One Battle remains king of Oscars season, but Sinners rules nominations morning with record haul

The march to glory for Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another continues unabated after it picked up a hefty 13 nods Thursday morning when Danielle Brooks and Lewis Pullman announced the nominees for the 98th annual Academy Awards. It hit in just about every major category, with one notable exception, which we will touch on later. But, for now, the big story of the morning is the record-setting 16 nominations garnered by Ryan Coogler’s musical horror triumph Sinners.

Nominated in every category where it was eligible (it arguably has no Actress in a Leading Role), Sinners blew past the old mark of 14, previously held by La La Land, Forrest Gump, and All About Eve. Breaking the old record by two should quiet those who might want to put an asterisk on the accomplishment by noting that the film is nominated in the brand new Best Casting category. The flipside of that coin, however, is that there used to be two sound categories. 

Regardless, there is no raining on the Sinners parade today. In addition to a Best Picture nomination, which Coogler shares with wife and producing partner Zinzi Coogler, as well as Sev Ohanian, Ryan Coogler becomes just the seventh Black director in history to be nominated for Best Director. Coogler also is nominated for his Original Screenplay.

Sinners nabbed three acting nominations, with Michael B. Jordan picking up his first nomination for Actor in a Leading Role, while Wunmi Mosaku was cited for Supporting Actress and Delroy Lindo earned his long-overdue first-career nomination for Supporting Actor. One Battle After Another and Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value each picked up four acting nominations, meaning 11 of the 20 acting slots were taken by just three movies.

One more note on history made by Sinners today: Director of photography Autumn Durald Arkapaw becomes just the third woman ever nominated for Best Cinematography, and based on some of the precursors, she has an excellent chance to be the first woman to win the award. Ruth E. Carter is now the most nominated Black woman in history, with her fifth nomination for Costume Design. She has two previous wins, as well, both for Coogler films.

Leonardo DiCaprio, who earned his sixth-career Best Actor nomination and eighth nomination overall, also set a record today with One Battle After Another’s Best Picture nomination. He is now the star of more Best Picture nominees than any other actor in history with 12, breaking a tie with his hero, Robert De Niro. Cate Blanchett, Jack Nicholson, Tom Hanks, and H.B. Warner are the only other actors ever to appear in double-digit Best Picture nominees with 10 apiece.

Joining DiCaprio and Jordan in the Best Actor race are Marty Supreme star Timothee Chalamet, Wagner Moura for The Secret Agent, and Ethan Hawke for Blue Moon. Alongside Lindo in Supporting Actor are One Battle tandem Benecio Del Toro and Sean Penn, Frankenstein’s Jacob Elordi, and Stellan Skarsgaard for Sentimental Value.

Marty Supreme, Frankenstein, and Sentimental Value each picked up nine total nominations, including joining Sinners and One Battle After Another in Best Picture. The other five Best Picture nominees are Hamnet (eight nominations), The Secret Agent (four), Train Dreams (four), Bugonia (4), and probably the biggest surprise of the morning, blockbuster racing film F1, which also nabbed four nominations.

In Best Actress, Jessie Buckley (Hamnet) and Rose Byrne (If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You) appear to be leading the way, joined by Kate Hudson for Song Sung Blue, Renate Reinsve for Sentimental Value, and Emma Stone for Bugonia. This was probably the category with the biggest pair of snubs, with Chase Infiniti (One Battle After Another) and Amanda Seyfried (The Testament of Ann Lee) both missing out. In Supporting Actress, Mosaku is joined by Amy Madigan for Weapons, Teyana Taylor for One Battle After Another, and both Elle Fanning and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleas for Sentimental Value.

Hamnet director Chloe Zhao becomes just the second woman ever to earn multiple Best Director nominations, sharing the distinction with Jane Campion. Along with Zhao, Coogler, and Anderson, the other two nominees for Director are Josh Safdie for Marty Supreme and Joachim Trier for Sentimental Value.

What made me happiest this morning? The recognition for Train Dreams in the top category, as well as its beautiful screenplay and stunning cinematography, has me delighted, though I would have loved if voters could have found room for Joel Edgerton in Best Actor. Elsewhere, I was thrilled to see The Voice of Hind Rajab make the final five in a highly competitive International Feature category. It’s a bold, heartbreaking film that deserves the kind of boost this nomination hopefully will grant it.

The other International Feature nominees were The Secret Agent, It Was Just an Accident, Sentimental Value, and Spain’s Sirat, which admittedly still remains a total unknown to me, though I am excited to see it. This leaves out flashy options like No Other Choice, Left-Handed Girl, and Sound of Falling.

Also left out of the nominations were Miles Caton, who is remarkable in Sinners and Jesse Plemons, who is the driving force behind Bugonia, and my personal biggest snub, though it was always a longshot, is the sound design for Alex Garland’s Warfare, which might have the best sound of any movie I’ve ever seen.

All in all, these nominations won’t do much to change the calculus of this awards season, which appears to be adding up to a coronation for Anderson and One Battle After Another. But, for one day at least, Hollywood belongs to Sinners. It’s Ryan Coogler’s world, and we’re just living in it.

Monday Miniatures: Spooky Season Begins

Welcome to Monday Miniatures, where I tell you about some of the stuff I’ve been watching in the past week that I wouldn’t otherwise get to share.

The week of Sept. 29-Oct. 5, 2025:

Short Cuts, directed by Robert Altman

One Battle After Another, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

How I watched them: Short Cuts - Rented DVD from Vidiots; One Battle After Another - In theaters (AMC Glendora - IMAX)

It feels natural that during a time of discussion around Anderson, Altman would be very much on the mind. As One Battle After Another continues to find its audience – slowly but surely making money at the box office, as if that’s a thing that should matter when discussing art – I find myself wanting to dig into the Altman canon in a way I never had. Short Cuts was probably the last masterwork I had yet to see, and this was an auspicious time to see it.

I am not saying anything new by observing that Short Cuts, based on a series of Raymond Carver short stories, contains much of the DNA for what would become PTA’s Magnolia a scant six years later. A sprawling cast? Check. Interlocking narratives? Check. The emotional turmoil of simply being alive? Check. Deus ex machina in the form of a rare but nominally possible freak occurrence of nature? Remarkably, check. That’s a lot, but do both movies have Julianne Moore, you ask? They sure do.

Having watched the two movies so closely together, however, also has highlighted the key difference between the two. Anderson’s film is bathed in emotional catharsis, spilling over with characters desperate for release who largely experience that release. Altman, who was 68 when Short Cuts premiered, has no such sentimentality. Magnolia is the work of a 28-year-old filmmaker who thinks he has everything figured out. Altman knows he doesn’t have it figured out and neither do any of the people in his film.

There is not enough space here to dissect everything going on in Short Cuts, but it is a profound work about the emptiness of a life without connection. Broadly speaking, the movie is about couples – those falling apart, those coming together, and those already disconnected. It’s about the pain of not being seen and existing in a world where everyone else wants to be seen, too, but can only look at themselves. It’s a dark, bitter, sad movie, and I can’t recommend it enough.

Kundun, directed by Martin Scorsese

How I watched it: Rented DVD from Vidiots

Until this week, this was the only Scorsese-directed narrative feature I had never seen. I recall renting it in freshman year, but a two-hour-plus movie about the Dalai Lama was a tough sell in the dorms. No excuses for why it still took so long to catch up with it, but I am, of course, glad I finally did. The film slots nicely into the Scorsese mode of exploring the pluses and minuses of religious belief and dogma, right alongside The Last Temptation of Christ and Silence.

Given my impression of this film as lacking much cultural impact – we can get into the reasons why in a second – I was surprised by how many of the beats I recognized largely through cultural diffusion. The film’s episodic structure means that often, things happen that seem to have no relation to what came before, but in the end, they add up to a satisfying and impressive whole.

Beyond the film itself, Kundun is an interesting artifact to revisit at this time of great political censorship and self-censorship out of fear. As possibly the most prominent piece of Free Tibet art ever made, the film of course upset the Chinese government. Disney, the film’s distributor, not for the last time capitulated to the totalitarian regime out of self-interest and self-preservation, agreeing to bury the film’s release and not promote it.

Disney supervillain and ex-CEO Michael Eisner once told the Chinese government, regarding Kundun: "The bad news is that the film was made; the good news is that nobody watched it. Here I want to apologize, and in the future, we should prevent this sort of thing, which insults our friends, from happening.” I’ll translate: “Unfortunately, a brilliant artist had the gall to make provocative art, but don’t worry because we made sure no one would get to see. We are sorry you had to be confronted with the truth of your own ugliness. We won’t let it happen again, lest it harm our bottom line.”

Censor, directed by Prano Bailey-Bond

How I watched it: Amazon Prime

From a film that was censored to a film about censorship, Bailey-Bond’s Censor tells the story of a screener working for the British Board of Film Classification during the height of the Video Nasties scare in the ’80s. There are a lot of fun nods and references in here for anyone familiar with that particular hysteria, but the main thrust of the story is Enid’s (the wonderful Niamh Algar) growing psychosis over a little horror thriller that bares a striking similarity to the real unsolved disappearance of her sister.

The performances are excellent, the atmosphere, mood, and tension are all top notch, and I really enjoy the twist ending as a logical extension of the story being told. But here’s the thing: What are we to take thematically from a film that on its surface seems to be anti-censorship but that tells the story of a woman being driven mad as a result of watching the very violence she’s censoring? Does that not, on some level at least, suggest that some images are too horrific to see?

Now, the film absolutely raises good points about mass hysteria and who gets to decide what has artistic value. But I think Bailey-Bond can’t quite hang onto the reins of the story she’s telling and the intention gets away from her just a bit in the final act.

Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum, directed by Jung Bum-shik

How I watched it: Amazon Prime

This film may have been a bit of a time-of-day victim. I had heard a lot of good things about Gonjiam, particularly about how scary it is, but I found myself underwhelmed. That said, because I often have to squeeze movies in when I can, I can’t always choose the circumstances under which I watch them. All of which is to say: I watched this movie during the day, and I bet it’s 20 times scarier at night.

There are absolutely scares and thrills here, but they felt somewhat muted. There’s also an order-of-operations problem at play in that I watched this 2018 film a couple weeks after watching 2022’s Deadstream, which has roughly the same premise. Obviously, Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum got there first (and is, in fact, based on a real location), but the territory felt a little previously trodden for me. Had the order been flipped, this film likely would have benefited.

All that said, there’s plenty of juice in the squeeze here, following a YouTube streamer and his fans/volunteers as they explore a notoriously haunted abandoned mental hospital. The filmmakers have about as much fun with the premise as one can imagine, and for sheer scale, this knocks Deadstream out of the park. I had a good time, but for maximum effect, I may revisit this again one dark and dreary night.

Zombeavers, directed by Jordan Rubin

How I watched it: Amazon Prime

Part of the long lineage of horror comedies that start from a funny title and work backward to create a film, Zombeavers at least delivers on the promise of its title. We get zombies that are beavers, and they lay siege to a cabin inhabited by six of the least likable movie characters you will ever meet. They are intentionally the most vapid, useless people on the planet and are meant to be a source of ridicule for the audience, but as a result, there’s really nothing to root for in the movie.

Rubin lets us know he’s in on the joke from the very beginning, casting Bill Burr and John Mayer – yeah, that one – as truckers hauling toxic waste. They engage in some of the worst movie banter ever, hit a deer with the truck, which causes some of the toxic cargo to spill into the river, and we get zombeavers. The beaver puppets are pretty dang funny, but there are better horror comedies to spend your time on.

The Blackening, directed by Tim Story

How I watched it: Netflix

Speaking of which, check out Story’s film, written by Dewayne Perkins and Tracy Oliver and based on their sketch, for an example of horror comedy done right. Three-dimensional characters we like and care about, genuine scares, a script with a ton to say about colorism, black spaces, and the place of black art in mainstream culture – and it’s consistently laugh-out-loud hilarious.

This is my second time seeing the film, and it only gets richer upon repeat viewing. Character moments mean more, the story is deeper than it first appears, and you catch way more jokes you missed the first time because you were too busy laughing at the jokes that came before. The Blackening will absolutely join the pantheon of horror comedies I revisit every October, along with Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, Cabin in the Woods, and others.

Monday Miniatures: The PTA Project and an Animated Masterpiece

Welcome to Monday Miniatures, where I tell you about some of the stuff I’ve been watching in the past week that I wouldn’t otherwise get to share.

The week of Sept. 22-28, 2025:

The Master, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Inherent Vice, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Phantom Thread, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Licorice Pizza, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

One Battle After Another, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

How I watched them: The Master - Blu-ray; Inherent Vice - Amazon Prime; Phantom Thread - Amazon Prime rental; Licorice Pizza - Amazon Prime; One Battle After Another - In theaters (AMC Americana at Brand XL)

The second half of my Paul Thomas Anderson rewatch is complete, ending with a screening of One Battle After Another on opening night. I will have a full review of the film up this week, as well as some thoughts on the whole PTA catalogue and hopefully some other fun bric-a-brac. For the moment, I will say the new film is one of the best films of the year, certainly in the top tier of PTA works, and a movie people will be talking about for a long time.

Flow, directed by Gints Zilbalodis

How I watched it: 4k DVD

The only non-PTA film I had the chance to watch this week, this is my third time seeing Flow but first at home after seeing it twice in theaters. In addition to being one of the best films of last year, it was also one of my favorites, so the moment Criterion announced they would be releasing a 4k edition, I knew I would be getting it. The DVD was released Tuesday of last week and my pre-order arrived Friday. I immediately popped it in.

I chose to watch with the new Zilbalodis commentary track, which offers a ton of insight into the way the filmmaker thinks about character development and using action to move a story forward. He also shared the difficulties in working independently with open-source software – high-definition animation files have a tendency to overwhelm a PC – but also the freedom to tell the kind of story he wanted in his way.

After seeing the film in theaters, I called Flow one of the most gorgeously animated films ever made, and seeing it in 4k has done nothing to change that opinion. The richness of the background details, the smooth camera moves, and the beautiful interplay between light and shadow all come through wonderfully on this transfer. There remain shots in the film – even after listening to Zilbalodis explain how they were done – that I can’t fathom how they were done. I can’t wait to dig into the director’s other work, which is also included in the set.

Monday Miniatures: Back to School Means It’s PTA Season

Welcome to Monday Miniatures, where I tell you about some of the stuff I’ve been watching in the past week that I wouldn’t otherwise get to share.

The week of Sept. 15-21, 2025:

Hard Eight, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Boogie Nights, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Magnolia, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Punch-Drunk Love, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

There Will Be Blood, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

How I watched them: Hard Eight and Magnolia - Amazon Prime rentals; Boogie Nights - Paramount+; Punch-Drunk Love - Criterion Channel; There Will Be Blood - DVD

With my most anticipated movie of the fall less than a week away and a series of pieces planned here for the release of Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest feature, now seemed like an opportune time to revisit each of the director’s nine previous films. I will be diving deeper into these films in separate articles later this week, so I’ll reserve comment for that. For now, let it be enough to say that this rewatch has been an absolute delight, Anderson is not only one of our most important but our most deft filmmakers, and my expectations for One Battle After Another could not be higher. 

Images, directed by Robert Altman

How I watched it: Rented DVD from Vidiots

I paired this with There Will Be Blood, which features a dedication to Altman, who was a mentor and inspiration to Anderson. It’s easy to see the influence in their sprawling, kaleidoscopic ensemble pieces like Altman’s Nashville or The Player and Anderson’s Boogie Nights and Magnolia. But even in something more internal and esoteric like Images, you can see the way the camera moves and actors are placed within a scene influencing the filmmaker Anderson would become.

Of course, Images is, itself, heavily influenced by Ingmar Bergam, in particular the Swedish master’s Persona. Altman would revisit this theme of fractured psyches a few years later in the more lauded Three Women, which I found a tad inscrutable. Images is a nervy little thriller with an excellent leading performance from Susannah York, whom I know best from They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? but whom you may recognize from the Christopher Reeve Superman films.

Overall, I  prefer Altman at his biggest and boldest, allowed to paint on his grandest canvases. If nothing else, Images serves as proof of Altman’s wonderful versatility, even at this early middle stage of his lengthy, prolific career.

Malice, directed by Harold Becker

How I watched it: Tubi

What my grandmother would have called hooey, this was the last Aaron Sorkin-penned script I had yet to see, and now having crossed it off the list, I understand how it could have fallen to the bottom of the priority stack. If I could say anything for it, at least in the Sorkin universe, it might not be as bad as Being the Riccardos. At least he followed it up with the unbroken run of The American President, Charlie Wilson’s War, The Social Network, Moneyball, Steve Jobs, and Molly’s Game, while also sneaking in two fantastic television shows (The West Wing and Sports Night; no need to talk about Studio 60).

Sorkin doesn’t deserve all the blame here, as the underbaked script was co-written by Scott Frank, who was nearly three decades away from cementing his own TV legacy with The Queen’s Gambit. The overdirection? That belongs to Harold Becker of VisionQuest and Sea of Love fame. The appalling acting? Lay that at the feet of Nicole Kidman, Bill Pullman, and the usually reliable Bebe Neuwirth. 

Alec Baldwin comes out unscathed with a performance that taps into everything that would come to define the Baldwin on-screen persona: calm, cool arrogance in the face of nearly universal distaste. A year after Glengarry GlenRoss proved Baldwin could be relied upon to deliver chunky monologues about how great he is and much the rest of the world should thank him for that greatness, here, he gets the now-iconic “I am god” monologue. It’s as good as you’ve heard and mostly worth the price of admission.

Beyond that, there’s not much to recommend in this erotic thriller that is neither erotic nor thrilling and a noir pastiche in which the mystery is solved quite accidentally. Everyone involved had done better before and would do better again.

Corman’s World, directed by Alex Stapleton

Piranha, directed by Joe Dante

How I watched them: Corman’s World - Tubi; Piranha - In theaters (Vidiots)

I watched the documentary Corman’s World about legendary producer Roger Corman in anticipation of catching the Corman-produced Piranha at Vidiots, where Dante was on hand to discuss the film. I’ll have more to say about that in a separate piece. The documentary is the exact kind of hagiography one might expect, and that’s not a bad thing. There are worse folks in Hollywood to lionize, after all. We get some great interviews with Dante, Martin Scorsese, and longtime collaborator Jack Nicholson, who credits Corman for giving him work when no one else would.

The thing I wish there were more of: the movies. At the time this film was made in 2011, Corman had literally hundreds of credits to his name. It would be unreasonable to dig too deeply in the span of a 93-minute documentary, but one wishes Stapleton and Co. had zeroed in on a few choice examples, Piranha perhaps foremost among them.

Corman was well known for his ability to shoot quickly on tight budgets, but it would have been fascinating to highlight more of the specifics on how he accomplished that. Instead, the film focuses more on Corman’s status as the father of the New Hollywood movement, giving directors like Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and more their early shots at filmmaking. It’s a fair focus, but it ultimately means the film settles for surface-level appreciation rather than rigorous study.

12:08 East of Bucharest, directed by Corneliu Porumboiu

How I watched it: Rented DVD from Vidiots

A key film in the Romanian New Wave, this comes a year after The Death of Mr. Lazarescu put the nation’s cinema on the map at Cannes and a year before the Palme d’Or-winning 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days conquered the Croisette. Porumboiu’s film is perhaps smaller in scope than either of those two efforts, but it is no less ambitious.

The original Romanian title of the film literally translates to “Was it or wasn’t it?” As the film ultimately makes clear, the question refers to whether the small town of Vaslui was involved in the 1989 revolution that deposed dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. The 12:08 of the international title refers to the time of day when Ceausescu gave up power. Up for debate is whether the people of Vaslui protested in the streets before 12:08 p.m. or celebrated in the streets after in the safety of a nation free of its dictator.

Porumboiu uses his characters to ask vital questions about who benefits from a revolution, who gets left behind, and what any of it means anyway. It is an incontrovertible good that Ceausescu was removed from power, but it is fair to ask what kind of nation should spring up instead.

The Man Without a Past, directed by Aki Kaurismaki

How I watched it: Rented DVD from Vidiots

This was probably the most popular Kaurismaki title I had yet to see, and it may be my favorite of all his films, or at least right up there with Le Havre and Fallen Leaves. Kaurismaki is the ultimate humanist in that in his best works, the vast majority of people are decent and kind, while systems and bureaucracies serve to oppress and deny.

Here, a man played by Markku Peltola arrives in Helsinki via train and is immediately mugged and beaten within an inch of his life. As a result, he develops amnesia. So, with no identification and no memory, he begins to slip through the cracks of society. The community members around him, many of whom find themselves also forgotten by society, become his saving grace.

At every turn, he is thwarted in his attempts to apply for benefits, to find work, to navigate the legal system simply because has no name and no past. It is not enough that he is a human being, alive and real, sitting right before you. Systems are not set up for this, and it should come as little surprise that it takes a human to understand humanity. As our economic and political leaders further push algorithms and artificial intelligence on us, we would do well to remember this lesson.