It’s the year of hustling and if I didn’t know any better, we’re all past wasting our time to find the perfect movies. From multiverse action comedies to quiet family dramas, the Best Picture category has become more diverse and more interesting than ever. So, out of all the names this list includes, I’m sure you’ll find your best pick.
The Brutalist (2024)
Don’t be disheartened by the watch time. It runs over three hours and earns every minute. Nominated for Best Picture in 2025, this is an epic about art, ambition, and the immigrant experience.
The Plot: A Hungarian Jewish architect survives the Holocaust and emigrates to America, where he struggles to rebuild his career. He is taken under the wing of a wealthy industrialist, but the relationship becomes increasingly exploitative. The film spans thirty years and is told with breathtaking scope.
The film is about the compromise that comes with survival, as we say, everything comes at a price.
Anora (2024)
I’d call this a real-world cinderella that turns into something much darker and more honest. It won Best Picture in 2025 and is Sean Baker’s most accomplished film.
The Plot: Anora, a young sex worker in Brooklyn, marries the son of a Russian oligarch after a whirlwind romance. When his parents find out, they send thugs to annul the marriage. The film starts as a romantic comedy and slowly reveals itself as a tragedy about class and power, especially from a woman’s POV.
The best part? The film refuses to judge its protagonist. The tragedy is not that Anora fell for a fantasy. The tragedy is that the world does not let people like her win, no matter how hard they try, something we all know by now.
The Holdovers (2023)
Want something retro, funny and emotional all at once? This is your pick. Nominated for Best Picture in 2024, this movie feels like a lost film from the 1970s.
The Plot: A grumpy history teacher at a New England boarding school is forced to stay on campus over Christmas break to watch over the students who have nowhere to go. He bonds with a rebellious student and the school cook. The three of them form an unlikely family over the holidays, that warms your heart.
These three do not fix each other. They just keep each other company, and that is enough. Paul Giamatti gives the performance of his career as the teacher.
Past Lives (2023)
It’s fine to admit that some of us are into stories that completely devastate us, break us, yet we only want more of it. Nominated for Best Picture in 2024, this film is like that.
The Plot: Nora emigrates from South Korea to Canada as a child and loses touch with her childhood sweetheart Hae Sung. Twenty years later, they reconnect online and must confront the question of what could have been. The film spans decades but feels like a single breath held.
The movie revolves around the concept of inyun, a Korean idea about fate and the connections between people. The ending is perfect and heartbreaking. This is a bonus recommendation for K-Drama lovers.
Oppenheimer (2023)
A “Best Oscar Nominees” list, without Nolan? Impossible. Oppenheimer won Best Picture in 2024. It is a biopic that plays like a thriller, even though you already know how it ends.
The Plot: J. Robert Oppenheimer leads the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. The film follows his rise, his triumph, and his devastating fall as he is consumed by guilt over what he created. Cillian Murphy delivers a performance that is quiet, intense, and haunting.
Honestly, the character arc got me hooked, I mean it’s not every day we see a rich guy contemplating over what he’s done.
Oppenheimer succeeded at everything he set out to do, and that success destroyed him. That’s not me though, I wouldn’t mind some flickers of success.
The Fabelmans (2022)
Steven Spielberg’s most personal film. Nominated for Best Picture in 2023, it shows his origin story, told with the kind of honesty and vulnerability that he has never shown before.
The Plot: A young boy named Sammy Fabelman falls in love with filmmaking after his parents take him to see The Greatest Show on Earth. As he grows up, he uses his camera to make sense of his family’s unraveling. His mother is struggling with her own happiness, and his father does not understand him. Like I said, vulnerable.
Sammy sees the world through a lens, and that distance from reality is both his gift and his curse, poetic, right?
Minari (2020)
Now this one is a bit immigration-centred. It was nominated for Best Picture in 2021 and is one of the most tender and honest films about family, and the quiet struggles of building a new life.
The Plot: A Korean American family moves to rural Arkansas in the 1980s to start a farm. The father chases the American dream while the mother and grandmother hold the family together. The grandmother plants minari, a Korean herb, by the creek, and it becomes a symbol of resilience.
The movie is about the small, ordinary moments of family life. The grandmother herself is not a wise sage. She is a flawed, funny, stubborn woman who loves her grandchildren imperfectly. That honesty makes the film unforgettable.
CODA (2021)
Creating history, this is the first film streaming service to win Best Picture in 2022. It’ll make you weep, it’ll keep you warm with a heartfelt story to tell.
The Plot: Ruby is the only hearing member of a deaf family. She helps run the family fishing business while secretly pursuing her passion for singing. She must choose between staying to support her family and leaving to follow her own dream. While coming-of-age, this is something we all ponder on.
The conflict is not about deafness as a disability. It is about the universal struggle of growing up and leaving home.
Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)
In one of her recent interviews, Lola Tung claimed this to be her favorite, all the more reason to list it. Won Best Picture in 2023, Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most original and ambitious films ever made. It is a multiverse movie that somehow feels more human than any grounded drama.
The Plot: Evelyn, a middle aged Chinese American laundromat owner, discovers that she can access the memories and skills of her alternate universe selves. She must use this power to save the multiverse from a mysterious threat. The film is chaotic, hilarious, and unexpectedly devastating.
Beneath the absurdity is a story about a mother trying to understand her daughter. The film makes you laugh until it makes you cry.
As for me, I’m rooting for a whole franchise.
Nomadland (2020)
It’s time for the first and foremost. This is one of the most quietly powerful films of the decade, capturing a side of America that rarely gets seen on screen and won Best Picture in 2021.
The Plot: A woman in her sixties loses everything after the Great Recession and decides to live out of her van, traveling across the American West as a modern day nomad. She works seasonal jobs, meets other travelers, and learns to find beauty in impermanence. Chloé Zhao directs with documentary-like intimacy
Most of the supporting characters are real nomads playing themselves. And just like the characters, the message this movie conveys is to really enjoy every single moment and choose a life outside the system, it’ll be worth it.
From the intimacy of Past Lives to the chaotic ambition of Everything Everywhere All at Once, we’ve covered it all. With that, my list ends here but your binge-watching will now commence. I hope you’re able to navigate which one suits you best. And if you have seen any of these, I hope you agree with my judgement for the relevancy of these films.
