Academy awards - Best picture nominees of 2026
Strumbl Original · Movies · 10 movies · Recommended watch order
The highest movies distinction of 2025. Watch them in release order to make sure you don't miss the movies every one talk about.
The Journey
Before you start: This order begins in Recife in 1977 and ends on a Formula 1 grid, and nothing in between was built to match what sits beside it. Take the ten spaced out rather than back to back, a nominee field is not a series, and every one of these wants its own evening. The Secret Agent asks the most of you first, a Brazilian thriller that trusts you to keep pace with a man who cannot explain why he is running. Give it a clear night. What the ten have in common will surface on its own, around the third film.
- The Secret Agent (2025) — Marcelo is in his early forties, an expert in technology, and in Brazil in 1977 that is enough to put a man on the run. He travels to Recife during Carnival hoping to reach his son, and the crowds that should swallow him do not. So the year opens with a father moving toward a child through a city that is watching him. That figure comes back nine more times, in very different clothes.
- Sinners (2025) — Twin brothers come home to start over, and their hometown has something waiting for them that is worse than anything they left behind. The Secret Agent kept its menace in daylight, in offices and paperwork. This one lets it out after dark. It is the horror picture of the ten, and it runs on the same fuel as the rest, people trying to build something of their own and finding out what it costs.
- Sentimental Value (2025) — Gustav was a renowned director once, and his idea of reaching his estranged daughters is an offer: the lead in his comeback film, written for Nora, a stage actress. She says no. He hands her part to an eager young Hollywood star, and the family has to live inside that decision. After Sinners this is a whisper, two sisters and a father who can only speak to his children through the thing he makes.
- Train Dreams (2025) — A logger works through the early twentieth century in America, and love and loss arrive the way the seasons do, without asking. Nothing here resembles Gustav's wounded theatrics, and that is the point of taking it now, one quiet life set against a country changing around it at monumental speed. This is the one to watch late, lights low, no phone in reach. It moves slowly because the century it covers did not.
- One Battle After Another (2025) — Bob was a revolutionary sixteen years ago, and now he is off-grid, stoned and paranoid, raising Willa, a daughter considerably more capable than he is. Then his old nemesis resurfaces and she goes missing. Marcelo in The Secret Agent was running toward his child; Bob has to run after his, dragging every consequence of his past along behind him. Both of them battle what he did, and only one of them chose it.
- Marty Supreme (2025) — Marty Mauser has a dream no one respects, and he goes to hell and back in pursuit of greatness anyway. Set him next to Bob, who burned through his convictions decades ago, and Marty is the other end of the same life, all appetite and no scar tissue yet. The year keeps circling people who make things, and Marty is the rawest version, a young man making himself before anyone has agreed he exists.
- Bugonia (2025) — Two young men, deep in conspiracy theory, kidnap the CEO of a major company because they are convinced she is an alien intent on destroying the Earth. Everything now depends on who is right, and the film makes you sit in that question with them. After Marty Supreme's naked ambition, this is belief instead, conviction so total it builds a prison around another human being. It is the strangest turn the year takes.
- Hamnet (2025) — Hamnet was a boy before Hamlet was a play, and this is the love and loss in Shakespeare's own house that fed the writing of it. The year has already shown you Gustav trying to reach his daughters through a film. Here the same move runs through a family in Stratford four centuries earlier, grief turned into the work rather than spoken aloud. It sits between Bugonia and Frankenstein like a held breath.
- Frankenstein (2025) — Victor Frankenstein, brilliant and egotistical, brings a creature to life, and creator and creation undo each other from that moment on. Everything the year has been circling gets said plainly here, a maker who cannot stop making, a father who will not face what he fathered. Shakespeare in Hamnet put his loss into a play. Victor puts his ambition into a body, and the body answers back. The oldest story in the ten, and the bluntest.
- F1 (2025) — Sonny Hayes retired from racing a long time ago, and a struggling Formula 1 team coaxes him back to drive and to mentor a young hotshot who does not think he needs one. After Victor and his creature, this is the same handover done generously, an older man passing on what he knows instead of running from what he made. It is the loudest and lightest film of the ten, chasing one more chance at glory.
Where it leaves you: Ten films, one year, and now the decision belongs to other people. One of these takes Best Picture at the ceremony in 2026, and the win will change how the other nine get remembered, though nothing about the films themselves will move an inch. If you want to test what you carried out of this order, go back to the middle and take Sentimental Value and Hamnet as a pair, a father speaking to his daughters through a film and a playwright answering his grief with a play, four centuries apart and making the same move.