Oscars 2025: The Odds and Ends

Jeremy BeckOscars
A scene from KPop Demon Hunters

Behold, it’s the Oscars! And an unusually competitive Oscars at that! Over the next week, we’ll be analyzing the 21 feature categories (no offense, shorts), discussing our predictions and preferences. Am I deeply invested in who will or should win any particular Academy Award? Not really. But the Oscars still matter, in both a commercial and historical sense, and it remains meaningful to think about them, even if just as an excuse to complain about them.

Today we’ll be running through eight miscellaneous categories—the kind that can make or break your pool (are Oscar pools still a thing?). Let’s get to it.

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE

NOMINEES
Arco
Elio
KPop Demon Hunters
Little Amélie or the Character of Rain
Zootopia 2

WILL WIN
Did you know that Zootopia 2 was the biggest domestic hit of 2025? It somehow made more money than Minecraft, Avatar: Fire and Ash, and Superman. But the Oscars are less about financial success than cultural saturation, and no animated film was a bigger phenomenon last year than KPop Demon Hunters—a movie whose presence was so pervasive, Netflix even allowed it to appear in theaters for a few days. That’s a real breakthrough. Read More

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Scream 7 review: The Ghostface and the Darkness

Jeremy BeckReviews
Neve Campbell in Scream 7

Remember when the Scream movies were about something? Wes Craven’s original horror classic was a playful deconstruction of the genre, though its meta wit didn’t prevent it from operating as a taut and suspenseful exercise. Its follow-ups were less engaging to various degrees, but they all at least purported to have something to say about the enduring conventions of the slasher picture. The up-the-ante imperative of sequels, the deadly stakes of trilogy cappers, the flexible laws of “requels” and franchises, the perils of fan service—these concepts weren’t always flawlessly executed, but they were ostensibly interesting ideas nonetheless.

Scream 7, directed by Kevin Williamson (who wrote the first film), is technically the latest entrant in the franchise. It has actors who reprise familiar roles, characters who are versed in the series’ canon, and a masked killer who taunts people over the phone in the voice of Roger L. Jackson. Yet it has remarkably little to say—about cinema, about horror, about itself. It’s a Scream movie that’s barely even about Scream movies. Read More

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Ranking Every Movie of 2025 (sort of)

Jeremy BeckFeatures
Cassandra Naud in Influencers; Sophie Thatcher in Companion; Brad Pitt in F1; Sydney Sweeney in The Housemaid; Margaret Qualley in Honey Don't

Yesterday, in unveiling my list of my favorite movies of 2025, I bemoaned the future of Warner Bros.—how it was likely to be acquired by either Netflix (which would be bad) or Paramount (which would also be bad). Well, later that day, Netflix announced that it was refusing to match Paramount’s latest bid, meaning David Zaslav and Larry Ellison will soon meet in the moonlight and lock horns and drink each other’s blood or perform whatever rituals are required when demonic billionaires finalize a disastrous sale. It’s a terrible outcome that bodes poorly for the fate of cinema.

But that’s for the future; right now, we’re still focusing on the (very recent) past. I perform this exercise annually, “ranking” all of each year’s new movies but really just dividing them into discrete tiers. It’s partly designed as a personal recordkeeping mechanism, but it might also serve those of you who are interested in checking out recent releases and want to know where to find them (I append streaming data next to each title, along with the director’s name). Read More

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The Best Movies of 2025

Jeremy BeckTop 10 Lists
Renate Reinsve in Sentimental Value; Eva Victor in Sorry, Baby; Michael B. Jordan in Sinners; Daniel Craig in Wake Up Dead Man; Cate Blanchett in Black Bag

The movies are thriving. It’s the movie business that’s in trouble.

Just ask Warner Bros. The two wolves of art and finance have long battled for cinema’s soul, but rarely has a major studio had a better year critically and commercially than WB in 2025. It cranked out three huge hits—Sinners, F1, and Weapons—that also happened to be well-regarded original productions. Two of those landed Best Picture nominations, and Sinners is essentially the Oscars’ co-favorite alongside One Battle After Another—another Warner property. The company also did well on the IP front, delivering a smash-hit videogame adaptation that wasn’t entirely soulless (A Minecraft Movie), a solid superhero flick (Superman), and a diverting sequel to an enduring horror franchise (Final Destination Bloodlines). (There was also another lucrative Conjuring film in the mix, which, whatever.) So what happened next? David Zaslav, the corporation’s president/hatchet man, responded to such prosperity just as you’d expect: He put the studio up for sale.

The fight to acquire Warner Bros. and its stockpile of assets seems designed to evoke the tagline to Alien vs. Predator. In one corner is Netflix, the streaming “disruptor” that views theatrical exhibition as an existential threat to its preferred conception of movie-watching: hitting “Play” on whatever title your algorithm recommends so you can have some background noise while you’re doing the dishes. In the other is Paramount, the legacy studio owned by a right-wing billionaire whose primary focus seems to be reshaping his TV network such that it never says anything that might hurt the feelings of the notoriously fickle Trump administration. Neither scenario promises a vibrant outlook for American moviegoing, much less the possibility of a theatrical slate as rich and varied as the one Warner Bros. put out last year. Read More

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Wuthering Heights review: Promising Stung Woman

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie in Wuthering Heights

In the opening scene of Emily, Charlotte Brontë disparages Wuthering Heights as “an ugly book, base and ugly.” Emerald Fennell must have missed that memo. To be sure, this umpteenth screen adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel is suffused with crude, primal emotions: lust, hatred, anguish, cruelty, more lust. But because Fennell fancies herself one of modern cinema’s most flamboyant stylists, her version clothes this vulgarity in beauty and extravagance. This is not your literature professor’s Wuthering Heights; this is more of the music-video edition.

Does that make it sacrilegious or sensible? Maybe a bit of both. I am not sure we needed another update of Brontë’s classic, much less one so high-strung and turgid. At the same time, if you are going to reimagine an article of the literary canon, you may as well do so with some flair. Fennell’s first two movies, Promising Young Woman and Saltburn, were original conceits, (arguably) teeming with provocative ideas and piercing insights into contemporary class and gender. Now pivoting from the freedoms of invention to the constraints of adaptation, she has redirected her inflammatory instincts away from theme and toward feverish form. The results may not be great, but at least they’re distinctive. Read More

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