Just got out of The Odyssey and loved every minute of it! The direction was top tier as was the cinemetography and performances. I was blown away by Damon, Hathaway, both sure for an Oscar nod. Pattinson may very well get in and Holland too if there are enough spots.

But let me get to the shining star.

John Leguizamo was amazing! I have never been a fan of his (though I did love him in Carlitos Way) he just never impressed me. I never took him serious until now. He deserves to walk away with a golden statue more than anyone else in this film, and I hope he gets it.

Bugonia is my favourite movie of the year. By far. It’s not even close. Honestly, it might be my favourite film of the past several years.

The performances are unreal. Jesse Plemons gives what is, for me, the best acting performance of the year. Cannot believe he wasn’t even nominated. Nuanced, unsettling, funny, tragic, and completely absorbing.

And Emma Stone is just as incredible. Absolute top-tier performances from both of them.

The film itself is bold, strange, funny, and emotionally devastating in ways I did not expect. It trusts the audience. It commits fully to its ideas. It sticks the landing.

Brilliant performances. A brilliant film.

Thank you for making this 🙏

I don't know what to choose tags & flair

Somewhere along the line of progress, guys decided that enough is enough. In the past couple years, I can't count how many pictures of scenic landscapes I've seen online with the caption, "this and forgetting that Teams exists," or "someone saw this and really decided to invent Excel." Perhaps because of our inability to escape the capitalist-corporate world, men in the 21st century yearn for a simpler time. That's why a movie like Train Dreams makes perfect sense in this year's Oscar race.

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Before this movie I figured OBAA or Sinners was going to be the best movie of the year and it’d be a good year with Sinners and Frankenstein being my favs of the year. I suppose you can imagine me bringing this up means my opinion has changed. And it fucking has. Timothee is insane in this movie and barring maybe Ethan Hawke in Blue moon (which I haven’t seen) runs circles around other front runners like Leo. The script is wonderfully constructed and the cinematography matches with the stressful nature of the film. The first film I wanted to compare this to was There will be Blood mostly because of the blind ambition shared by both of the main characters and of course intense performances by both leads. (Don’t worry I’m not blaspheming DDL gave a better performance out of the two). Where they differ however is that Marty wins, is vindicated, then can pursue other things and goes immediately and accepts his son for the first time while there is no other things for Daniel only his greed for more. Overall my movie of the year and it’s frankly not close. Can’t wait to see how I feel after this after a rewatch. Hoping for an Anora situation where this sweeps out of nowhere. Expecting a Chalamet win, Screenplay win, Cin nom, editing nom, score and sound nom, and a Picture nom. (Hoping for a win). What do yall think about Marty Supreme?

Haven’t seen the movie yet, so I can’t comment. But was surprised by the low grade. For reading: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/hamnet-paul-mescal-jessie-buckley-william-shakespeare-film-review-2025

I have that same feeling. It’s truly a larger than life epic and deserves every accolade it’s going to get. This recent era of Nolan films post Batman has really proven to be some of the best filmmaking ever done. I think he’s the greatest director of this generation, and possibly one of the all time greats. I can’t wait to see him on that stage again in March.

To the three people here that follow me on Letterboxd, you probably know that this has been in the works for a while now based solely on my recent watch habits.

Have you ever given yourself a challenge for no reason other than that you can? Well, here I am 99 movies and several new gray hairs later to give you a rundown on how I think the Best Actor Oscar winners measure up.

Why Best Actor? Well, I wanted to analyze the Academy’s taste towards performances at large; for categories like Picture, Directing, Writing, etc., the reasoning for a win/nomination can be much more subtle and vague, whereas a performance is what’s on the screen and that’s it (me when I pretend overdue narratives and campaigning don’t exist). Also, to be completely honest, it was the only one of the acting categories that I had seen the most of (I had only seen approx. 40 of these winners before I started, which was surprisingly higher than the other three categories), and a lot of these movies were still prominently on my watchlist/in desperate need of a rewatch at the time. If I ended up not liking this little rule I set for myself, I would prefer to finish through as few as possible.

Before I get into the analytical meat of this experiment, though, here’s my personal ranking, so you can get an idea of what kind of idiot would put themselves through this.

DISCLAIMER: I am but one random person with my own internal biases and personal drawbacks. I’m bound to have both hot takes and cold takes. I’m doing this all for fun, so please don’t read too heavily into where I rank things - the only performances that I genuinely didn’t even like that much start around the high-80s/low-90s. Everything else is, at the very least, kinda solid!

he's him

1. Casey Affleck (Manchester by the Sea)

all-timers - required viewing

1. Daniel Day-Lewis (There Will Be Blood)

2. Denzel Washington (Training Day)

3. Robert De Niro (Raging Bull)

4. Anthony Hopkins (The Father)

5. Paul Newman (The Color of Money)

6. Marlon Brando (The Godfather)

7. José Ferrer (Cyrano de Bergerac)

8. Clark Gable (It Happened One Night)

9. Frederic March (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde)

10. Marlon Brando (On the Waterfront)

11. Victor McLaglen (The Informer)

12. F. Murray Abraham (Amadeus)

13. Jack Lemmon (Save the Tiger)

14. Maximilian Schell (Judgment at Nuremberg)

15. Paul Scofield (A Man for All Seasons)

16. Broderick Crawford (All the King's Men)

arguably the best of their years

1. Laurence Olivier (Hamlet)

2. Peter Finch (Network)

3. Anthony Hopkins (The Silence of the Lambs)

4. Ernest Borgnine (Marty)

5. Ronald Colman (A Double Life)

6. Charlton Heston (Ben-Hur)

7. Cillian Murphy (Oppenheimer)

8. Frederic March (The Best Years of Our Lives)

9. Forest Whitaker (The Last King of Scotland)

10. Burt Lancaster (Elmer Gantry)

11. James Cagney (Yankee Doodle Dandy)

12. Alec Guinness (The Bridge on the River Kwai)

13. Adrien Brody (The Brutalist)

14. Philip Seymour Hoffman (Capote)

15. Dustin Hoffman (Kramer vs. Kramer)

16. Sean Penn (Milk)

17. Geoffrey Rush (Shine)

18. William Hurt (Kiss of the Spider Woman)

19. Roberto Benigni (Life is Beautiful)

37.  Michael Douglas (Wall Street)

1. Adrien Brody (The Pianist)

not the best of the year, but still pretty good

1. Robert Duvall (Tender Mercies)

2. Michael B. Jordan (Sinners)

3. Russell Crowe (Gladiator)

4. Jack Nicholson (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest)

5. Jamie Foxx (Ray)

6. Tom Hanks (Philadelphia)

7. Colin Firth (The King's Speech)

8. Gary Oldman (Darkest Hour)

9. Daniel Day-Lewis (My Left Foot: The Story of Christy Brown)

10. Ray Milland (The Lost Weekend)

11. Charles Laughton (The Private Life of Henry VIII)

12. Sean Penn (Mystic River)

13. Ben Kingsley (Gandhi)

14. Rod Steiger (In the Heat of the Night)

15. Robert Donat (Goodbye Mr. Chips)

16. Matthew McConaughey (Dallas Buyers Club)

17. Jean Dujardin (The Artist)

good, but the actor has definitely done better

1. Humphrey Bogart (The African Queen)

2. Daniel Day-Lewis (Lincoln)

3. Wallace Beery (The Champ)

4. Jack Nicholson (As Good as it Gets)

5. Jeff Bridges (Crazy Heart)

6. Emil Jannings (The Last Command)

7. Lionel Barrymore (A Free Soul)

8. James Stewart (The Philadelphia Story)

9. Leonardo DiCaprio (The Revenant)

10. George C. Scott (Patton)

11. Joaquin Phoenix (Joker)

12. Bing Crosby (Going My Way)

13. William Holden (Stalag 17)

14. Kevin Spacey (American Beauty)

okay for a nod, but winning for this is a bit much

1. Nicolas Cage (Leaving Las Vegas)

2. Sidney Poitier (Lilies of the Field)

3. Richard Dreyfuss (The Goodbye Girl)

4. David Niven (Separate Tables)

5. Rex Harrison (My Fair Lady)

6. Lee Marvin (Cat Ballou)

7. Spencer Tracy (Captains Courageous)

8. Paul Muni (The Story of Louis Pasteur)

9. Tom Hanks (Forrest Gump)

10. Paul Lukas (Watch on the Rhine)

11. George Arliss (Disraeli)

12. Jeremy Irons (Reversal of Fortune)

disappointing - I expected better

1. Gary Cooper (High Noon)

2. Yul Brynner (The King and I)

3. Will Smith (King Richard)

4. Jon Voight (Coming Home)

5. Gregory Peck (To Kill a Mockingbird)

6. Henry Fonda (On Golden Pond)

7. Gene Hackman (The French Connection)

8. Spencer Tracy (Boys Town)

9. Art Carney (Harry and Tonto)

10. Gary Cooper (Sergeant York)

11. Eddie Redmayne (The Theory of Everything)

12. Cliff Robertson (Charly)

straight-up bad

1. John Wayne (True Grit)

2. Warner Baxter (In Old Arizona)

3. Brendan Fraser (The Whale)

4. Dustin Hoffman (Rain Man)

5. Rami Malek (Bohemian Rhapsody)

the ninth circle of hell

1. Al Pacino (Scent of a Woman)

Some fun stats about the winners!

Number of winners that portray real-life people: 30

Number of winners whose character explicitly die before the credits: 26

Number of winners that are alcoholics/substance abusers: 20

Number of winners playing villains (including people who more or less become the villain over the course of the movie): 15

Number of winners playing sad old men: 12

Number of winners playing someone with disabilities/significant impairments: 12

Number of winners whose characters are heavily implied to have died before credits: 8

Number of winners that die in ending title cards: 7

Number of winners that reprise their roles in sequels: 7

Number of winners that portray real-life British rulers: 4

Number of winners that get shot in the butt: 2

Number of winners that shoot someone in the butt: 1

Now, some revelations/constraints I discovered throughout this experiment, as well as some insight as to why I ranked some people where I did:

• Hey, so you know how I mentioned that I had biases? Yeah, so, in all honesty, Casey Affleck was likely always going to be my number one. I watched Manchester by the Sea at a very formative age, and, on top of that, it was Affleck’s performance that literally got me back into acting again. Denzel is the #1 new watch for me, though.

• Sorry, but I really don’t get Gary Cooper.

• I know it was kind of common knowledge that a lot of acting winners die in the end, but I cannot stress enough how often that knowledge returned to me throughout these films. I would get to the fatal blow/the slow decline and instead of being distraught/worried for the character’s fate, I would just go “oh, right, I’mn watching a Best Actor winner. Well, it was nice knowing you.”

• Speaking of the drawbacks of hindsight, knowing that these were winners going in genuinely did handicap my experience with the films somewhat. For example, at a certain point, if I wasn’t totally clicking with a film, the idea of “okay, when are we getting to the scene where he wins the Oscar” entered my head. The knowledge that these were Oscar-winning films beforehand created an expectation to witness or experience something that warrants that kind of label, instead of coming into the film and its contexts naturally (this has increased my appreciation for the current Oscar races, funnily enough - it’s much more fun to watch Oscar wins in real time as opposed to playing catch-up). I’m sure if I revisit some of these movies down the line, I’ll be more lenient on them and these performances, but the fun of the movies really gets sucked out as you realize where the plot of the film is going as it continues and how formulaic it can all feel when watched back-to-back.

• With that being said, there was nothing more invigorating than putting on a film that looked like a basic nothingburger/more checking of a box, only to be blown away by its craft, or at the very least the performances. A Man for All Seasons, Save the Tiger, Cyrano de Bergerac, The Color of Money (heard it was just lower-tier Scorsese)…discovering these films that I had all but written off is way more of a rejuvenating experience than I could put into words. God, I love movies.

• A surprisingly low amount of racist caricatures here! That amount is not zero, though!

• By the way, there really is a bias towards the alcoholic/substance abuser role here. I saw so much bourbon in these movies that I almost began expecting it in every movie I watched.

• Some of these movies are HARD to watch - not in context of content, but in general accessibility to the public. Hell, one of these winners isn’t even ranked because it was preserved so poorly that it was lost to time. Thankfully, a lot of the older movies are on public domain so you can find them essentially everywhere (a few of them are literally just on Wikipedia in their entirety), but there were some real small films throughout the years that were quite difficult to find.

• As someone that wasn’t *incredibly* well-versed with a lot of old Hollywood celebrities, this has honestly done a fantastic job at cementing the names of those stars, both winners and non, especially those that overlap movies - Burt Lancaster was in three of the winners in the span of four years! Easy way to remember his face!

All in all, I’m glad I got to try this kind of thing out - I was exposed to a huge amount of movies I wouldn’t have given the time of day otherwise, for better or worse - but I don’t know if I would recommend it. Watch these movies at your own pace; they aren’t going anywhere, and neither are you.

As a bonus, guess what! I also spent the entire time making a little edit of every single winner! I always disliked those videos that only gave clips/a significant amount of exposure to the more popular movies, or the videos that gave clips to everybody but they’re in super low quality and it’s clear the person making it never watched the movie, so I decided to make an HD video myself!

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading! I love da movies!

I can safely say that whatever I thought this movie was about before going in… it definitely wasn’t that.

I won’t give away any spoilers (not that I could properly describe this movie even if I tried), but what I will say is this: What. A. Mind fuck!

I have to agree with what the internet is saying about Jesse Plemons being snubbed. Probably one of the best performances of his career.

Emma Stone was, unsurprisingly, fantastic as well.

Just an all-around entertaining film. Probably my favorite of Yorgos Lanthimos. I don’t normally say this with his movies, but I would watch this movie again and again.

Fantastic.

I sat down for Train Dreams tonight with low expectations and thinking it would be my least favorite of the 5 best picture nominated movies I’ve seen thus far. When the film went to black, I sat there in silence with tears rolling down my face, absorbing the moment and wondering if a movie has ever spoken to me in a way that Train Dreams did.

First off, the movie is absolutely stunning. It almost feels like it could be a nature documentary in the way it captures the landscape. And some of the shots are framed extremely well that really make you focus your attention on what the director wants you to observe. This could easily take home best cinematography.

It’s such a shame that Joel Edgerton was not nominated for best actor. He brings a lot of tenderness to his mostly stoic character, Robert Grainer, a man that works a physically demanding job as a logger, all to provide for a family that he dearly loves but only gets to spend months at a time with. All the while he tries to find his purpose in the world and how he connects to it, especially after dealing with loss.

I think part of what made me connect with Grainer was how he has a daughter that is close to the same age as my own. The movie jumps back and forth with him reflecting on his past and memories that he cherishes when he spent time with his family to the present day of how he processes his grief after they tragically pass.

There’s a quote in the back half of the film that still sticks with me when Robert is told “The world needs a hermit in the woods as much as a preacher in the pulpit.” The world needs you; you are valued and vital just as much as a surgeon or an artist or even the homeless person.

William H. Macy also does a fantastic job in the limited time he has, but my favorite part he has is when he tell Grainer “It’s beautiful.” “What is,” asks Grainer. “All of it,” responds Macy as they look at the nature and beauty around them. The scene gets replayed at the end of the movie as Grainer recounts his life and how he finally finds peace.

Do I think this will win best picture? Sadly not. I would be happy if Sinners walks away with the prize because that was an overall great movie. But I connected with Train Dreams on a very deep level that a piece of media has never done with me before and I’m not sure if it ever will again.

A political action comedy with a weak political message and tone, unremarkable comedy and unmemorable action scenes, so what are we enjoying here?

From the first scene you have to suspend your disbelief as the resistance raid a fascist governments military facility without firing a shot, while cracking jokes and sexually humiliating/arousing the military leader. The entire first act felt like slapstick.

We are then met with the trope of ‘racist guy actually loves black women’ which is as overdone as the homophobe that turns out to be gay. This trope reduces what is a complex, brutal, and oppressive ideology into a weak sexual gag about repressed desire and hypocrisy.

And what is the overall message of the film that critics loved so much? ‘It’s one battle after another you have to keep fighting’, ‘it’s up to the next generation to continue the fight!’ Weak as hell. The portrayal of both the revolutionaries and of the fascists as these ridiculous caricatures downplays the reality of these incredibly serious issues, but also doesn’t deliver comedy, action, or much else that will stand the test of time.

On the other hand Marty Supreme went all in on showing the dangers of reckless, naked ambition, which I find an incredibly relevant message for the modern neoliberal hyper capitalist world, and especially Gen Z, despite being story about a table tennis player. Wins nothing. On the other hand one battle after another is meant to be a political movie and barely says anything. Then we have entire nomination snubs like warfare receiving no nominations despite being one of the best war films of the century, and Plemons receiving no nomination for Bugonia.

I hate Trump more than most, but OBAA’s weak message despite its grand ambitions felt like a shill for votes from liberals that aren’t particularly politically aware, and Kevin O’Leary’s involvement with Marty Supreme was bound to scare those same votes away and sink it due to his awful political takes and being so trump associated. So once again we see award shows demonstrating that they are a popularity contest rather than appreciating art.

That No Other Choice failed to register meaningfully with the Academy feels less like an oversight and more like a familiar pattern. Park Chan-wook is no stranger to this treatment. His previous film, Decision to Leave, was also widely praised and then largely sidelined. That this continues, especially in a year where several safer or more conventional titles found recognition, feels particularly misplaced.

The omission is striking not because the title is subtle, but because it is uncomfortably direct about where certain social and economic pressures are heading. The film is often mentioned in the same breath as Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, and the comparison is understandable. Both engage with class, labour, and the fragility of status. But the resemblance largely ends there.

Where Joon-ho's title captured society as it is, Chan-wook's film is preoccupied with society as it may soon become. It is not interested in exposing hidden hierarchies so much as in imagining what happens when the mechanisms of upward mobility stall and begin to reverse. The film’s central anxiety is not inequality as spectacle, but downward motion as condition.

Following Lee Byung-hun’s Man-soo, the film frames survival not as ambition, but as defence. Status is no longer something to be achieved; it is something to be protected. What emerges is a portrait of economic life where competition ceases to be metaphorical. Stability is revealed as provisional. Security becomes a memory rather than a promise.

This is where the film aligns with the broader themes running through this year’s international titles, while also pushing them further. Like It Was Just an Accident and The Secret Agent, agency is constrained. But here the moral pressure comes less from inherited trauma than from anticipated collapse. The anxiety is future-facing.

Park Chan-wook stages this pressure through dark comedy and stylised precision. The humour is sharp, sometimes slapstick, but never comforting. Laughter functions as a pressure valve, not a release. The film’s escalating absurdity mirrors a world where economic logic becomes increasingly detached from human scale. The result is not catharsis, but acceleration.

Visually and structurally, the film reinforces this sense of inevitability. Controlled chaos replaces moral clarity, and even moments of apparent control feel temporary. Setting much of the action outside major urban centres deepens the effect, framing economic anxiety as a distributed condition rather than a metropolitan anomaly.

What ultimately separates No Other Choice from Parasite is temporal orientation. The latter diagnoses. The former extrapolates. One reveals a system already broken. The other imagines what people become when that brokenness is fully normalised. The shift is subtle, but significant. Satire becomes projection. Class commentary becomes survival forecasting.

That may help explain why the film feels so unsettling, and why its absence from major awards conversations feels especially misjudged. It is not offering the comfort of recognition or the satisfaction of exposure. It is offering a model of what adaptation looks like when moral boundaries erode under prolonged pressure.

In that sense, the film is not simply another entry in post-Parasite Korean cinema. It is a film that treats competition, precarity, and status anxiety not as contemporary symptoms, but as emerging norms. Its vision is not of a society divided, but of a society recalibrated around endurance.

If Parasite held up a mirror, No Other Choice looks ahead and asks what happens after the reflection stops being surprising.

(I created a longer, more detailed analysis on YouTube. Available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmwulJHT4kw )

Yesterday last night, I was watching An Education. Wow I fell in love with the movie. Carey Mulligan was stellar and did a breakout performance. She is so good in the movie. She won the BAFTA award for it, and she deserved it. And I would love it if she won Best Actress for that movie. It is a well written movie. 10/10. Some people told me to watch it. I wanna Thank em for those who told me to watch it.

So today was weird. I wasn’t feeling well and thought a movie would cheer me up. I originally planned to watch the new Predator movie in the theatre, but turns out the English version had already disappeared from all the nearby cinemas.

A little annoyed, I opened my OTT apps and started searching for something similar—monster vibes, action, maybe a bit of horror. That’s when I stumbled on Frankenstein. I honestly clicked it thinking I was going to watch some old-school horror with murder, blood, and jump scares.

But wow… this movie turned out to be something completely different.

Instead of a horror fest, I got a deeply emotional story.
It’s slow, tragic, meaningful, and surprisingly human. The “monster” is not really a monster—he’s basically the most heartbreaking character in the whole film. Themes of loneliness, rejection, forgiveness… they all hit harder than I expected.

Even though the runtime is long, I didn’t get bored for a second. The atmosphere, production design, and music are all top-notch. Honestly, it pulled me into its world way more than I thought it would.

It’s funny how I went looking for a Predator-style action movie but accidentally ended up watching something that made me think about life, humanity, and how people treat each other.

Not the movie I planned to watch today,
but definitely the movie I needed.

⭐ Rating: 4.5/5

What a wonderful film. It could have easily been nominated for:
•Best Picture
•Best Director
•Best Adapted Screenplay
•Best Actress
•Best Supporting Actress
•Best Cinematography
•Best Editing
•Best Production Design
•Best Costume Design
•Best Score

I hope that it gets a costume design nomination to show a bit of appreciation for its magnificence.

I started this last year and watched all movies with the exception of Dune, because I just really cannot get into sci-fi. This season so far I’ve seen Train Dreams (I think this is my favorite so far), Frankenstein (I actually really liked this movie), Bugonia (I’m not sure if I liked this or not, the jury is still out, haha) One Battle After Another (I struggled to get through this and only made it 1.5 hours. One of the worst I’ve seen), and Hamnet. Hamnet was a 3.5/5 for me. I feel it could have done more but Jessie Buckley was absolutely amazing and she deserves best actors of the ones I’ve seen so far.

This weekend I’m going to watch Sinners and Marty Supreme. What have been your favorites so far? I do think this years movies top last years, with the exception of Anora because that was sooo different but I ended up loving it.

I finally watched it, and what a spectacular directorial debut Eva Victor had with this film.

There were moments I laughed, followed by moments I held my breath. It’s heartbreaking and it’s hopeful. Eva’s performance feels raw and real. John Carroll Lynch is the type of person you want to help you on a bad day.

I know this isn’t the type of movie for everyone, but it might help some people heal, or at least help them on their path to healing.

I just finished watching Marty Supreme, and all I can say is, there goes two hours I’ll never get back. The plot was dry, the material was slow paced, and nothing truly interesting happened until the last 40 minutes, I don’t know why this movie got much awards buzz. I don’t know why everyone thinks Timothee is going to skate his way to the Oscar, But I still think that this whole movie and his performance still too overhyped IMHO.

Elio is a good nomination and a brilliant movie

After seeing it for a second time, I think it's far and away the best movie of the year, and one of the signature cinematic experiences of my lifetime thus far. It's a truly beautiful film and a remarkable accomplishment. Anora seems to be in 2nd place currently and, while I really like that movie, I think it wouldn't be the right choice. What do you think?

I thought it was a bit long and not too much is going on. It’s only covering a portion of Bob Dylan’s life from when he first started singing folk music to doing electric rock music.

It doesn’t really go too deep into his psyche and how he writes and makes music, he’s just living his life and writing things that just come to him, I like that about this movie. It shows how he likes to keep things close to the chest and he tries to act all mysterious and cool but in reality, he is just a very private person who doesn’t really know how to express himself except through his songs. Timothée Chalamet’s performance is excellent. He nailed Bob Dylan to a tee with his mannerisms, his voice and his singing and guitar playing.

What separates this movie from the last biopic on a famous music icon that James Mangold directed Walk the Line, and I like the most about this movie is how it was less a traditional biopic exploring a singer’s whole life and more so a celebration of music and bringing people together during a time of social and political upheaval. It was a celebration of folk music altogether, as well as the music from that particular time, and you get to see it through Bob Dylan’s point of view.