mine.”
In 2017, Guillermo del Toro released the film “The Shape of Water” to great critical success. It was a passion project of his that told a story about a woman who falls in love with a monster, and he won Best Picture for it. Eight years later, he is back with another one of his passion projects, this time an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s acclaimed Sci-fi novel “Frankenstein.”
The plot follows the mad scientist Victor Frankenstein (played by Oscar Isaac, star of 2015’s “Ex Machina”), who, at the end of his journey, recounts his life story to the crew of a Danish arctic expedition. After a rather unfortunate and loveless childhood, Victor becomes obsessed with the possibility of creating life from death, and finds a rich patron named Henrich Harlander (played by Oscar winner Christoph Waltz, star of 2009’s “Inglorious Basterds”) who is willing to foot the bill for his experiments.
Victor also falls in love with his brother William’s (played by Felix Kammerer, star of 2022’s “All Quiet on the Western Front) fiancée, named Elizabeth (played by Mia Goth), which further complicates his personal life. Eventually, he succeeds in creating a monster (played by Jacob Elordi) but ends up regretting his choice and tries to ruin its new life.
The technical craft put into this film is really rather impressive. The work that the hair and makeup team did for Elordi to turn him into the monster is extremely impressive and will definitely win the Oscar. Similarly, the costumes and production design were also lavish and gothic. While the overly digital cinematography might not have me fully on board with the way the film looks. I can at least respect how much effort was put into making it.
Elordi also received his first Academy Award nomination for playing the part of Frankenstein’s monster. He gave a great performance and while I don’t think he will win over someone like Stellan Skarsgård or Sean Penn, it is at least a stepping stone for him on the road to even better roles.
My final rating for Frankenstein is a lavish 8/10.
№10= “Bugonia” (2025):
“Your hair has been destroyed. To prevent you from contacting your ship. Your mothership.”
When ranking all the nominees, one will inevitably come last. Normally, I have to think about which one I put in №10, but not this year. Adapted from Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 South Korean film “Save the Green Planet,” comes another quirky and out there movie from director Yorgos Lanthimos.
The plot follows two obsessed conspiracy theorists named Teddy (played by Academy Award nominee Jesse Plemons, star of 2021’s “The Power of the Dog”) and Don (Played by Aidan Delbis) who become convinced that aliens from the planet Andromeda have infiltrated Earth and are secretly running society. To do something about this, they kidnap the high profile pharmaceutical CEO Michelle Fuller (played by two time Best Actress winner Emma Stone, For 2016’s “La La Land” and 2023’s “Poor Things”) and torture her and forcibly shave her hair to prevent her escape back to her mothership.
I simply did not connect to this movie on a fundamental level. It may be because I watched the film that it was based on first and found it to be far superior in almost every single aspect besides the acting. In the months since I have seen this film, I have gone from mild disappointment to an outright distaste for it. It has soured in my mind, and it is just unfavorable when compared to the original.
The “big twist” at the end of the movie was just OK in the original, and it just kind of came out of nowhere in “Bugonia,” and it similarly was not well built up to or satisfying in this film. Tonally, it is also so hateful and nihilistic; it just thinks everyone in the world should die, and I did not connect with it. Maybe I am not a Yorgos guy, but for whatever reason, this one was not for me. I hope you all have a better time when watching this film. My final rating for “Bugonia” is a disappointing 3/10.
