What to Watch Next If You Enjoyed These Best Picture Nominees of the 98th Academy Awards

Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia is at its most riveting and clear-minded when Emma Stone’s Michelle finds Jesse Plemons’s collection of evidence of the torture he’s committed in the name of conspiracy. It is here that the attempt at commentary on belief is pushed to the extremes and the modern culture of conspiracy theories feels the most fleshed out. Martyrs similarly finds young women being tortured in the face of conspiracy: the idea that their suffering can lead to transcendence in the afterlife. In Martyrs, pain is imposed with brutal methodology. The body is reduced to a site of experimentation, victimhood as a pathway to an understanding of death. Bugonia, by contrast, cloaks its brutality in paranoia and dark absurdism. Teddy’s conspiracy initially reads as delusion, which Lanthimos weaponizes until it becomes the central horror. Both films hinge on torture as proof of otherness, suffering as evidence. Both films ultimately frame annihilation as revelation, but through sharply different relationships to belief. Martyrs concludes with transcendence withheld; after all, conspiracy becomes meaningless once the meaning is clear. Bugonia, however, treats conspiracy thinking as a warped response to that same suffering—a desperate attempt to impose logic on trauma. Teddy’s belief in the Andromedans transforms grief, abuse, and medical exploitation into a narrative that promises meaning, even if it demands violence. Michelle’s final act cruelly validates that impulse. The conspiracy is real, but its truth offers no salvation. In both films, human suffering is meaningless, merely data in an experiment. [Aaron Isenstein]

Every year, it seems Formula One has reached a new level of success and popularity among the mainstream. From the annual Netflix breakdown show Drive to Survive that dramatises the events of the World Driving Championship to the significant social media presence of nearly every competitive driver, there is almost no end in sight for Formula One’s saturation. It is in this environment that Joseph Kosinski’s latest film F1 was released, allowing it to become the highest grossing racing film of all time. Though the success was not unimaginable, few could have foreseen its meteoric rise to universal endorsement by the industry. However, while Kosinski’s film was concerned with the business aspects of Formula One—in particular, in Sonny’s (Brad Pitt) attempts to revive his former teammate’s race team, APXGP—the Wachowskis’ brazenly extravagant racing film, Speed Racer, is a paean to the art of racing itself. The film has certainly garnered a new cult-like status since its years as a box office failure. It follows the journey of the titular Speed Racer as he battles capitalism while focusing on his true passion of automobile racing. The film exudes a carefree love for the ambitions of karting, capturing the glitz of the sport in all its unadulterated glory. Underneath its undeniable gaudy flashiness, the Wachowskis emanate a protective warmth over their protagonist, naïve to the pervasive greed that lurks beneath the sport. Its wholesome morality is fuelled by the kitschy visuals that create and foster a love for the pursuit of sporting excellence. We watch sports films to root for underdogs, and there is no underdog in recent history as affable or as triumphant as Speed Racer. [Hagen Seah]

Frankenstein serves as Guillermo del Toro’s passion project, but also as his direct response to the rise of artificial intelligence. Del Toro compares the titular doctor to a tech-bro, attempting to remind us about what happens when we have innovation without responsibility. Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast also serves as a direct response to modern technologies and the ever changing landscape of what we can do and why we do it. Del Toro reimagines Victor Frankenstein not simply as a reckless scientist but by a man consumed by the need to create. Technology, rendered through flesh and electricity, become an extension of Victor’s need for power and control. The Beast translates this same thinking into the language of artificial intelligence and emotional regulation. Across Gabrielle’s past lives and into 2033, Louis Lewanski reappears as a figure whose inability to process desire curdle into entitlement and violence, from romantic fixation to incel rage. Bonello’s AI promises to save humanity but instead enables the same rage, allowing Louis’s capacity for harm to remain. Where Victor externalizes his ego through creation, Louis is shaped by a system that absolves him of emotional responsibility, transforming violence into an inevitability rather than a choice. Both films circle the idea of masculine failure: from the man who carelessly creates life to prove his greatness to the man whose violence is only amplified by allowing ego to persist under the pretense of innovation. [Aaron Isenstein]

On paper, there is nothing in common between Chloe Zhao’s meditative depiction of grief, motherhood, and art and the first film in the Dakota Johnson BDSM trilogy. However, both films are based on texts that are uniquely female-centered literary projects that just happen to be fanfiction. Hamnet, adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, rewrites the most mythologized male author in Western history by shifting focus away from genius and legacy toward absence, motherhood, and intense grief. Instead of focusing directly on Shakespeare, she centers her work around Agnes’s intuition, labor, and sorrow to structure the film. Fifty Shades of Grey, originating as Twilight fanfiction, operates very differently, yet its cultural impact stems from a similar refusal to sideline female fantasy. Seen together, the films argue for fanfiction not as empowerment fantasy, but as a mode of authorship that allows women to enter dominant narratives such as history, romance, or masculinity, and reshape them around feeling. In doing so, both works validate female subjectivity not by idealizing it, but by taking it seriously.  There would be no Jessie Buckley crying her eyes out without the recentering of male literary narratives around women, and there would be no Dakota Johnson discovering the red room without rewriting Twilight around female pleasure. [Aaron Isenstein]

At some point during Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, which he has now loudly declared as one of his all-time favorite films, my dad looked over at me and commented that it reminded him of Tim Burton’s Ed Wood. He continued to note these films’ similarities throughout the film. When the movie finished, I asked him where the comparison came from. He simply remarked that they are both movies about passionate men that no one takes seriously and their willingness to do anything for money, validation, or proximity to their dream. Like Ed Wood, Marty Mauser is incredibly sincere in his obsession (table tennis instead of filmmaking), but that sincerity exists in a world that sees him as ridiculous. Burton frames Ed Wood with affectionate irony, presenting him as eternally optimistic and blind to how deeply the system exploits him. Safdie is crueller, showing how Marty’s belief in his own destiny metastasizes into theft, violence, and humiliation as he scrambles to fund the fantasy. Yet neither film fully condemns its protagonist. Burton offers Ed a kind of immortality through sheer passion and importance, while Safdie allows Marty a bruised yet ultimately hopeful ending. Together, the films trace a line from lovable eccentricity to moral collapse, asking when passion stops being brave and starts being dangerous and how capitalism rewards delusion just long enough to ruin the people who believe in it most. [Aaron Isenstein]

The most touching moment of Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film arrives when Perfidia Beverly Hills addresses her daughter, Charlene, in her letter. In it, she describes how disconnected she feels, but importantly ends on a hopeful note. She writes, “Will you try to change the world like I did? We failed. Maybe you will not.” This line echoed a hopeful sentiment found in Heiny Srour’s The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived, which recounts in real time the rise of the feminist, Marxist-Leninist group, the Dhofar Liberation Front (DLF), who fought for liberation against the Omani Sultanate and British Imperialists after years of exploitation and oppression. In many ways, they were what the French 75 were modelled after, as liberated women armed with assault rifles sought to tear down the rigid hierarchies of power established by colonial rule and reinstate success by rebuilding through community building and education. Although Pynchon’s novel is a hybrid of truth and fiction, the DLF’s impact cannot be understated, and their impact reverberates in resistance movements around the world, consciously or not. While they were ultimately unsuccessful in sustaining their brief separation, the film captures a raw fervor of revolution that parallels the hopeful sentiments established at the end of One Battle After Another. [Hagen Seah]

When imperialist powers secede from large countries, they unfortunately go through many periods of political instability, capitalised by wealthy, charismatic forces who consolidate their power through unchecked access to capital and military manpower. The Secret Agent captures individuals trapped in the system as they fight authoritarianism and flee persecution as a result of their rebellion. Kleber Mendonça Filho’s film captures resistance from the outside and social suffocation that engenders solidarity in spite of personal differences. Lav Diaz’s film takes a markedly different approach, exploring the rotting carcass of moral indifference in pursuit of political power in his crime thriller When the Waves are Gone. In many ways, Brazil and the Philippines have gone through eerily similar stages of political turmoil, supported by invasive American forces that fuelled their fascist regimes, whose repercussions can still be felt today. Diaz’s filmography is often concerned with the consequences of political vacuums, and depicts various stages of Ferdinand Marcos’s regime and the tumult that occurs during social and political unrest. Though not strictly a thriller in the conventional sense, as any cursory glance of Diaz’s films will inform you of his languid pacing, When the Waves are Gone revolves around the moral quandary faced by Lieutenant Hermes Papauran, a top investigator in the Philippines police who sees firsthand the brutality caused by the anti-drug campaign imposed by the Marcos regime. By exploring the rotten core of Marcos's constitutional authoritarianism, Diaz confronts the dangers of the relentless pursuit of power and its trickle-down effects on its citizens and enforcers. The conclusions drawn by Mendonça and Diaz’s films are clear: in a world of totalitarianism, nobody wins. [Hagen Seah]

It is the natural sensibility of the filmmaker to draw on their own life when writing, from stealing a conversation heard upon the streets to telling stories directly about people they know. It is also not uncommon for family to work together in the same film, but both Betsey Brown’s unsung masterpiece Actors and Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value explore what happens when filmmaking with and about family becomes too personal and too messy. While the two films take staunchly different approaches in tone, with Actors being a hyper-online edgelord pseudo-mockumentary and Sentimental Value being a quiet, Bergman-esque take on generational trauma, they both sit with the deep melancholy of trying to navigate your own family alongside the creation of art. Filmmaker/actress Betsey Brown places herself and her own brother within her film, using the conceit of making a movie where they play themselves as a real life way to confront conversations about jealousy and her own flaws with him. Meanwhile Sentimental Value’s Gustav Borg makws his own return to film as an attempt to make sense of his strained relationship with his daughter Nora after years of trauma, crucially framing it through her perspective to the point where she plays the lead character. Unintentionally, Joachim Trier made a film about a man trying to do exactly what Betsey Brown did in her own work. [Aaron Isenstein]

To call Ryan Coogler’s Sinners an outlier in today’s cinematic landscape would be underrepresenting the magnitude of this unprecedented success story. The highest grossing original live-action film since Christopher Nolan’s Inception, Coogler’s vampiric ode to the American South is a much-needed revival of traditional horror tropes with a postmodern perspective on the African-American experience. Its anomalous triumph resisted the very notions of box office success that we have been fed for the past decade, that films need recognisable characters from pre-existing intellectual property in order to be palatable to general audiences. It thus feels incredibly relevant to view Sinners in tandem with its ancestor in the black horror genre: Bill Gunn’s avant-garde blaxploitation film, Ganja & Hess. Despite being labelled under the blaxploitation umbrella, Ganja & Hess is a far more subversive blend of the African-American experience, blending visual elements of canonical horror films while maintaining the acerbic edge of satirical commentary commonly spotlighted in those films. While Coogler’s Sinners leans into the aspect of community found in a vampiric society, a world where a collective eternity is granted to individuals in exchange for their soul, Gunn’s film is far more melancholic, exploring the cycles of guilt, grief and addiction that comes with that insatiable chase for blood, an unfortunate byproduct of their primal desire. The films share little in common tonally – Ganja & Hess is populated with the cacophonous sounds of techno beats, an alienating experience that suffocates you, while Sinners’s backdrop is littered with the community’s shared experience with the Blues. Their depiction of vampiric liberation are similarly diametrically opposed. But, it is in this very contrast that one might find illumination, highlighting the minute details of the Black experience in America and unpacking how the perception of a social ethno-group within an individualistic trait has changed in the years since the civil rights movement of the sixties. [Hagen Seah]

Clint Bentley’s newest film, Train Dreams, traces a filmic lineage of the mythos of Americana, backdropped by the rolling expanses of the Pacific Northwest. It blends its quixotic visions of lush, temperate forests with its explorations of human existence. Much of the same can be said about Stan Brakhage’s formal, experimental masterpiece, Dog Star Man. Told in five parts, Brakhage’s epic begins with a prelude to space and time, as a flurry of colour and shapes are shown in quick succession that represent the creation of the universe. What follows is a crusade in a man’s life of pastoral living and bucolic journey to self-actualisation, blending his odyssey with images of the cosmos and visions of hyperspace. There is a distinct contrast in pairing Dog Star Man with Train Dreams, as the viewer trades a tempestuous inner life in Joel Edgerton’s Robert, devoured and enshrouded by grief for Brakhage’s nameless protagonist, but the questions of existentialism both film poses are one and the same. It questions the transience of human life and ascribes meaning not through descriptivist explanations but contemplative scenarios, trading in visual language that poetises the grandeur of simple acts. Train Dreams is a tapestry, woven from the threads of many filmmakers, but Brakhage’s influence, especially in his elegantly prosaic frames, speaks volumes about the ethos of Train Dreams. In a world which swallows permanence with time, how do we reconcile with disappearance? [Hagen Seah]