Hollywood’s biggest night is less than two weeks away, and we couldn’t be more excited to see who’s going to take home Oscar gold.
This year’s Academy Awards feature several fantastic nominees, including hit movies like Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another and Sinners.
But what about the snubs? We understand that only so many movies can be nominated for Best Picture. Yet Watch With Us can’t help but grieve over the great films that deserve their moment in the sun.
We want to take a moment to highlight five exceptional movies from 2025 that were snubbed by the Academy.
Amanda Seyfried stars in this epic historical musical as Ann Lee, the founder of the Shaker religious movement of the 18th century. The Testament of Ann Lee explores the true legend surrounding Ann’s life, from her birth to her death and the ultimate dissolution of the Shaker community. Though passionately devout and worshipped by her many followers, the foundations of Ann’s preaching rest on social and gender equality.
Director Mona Fastvold takes the life of a historical religious figure and turns it into a ravishing and ambitious musical, one that both enthralls and disturbs. Though the film takes obvious creative liberties in filling in the blanks of Ann Lee’s life, this creates a unique experience, one that is more about evoking a feeling than about being true to historical fact. Not only is The Testament of Ann Lee worthy of Oscar consideration, so is Seyfried’s performance — a remarkable and career-best turn that is indescribable as anything other than a tour de force.
‘It Was Just an Accident’In Iran, a man with a prosthetic leg (Ebrahim Azizi) visits a nearby garage after his car breaks down, where the mechanic seems to recognize him. But it’s not a happy reconnection: the mechanic, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), believes the man to have been his torturer, Eghbal, in an Iranian prison from years prior. Convinced of Eghbal’s true identity, Vahid kidnaps him with the intent to exact his revenge. But as he recruits more people who were tortured by Eghbal, and the man vehemently denies the accusations, doubt begins to set in over whether they have the right person.
While Jafar Panahi‘s It Was Just an Accident has been nominated for Best International Feature Film, many feel strongly that it is more than deserving of a spot among the Best Picture nominees. The critical response to the film has been overwhelmingly positive, praising the film for its blunt political overtones and direct castigation of authoritarianism while still being an engaging and entertaining thriller. The riveting narrative cascades to a shattering finale that cements the film’s status as one of the best of the year.
‘No Other Choice’Faced with over a year of unemployment and at his wits’ end with the job market, South Korean father and paper industry expert Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) decides to resort to an unorthodox method of finding a job. While on the verge of killing the manager who humiliated him in an interview, he realizes that he’d only get the man’s job if he were the best candidate, so he decides to kill his competitors. After he narrows it down to two men, Man-su’s scheme to do away with them becomes a comedy of errors in his desperate bid to maintain his family’s way of life.
No Other Choice is another masterful blend of dark comedy and thriller from South Korean director Park Chan-wook, and many critics have been praising the film as one of the best of Park’s career. The film is clever not just in its humor and screenplay, but also in its camerawork, cinematography and editing, as Park crafts a kinetic and dazzling work of art. The film ends up as one of the most biting takedowns of the corporate rat race ever put to film, and it’s across-the-board shutout by the Academy feels like a crime.
‘If I Had Legs I’d Kick You’Psychotherapist Linda (Rose Byrne) is a mother who is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. While her husband (Christian Slater) is away for work, Linda must contend alone with their highly disordered young daughter, a collapsed ceiling in their apartment and an increasingly erratic and anxious client named Caroline (Danielle Macdonald). Forced to move into a rundown motel while caring for her daughter, working and seeing a therapist (Conan O’Brien) herself, Linda’s life becomes like a strengthening hurricane, and the hole in her apartment ceiling looks to her like the calm eye of the storm she longs to escape into.
For her revelatory performance as Linda, Byrne is currently up for a much-deserved Academy Award for Best Actress (after already having taken home a Golden Globe for it as well), but Byrne isn’t the only good thing about If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Mary Bronstein‘s anxiety-inducing, stomach-churning fever dream about motherhood and parental stress is a powder keg constantly on the verge of combustion. The uncompromising film is daring and assured, and probably deserves Editing and Sound Design nominations to boot.
In the small town of Eddington, New Mexico, a flash point of social and cultural convergence occurs during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Local sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) disapproves of Mayor Ted Garcia’s (Pedro Pascal) implementation of mask mandates and lockdowns, and he decides to face off against him in the upcoming mayoral election. But at the same time that Joe employs increasingly ugly tactics in his “campaign” against Garcia, racial tensions in the town begin to mount, while a shadowy armed group makes its way towards Eddington.
Eddington has been largely overlooked by awards bodies, yet it nevertheless succeeds at being what is perhaps the best articulation of the absurdity of our current cultural and political moment than any other film has managed thus far. Blending genres into a Western social thriller hybrid, the movie astutely satirizes how the digital world and our fear of each other distract people from more serious problems. Aside from a compelling and provocative narrative, the movie is anchored by one of Phoenix’s best performances.
![Sullivan s Crossing s Scott Patterson Discusses [Redacted] s Fate After Shooting I Cried So Much 487](/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Sullivan-s-Crossing-s-Scott-Patterson-Discusses-Redacted-s-Fate-After-Shooting-I-Cried-So-Much-487-1.jpg?crop=177px%2C0px%2C800px%2C799px&resize=600%2C600&quality=86&strip=all)
