Every year, the Oscars get it wrong. By “it,” I mean the nominations and, later, the winners—and by “wrong,” I mean that their choices fail to completely line up with your own personal favorites. Naturally, then, it’s inevitable that a degree of discontent is baked into the proceedings, leaving film fans complaining about the omissions and snubs. Although let’s be fair: Any Academy Awards that chooses to honor major films like “One Battle After Another,” “Sinners,” “Sirât,” and “Marty Supreme” is actually getting it right a lot of the time.
Nonetheless, once the Oscar nominations are announced, so many worthy films immediately get brushed aside because they didn’t earn a single nod. That narrowing of the race, which throws a huge spotlight on the nominated movies, means so many others are largely forgotten about. In the eyes of the media, it’s almost as if they never existed.
For the third straight year, I’m very happy to pay tribute to 10 great films from the past year whose titles you won’t hear mentioned during the Oscars on March 15. As always, narrowing it down to 10 was its own version of culling the field, and I’m sorry to leave off so many fine movies that might have been among your own highlights of 2025. But whether I snubbed them or the Academy did, those films have lost none of their luster. If anything, a personal beloved choice sometimes seems even more luminous because our love for the film isn’t widely shared—it becomes a treasure we get to keep close to our heart. In alphabetical order, here’s my salute to some such jewels.
Last year’s Sundance featured myriad exceptional nonfiction films. All five Oscar nominees for Best Documentary debuted at the Park City festival, alongside such other memorable documentaries as “Predators” and “Zodiac Killer Project.” Add to that list visual artist and music video director Kahlil Joseph’s stunning feature-length debut. Based on his own video installation, “BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions” opens with a consideration of Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience, a 1999 collection (since expanded) that sought to encompass the totality of Black history.
But that tome is merely the starting point for Joseph’s ambitious, dizzying work, which plays like a record album, each new vignette serving as a separate “track.” The film honors Black journalists, thinkers, and leaders who have fought to center the Black experience, but “BLKNWS” is not limited to the past. (Indeed, one of the movie’s key lines of dialogue is “Do you even remember the future?”) With its forward-looking mixture of sources and art forms—making room for dance, poetry, sculpture, social media, music, and more—Joseph blends autobiography with commentary, fiction with nonfiction. It’s a knockout.
Is Zhao Tao the most acclaimed actress most American moviegoers have never heard of? Just recently turned 49, she has been the star of her husband, Jia Zhangke,’s films for roughly half of her life, starting with his 2000 breakthrough “Platform.” The Chinese writer-director has devoted his career to chronicling his homeland’s uneasy embrace of globalization, which has marginalized poorer communities and changed the nation’s very understanding of itself. Zhao’s expressive, melancholy face has often personified that societal tension, especially so in “Caught by the Tides,” one of Jia’s most radical films.
Here, he pulls from footage he’s shot for previous movies—including “Still Life” and “Ash Is Purest White”—to tell a decades-spanning tale of two lovers (Zhao Tao, Li Zhubin) that’s set against the country’s changing character. Drawing comparisons to films like “Boyhood,” “Caught by the Tides” captures its protagonists as they seemingly age in real time, leading to a newly shot final sequence that plays like a bittersweet summation of Jia and Zhao’s lifework. She’s never been so luminous.
Writer-director Sarah Friedland rightly describes her unsentimental feature debut, which won three prizes at the 2025 Venice Film Festival, as a political film. Other movies about the elderly treat their subjects as overly adorable, but “Familiar Touch” allows for not such cutesiness to intrude. The movie stars venerable stage actress Kathleen Chalfant as Ruth, who is sent to an assisted living center by her concerned, loving son (H. Jon Benjamin) once her dementia becomes more pronounced.
Friedland, who has experience as a care companion, shot Ruth’s awkward navigation of her new life at an actual Pasadena center, recruiting the residents to be part of the filmmaking process. What emerges is a touching meditation on aging that doesn’t shy away from the limits of medical care during our twilight years. Chalfant was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award, a deserving recognition for a performance that nimbly conveys Ruth’s fear and resignation as her mind starts slipping away. But kudos also go to Friedland for making an honest film about the American healthcare system and the ways we tend to marginalize and infantilize the aged in popular culture.
So few American films get small-town life right, which is why it’s always worth celebrating one that does. Not surprisingly, one of the best examples in recent years, “A Little Prayer,” comes from the writer of 2005’s “Junebug.” Filmmaker Angus MacLachlan once again sets the action in North Carolina, introducing us to a loving but troubled suburban family led by kindly patriarch Bill (David Strathairn).
Running a factory with his son David (Will Pullen), Bill starts to suspect that David is having an affair with a coworker, which especially displeases Bill because he has such fondness for David’s wife Tammy (Jane Levy). As Bill struggles with whether to say anything to Tammy or his wife, Venida (Celia Weston), he must also contend with the abrupt return home of his restless, irresponsible daughter, Patti (Anna Camp).
“A Little Prayer” captures all the gentle rhythms of domestic life far away from the big cities, and Strathairn does stellar work as a good man unsure of the right thing to do for either his daughter or his daughter-in-law. Few American films inspire comparisons to the quietly observant, subtly emotional approach of Yasujirō Ozu—this one does.
Josh O’Connor’s career is just getting started, so one shouldn’t be shocked that he has yet to receive an Oscar nomination. But what about Kelly Reichardt? This singular filmmaker’s ninth feature is among her finest, starring O’Connor as J.B., a going-nowhere family man in 1970 who plots a heist at a local art museum. “The Mastermind” upends the conventions of the crime-thriller to deliver a seriocomic character study of a directionless, privileged middle-class American unaware of the tumultuous political climate swirling around him.
In the process, Reichardt also writes an astounding homage to the sort of revolutionary films that littered the landscape during Hollywood’s 1970s golden age, except with her own unique perspective on individuals’ wary relationship with society. She found the perfect rising talent for the job: O’Connor starred in four movies in 2025, but this was his high-water mark.
“My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow”
Winning Best Documentary from the New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and the National Society of Film Critics, Julia Loktev’s engrossing portrait of the embattled journalists working for TV Rain, Russia’s last independent news agency, was one of 2025’s most critically-acclaimed films. The Academy’s failure to nominate “My Undesirable Friends” will go down as one of that branch’s most questionable omissions, alongside “Hoop Dreams” and “The Thin Blue Line.” The documentary takes viewers inside the newsroom and into the apartments of these young, mostly female reporters, who are trying to expose the corruption running rampant within Vladimir Putin’s regime.
But the film’s power stems from its incredible timing: Loktev arrived in Moscow mere months before the country’s invasion of Ukraine, which had chilling effects inside Russia as the government cracked down even more forcefully on free speech and protest. Instantly establishing itself as one of the great movies about journalism, “My Undesirable Friends” is also a portrait of courage and friendship during impossible times. That its depiction of an authoritarian government feels increasingly relevant to American viewers is just another of the film’s gripping selling points.
Like “It Was Just an Accident,” British-Zambian filmmaker Rungano Nyoni’s second feature opens with an upsetting incident behind the wheel in the middle of the night. Shula (Susan Chardy) drives home from a costume party to discover her uncle’s dead body in the road. That sets in motion preparations for a family gathering to mourn the man’s passing, except some of the women assembled have good reason to be glad he’s gone.
Nyoni, who won best director in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section, casts a harsh light on Zambia’s patriarchal culture, using the deceased’s not-so-secret history of sexual abuse as a catalyst for a liberating, burn-it-all-down commentary. “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl” opened nearly a year ago, when Academy members and critics weren’t necessarily thinking about award-worthy films. Their loss: Anyone who saw “Guinea Fowl” was bewitched by its gorgeous images, angry undercurrent, and unforgettable final moments.
It had been seven long years since Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan released “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” a seductive love story that featured an hour-long oner presented in 3D. He returned with another audacious enterprise in “Resurrection,” which traces China’s 20th century, as well as cinema’s, through an entrancing, episodic story of a strange creature (Jackson Yee) who escapes into movies so that he can still dream. (In the world of “Resurrection,” society has stopped dreaming so it can gain immortality.)
Bi works his way through silent cinema, noir, and genre flicks, and once again delivers an ambitious long take set at the close of the millennium. Hollywood is always preaching about the importance of the theatrical experience, but few studio movies were as sumptuous in their big-screen beauty as Bi’s intoxicating ode to the power of cinema. The jaw-dropping images never let up, and the score, provided by M83, is equally transporting. “Resurrection” reminds the viewer why the movie theater remains the optimal way to appreciate a filmmaker’s grand vision.
At a moment when #MeToo’s impact seems, sadly, to be waning in Hollywood, writer-director-star Eva Victor’s feature debut was a moving tribute to a survivor of sexual assault. But what was most remarkable about “Sorry, Baby” was how nuanced and even hysterically funny such a tribute could be. Victor plays Agnes, an aspiring-writer-turned-professor whose early artistic promise was demolished by an abusive teacher who sent her life on a different course.
Featuring spectacular supporting performances from Naomi Ackie and Lucas Hedges, this comedy-drama explores the lingering pain and confusion that survivors experience, while eschewing the well-meaning but melodramatic clichés usually associated with such subject matter. As a result, “Sorry, Baby” celebrates a life rather than focuses on just the tragedy, presenting Agnes as a hobbled but by no means broken person on the path to rediscovering herself.
Oscar shortlisted for Best International Film and Best Cinematography, German director Mascha Schilinski’s second feature won the Jury Prize at Cannes and entrances more with each subsequent viewing. “Sound of Falling” spans approximately 100 years, following four young women who live in the same house at different times in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Working with her cinematographer husband Fabian Gamper, Schilinski astutely observes the similar challenges these girls face, whether they live during the run-up to World War I or in modern Germany. Indeed, the movie weaves together disparate time frames so that the characters’ circumstances seem to speak to one another across generations. Haunted by the occasional use of Anna von Hausswolff’s ethereal “Stranger,” “Sound of Falling” turns the past into a ghost story while making history feel very much alive and unresolved. Many have yet to see this wonderful film, but just because the Academy overlooked it isn’t an excuse for the rest of us to do the same.