The 2026 Oscars are getting ever closer, and with the nominations announced, we finally have the 10 movies competing for Best Picture. How well the Academy celebrates the best in film is always up for debate, but this year, the lineup is full of varied, excellent features. In my opinion, there isn’t a bad one among them.
But in the end, only one can win. When the Academy votes for Best Picture, they fill out a ranked choice ballot, such that where they place them in the hierarchy actually matters. As SR‘s New Movies Editor, I am going to pretend I get a vote and do the same. This is my ranking of the 2026 Best Picture nominees (based on quality and not likelihood), from worst to best.
10
Train Dreams
This will, I imagine, ruffle some feathers. Unlike most of my fellow critics (and clearly the Academy), I didn’t really fall for Train Dreams when I saw it. Though beautifully shot, it registered as trying to present itself as emotional or profound, rather than actually being those things. I came away both liking it and wondering how I could see the transformative movie everyone else seemed to.
I do think it features fine work from Joel Edgerton, whose enigmatic screen presence, often framed as sinister in other films, is quite smartly used to suggest hidden soulfulness. William H. Macy is also worth highlighting for his small but remarkably impactful role; in another year, he’d be contending in Best Supporting Actor. I’d have preferred to see those two nominated in their respective categories, and this slot in Best Picture left open for another film.
9
Frankenstein
I find it fascinating that the movie Guillermo del Toro has seemingly been building up to his entire career ended up far from his best. Perhaps it was made with too much reverence for the source material, and thus (ironically) ended up less vital. Regardless, Frankenstein doesn’t do anything visually or thematically that the director hadn’t already done better in The Shape of Water, Crimson Peak, or Pinocchio.
Still, it’s a very good film, filled to the brim with his team’s customary craftsmanship. And it showcases a great performance from Jacob Elordi, whose Creature can stand proudly alongside any of the del Toro monsters performed by his frequent collaborator, Doug Jones. If Elordi takes Best Supporting, as has slowly become more plausible throughout awards season, it’ll be a worthy victory.
8
F1
The unexpected nomination of Joseph Kosinski’s F1 has sparked a snarky backlash that, to me, seems more about the kinds of movies up for Best Picture than the quality of this particular one. But people sometimes forget that these nominations come from people who actually make these things, and who, when faced with an engaging blockbuster, might see the technical undertaking worth acknowledging underneath the images. And why shouldn’t that slot go to the highest-grossing original movie of the year?
In terms of story and theme, F1 doesn’t reach as high as the two nominees I’ve ranked below it. Experientially, however, I found it far more successful. As with his previous film, Top Gun: Maverick, Kosinski threads the tricky needle of locking us into the visceral thrill of racing while still allowing us to understand it in terms of a character’s arc. The result is a gripping, cinematic rendering of a sport in which the people doing it are usually inaccessible while it’s happening.
7
Hamnet
Some of the same stylistic choices that left me cold in Train Dreams dampened my experience with Hamnet, especially in the elliptical first act. But by the midpoint, Chloé Zhao and her excellent cast tap into something undeniably powerful. To witness Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, two of the best actors of their generation, be given the space to channel these feelings is one of the gifts of this past movie year.
As a work of adaptation, Hamnet finds a way to expand on its source material, rather than merely retread the same ground. If Maggie O’Farrell’s novel builds to understanding art as a way to process grief, Zhao’s film goes a step further by exploring the collective catharsis that such art can offer its audience, whether that be a Shakespeare play at the Globe theater or this very film at your local cinema. It’s a moving and intelligent piece of work, the highs of which could go toe-to-toe with anything released in 2025.
6
Bugonia
This movie is easy to take for granted. Its thriller engine, powered by the uncertainty over whether an abductee is indeed the alien that her captor believes her to be, is very effective, and straightforward in a way atypical of Yorgos Lanthimos’ other work. While on that initial ride through the story, it can seem like those thrills, and the dueling performances of Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons, are all that’s on offer.
But Bugonia‘s ideas are there, just beneath the surface, waiting to be noticed. Dig them up, and they will take hold and fester, until the movie starts to look like one of the sharpest examinations of our present moment in recent memory. Lanthimos and writer Will Tracy are exploring corrosion – of the mind, of society, and of the environment – and the various forces that cause it. It is, as things often are these days, pretty bleak. But when viewed through what the film has to say about conspiratorial thinking, Bugonia‘s ending isn’t as nihilistic as it seems.
5
Sinners
Ryan Coogler’s triumphant horror-musical is a tale of two halves. The first is a thoughtful, nuanced character drama that builds to one of the most breathtakingly original sequences of 2025. The second is a vampire action film that, while continuing to deepen the themes, leans pretty hard into the expectations of its genre. This dichotomy of invention and convention is characteristic of Coogler’s work, and something that holds me back from embracing his movies as fully as I’d like to.
Still, he is among a select few who can instill in blockbuster-scale features this degree of authorial voice, visible in every creative decision. Everywhere you look in Sinners, you find something bursting with meaning. The performances are engaging top to bottom, the craftwork is impeccable, and the music gives a ring of truth to everything the film wants to say about the healing power of Black art. Whether it wins the top prize on Oscar night or not, it is undoubtedly one of the defining movies of its year.
4
Sentimental Value
Sentimental Value has been on a collision course with the Academy Awards since its Cannes premiere, and it’s easy to see why: Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier built a showcase not just for his actors, but acting itself. Through the somewhat meta lens of a director trying to make his most personal film yet, we come to understand the challenge of being the conduit for someone else’s emotional expression, and the awkwardness of doing that as part of what is ultimately a business venture. We also appreciate more than ever the absolute magic they perform under those conditions.
And Sentimental Value‘s cast does perform magic – there’s a reason that Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, and Elle Fanning all find themselves Oscar nominees. The movie is full of creative flourishes that build on its larger ideas, and Trier deserves much credit for not being content with just capturing his actors doing their thing. But, ultimately, it’s the way in which they seem to summon just the right feeling and let it seep into the frame that kept me spellbound all the way through.
3
The Secret Agent
A film as narratively knotty as The Secret Agent making it into Best Picture is a seriously cool thing. Writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho explores the lingering cost of Brazil’s military dictatorship through the 1970s-set story of one academic who ran afoul of the wrong people. It is, as the title suggests, full of neo-noir intrigue that is quite enjoyable to sit back and watch unfold. But the film’s interest in the often uneasy distinction between truth and fiction, and the role of one in creating the other, can make it almost frustratingly slippery by the end.
But that, The Secret Agent suggests, is the nature of life under oppressive regimes. The film is full of human warmth, love, and endurance, but also cruelty and death, which can come crashing into anyone’s path at any moment. But Mendonça Filho is perhaps more interested in memory, and has appropriately made something that lingers in the mind long after it ends.
2
Marty Supreme
Though much has been made of star Timothée Chalamet’s Herculean effort to promote Marty Supreme, it shouldn’t overshadow just how great a film he was selling. Director Josh Safdie and co-writer Ronald Bronstein gave their previous film, Uncut Gems, a sports movie cousin, and the resulting mix of anticipation and anxiety is intoxicating. Chalamet’s Marty is constantly deploying his considerable charm to shape the world to his liking, always at the expense of those around him, us included. Our desire to see him succeed in table tennis is hard to shake, and the more damage done by his manipulative schemes, the greater our guilt at continuing to root for him anyway.
Chalamet is blinding in this role, but he basically had to be – at any given moment in this film, there isn’t a spot in the frame that wouldn’t reward your attention. The costuming and production design create a period New York that feels like you can reach out and touch it, and in a real triumph of creative casting, it’s completely filled with memorable faces. If it isn’t quite the best film of the year, it’s certainly the most richly detailed, and Marty Supreme deserves whatever Academy recognition is headed its way.
1
One Battle After Another
The top film in my Best Picture ranking is also currently the most likely to win. Rarely is all so right with the world.
One Battle After Another is a remarkably multifaceted cinematic experience. At any given moment, it oscillates from action blockbuster to stoner comedy to political satire to character drama, and each of these modes feels like a full meal. It’s difficult and thorny at times, smoothly propulsive at others. It features several of the year’s best performances, all operating at different registers that somehow coalesce. It speaks very urgently to this current moment in a way that’s both chilling and exhilarating.
Paul Thomas Anderson has crafted something that’s as rich as it is entertaining, and that can actually support all the different ways it’s been talked about. That’s a quality I’d love to see in a Best Picture winner. Plus, along with Sinners, it makes a very compelling case for letting great filmmakers play with studio money, and not just within franchise packaging that pre-justifies the spend. Let’s hope that, if either of them wins, Hollywood takes the hint.
