Oscars 2024: All 10 Best Picture Nominees, Ranked from Worst to Best

10. “American Fiction”

Cord Jefferson knows his way around the American media landscape better than most — the first-time filmmaker’s resume includes everything from journalism stints at Gawker and The New York Times Magazine, an Emmy-winning writing gig on lauded TV series “Watchmen,” and a consultant job on no less than “Succession” — but his first film hints at an understanding of our greatest institutions and our basest cultural impulses that goes beyond just those mediums. For his TIFF People’s Choice Award winner, Jefferson adapted Percival Everett’s seemingly predictive 2001 novel “Erasure” into a scathing social satire that seems destined to spark conversations for years to come.

Jefferson gathered a stellar cast for the feature: a never-better Jeffrey Wright stars as beleaguered professor and underappreciated writer Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, and he’s joined by everyone from Tracee Ellis Ross to Issa Rae, Sterling K. Brown to John Ortiz, Adam Brody to Leslie Uggams, as they navigate a story that feels almost too funny to be true. Monk, disturbed by the lack of respect his high-brow literature has afforded him, jokingly writes the kind of poverty porn that most audiences seem to expect from Black writers and then finds himself the toast of book town. Oops! But Jefferson also weaves in compelling dramatic bits as well, going deeper into Monk’s own self-loathing as he grapples not just with ill-gotten fame, but a changing family, an unexpected new romance, and the revelation that more people see him (and through him) than he’s willing to allow. It’s a smart, sharp debut, and the beginning of yet another fruitful career for Jefferson. —KE

9. “Maestro”

Bradley Cooper exerts and exhausts his soul to not only direct and co-write “Maestro,” about the great composer and New York Philharmonic conductor Leonard Bernstein, but also to star as the complicated musical legend widely known for writing the score for “West Side Story.” Much ado has already been made about the prosthetic nose the gentile second-time feature filmmaker dons to inhabit the specific skin of the Jewish maestro, who died of a heart attack in 1990 at 72. This feat of sculptural makeup effects by artist Kazu Hiro is an unnecessary distraction that never stops reminding you that the person underneath is actually Bradley Cooper, not Bernstein.

Nose aside, “Maestro” is a technical triumph in terms of checking all the boxes of multihyphenate-ism — Cooper funnels himself into the project at every creative level — but this handsomely made Oscar-tailored package actually belongs to another person entirely, and that would be Carey Mulligan, playing Bernstein’s wife of nearly four decades, Felicia Montealegre. She was both the adoring but also the suffering end of a lavender marriage in which she enabled Bernstein to have affairs with an endless train of men (including some of his proteges) as long as he was home on the weekends and didn’t let his sex life impact their three children. To play the sparky Costa Rica-born actress, Mulligan puts on a kind of Transatlantic accent and later a deep, worn-in inner graveliness by the end of her life, cut off by cancer in 1978. Mulligan is wonderful and never overwhelming or overstating in portraying a woman who never set aside her own ambitions for the sake of her husband — even while having to stand by in the wings of his greatness.

As a study of how the Bernsteins’ near-three-decade marriage endured Lenny’s gayness and genius, “Maestro” succeeds off the chemistry between Mulligan and Cooper, but the film often looks and feels too fussed-over, almost too precisely manicured, to ever erase its own parameters as a linear biopic. —RL

8. “The Holdovers”

Set in the winter of 1970 and shot to look as if it had actually been made back then, Alexander Payne’s nuanced and hyper-literate “The Holdovers” takes great pleasure in defying every impulse of modern cinema from even before the moment it starts (the studio fanfare includes a “throwback” Focus Features logo, which is a cute little in-joke about a company that wasn’t founded until 2002). And yet, it might take even greater pleasure in embracing some of the movies’ most time-honored tropes and traditions. 

Chief among them: The inviolable rule that anything a school teacher “casually” tells their students in the first act of a film must speak to a core idea of the film itself. In that light, be sure to take notes during the opening scene in which Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) quotes Cicero to the “vulgar philistines” in his Ancient Civilization class. “Non nobis solum nati sumus.” “Not for ourselves alone are we born.” No spoilers, but that’s definitely going to be on the final exam of “The Holdovers,” which gradually thaws into a slight but sensitive tale about a trio of lonely souls who teach each other to push through their lives’ most isolating disappointments.

So begins Payne’s first collaboration with Giamatti since 2004’s “Sideways,” which set the stage for this similarly breezy-sad dramedy, and also confirmed the duo’s shared genius for spiteful male characters whose cantankerous wit masks a profound sense of personal failure. You won’t be surprised to learn that Mr. Hunham is very much another one of those, even if his various affectations — which include functional alcoholism, a glass eye, implied hemorrhoids, and a bodily inability to break down trimethylamine, which causes him to stink of rotting fish towards the end of the day — are enough to make “Sideways” protagonist Miles Raymond seem like Steve McQueen by comparison. 

If “Sideways” only pulled off its biggest comic swings because the self-loathing Miles Raymond was so in touch with his resentment at all times, “The Holdovers” shoots itself in the foot by adopting a somewhat broader and more cartoonish tone that stops its drama from cutting as deep, and its comedy from being as cutting. Sure, Mr. Hunham learns to loosen up a little over the course of the Christmas break he’s forced to spend chaperoning the Barton Academy students whose parents didn’t want them to come home, but the character dresses for the New England winter by wearing a hat on a hat on a hat, to the point that it takes Payne and Giamatti the better part of two hours to undress the guy down to his core. —DE

7. “Barbie”

Greta Gerwig’s zeitgeist-changing smash hit opens, of course, with an homage to Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.” A dazzling sunrise stretches over a barren desert, populated exclusively with sad-eyed Dust Bowl-era girls and their unblinking baby dolls, as Helen Mirren (!!) narrates us through what life was like pre-Barbie. It wasn’t just boring (though it was certainly boring), but it was limited (oh, was it limited). For so many little girls, dolls were only ever baby dolls, which meant that their playtime could only ever revolve around motherhood, servitude, and no fun whatsoever.

But just as Kubrick’s apes eventually met an alien monolith that utterly changed their world and worldview, Gerwig’s little girls are about to be descended upon by a world-altering and brain-breaking new entity: a giant, one might even say monolithic, Barbie doll, in the form of a smiling Margot Robbie, kitted out like the very first Barbie doll ever made. And thus spake Barbie. That’s where Gerwig’s funny, feminist, and wildly original “Barbie” begins. It will only get bigger, weirder, smarter, and better from there.

“Barbie” is a lovingly crafted blockbuster with a lot on its mind, the kind of feature that will surely benefit from repeat viewings (there is so much to see, so many jokes to catch) and is still purely entertaining even in a single watch. It’s Barbie’s world, and we’re all just living in it. How fantastic. –KE

6. “Poor Things”

Emma Stone is a woman who gets to start from scratch in Yorgos Lanthimos’ unbound and astonishing new feature, “Poor Things.” For most of us, life is comprised of knowledge and circumstance that take decades to accumulate until we die.  

For Stone’s Bella Baxter, that process happens in very fast motion, thanks to a reanimating procedure that finds her, once a dead woman floating in a river, now alive again with her unborn child’s brain inside her head. Bella, née Victoria, is a living breathing tabula rasa unfettered by societal pressures, propriety, or niceties. And Stone, in her most brazenly weird performance to date, plays her like a toddler taking its first steps and saying its first words — until by the end of “Poor Things” she’s speaking fluent French and studying anatomy, her eyes and ears full of worldliness.  

Boldly realized with taffy-colored production design, brain-bending sets stuffed with enough easter egg unrealities to fill the most difficult 5,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, and wildly over-the-top Victorian costumes that look as if made by a schizoid seamstress on too many tabs of acid, “Poor Things” is also hysterically funny and the raunchiest movie you’re likely to see all year. Lanthimos makes a sexually graphic picaresque that’s part Terry Gilliam, part Ken Russell, about Bella’s pursuit of pleasure but also her selfhood in a patriarchal world. Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, and Ramy Youssef each provide overwhelmingly hilarious turns as the men in Bella’s life — her ridiculous lover, her creator, and her potential husband, respectively.  

“Poor Things” is the best film of Lanthimos’ career and already feels like an instant classic, mordantly funny, whimsical and wacky, unprecious and unpretentious, filled with so much to adore that to try and parse it all here feels like a pitiful response to the film’s ambitions. It’s proof that whatever weird alchemy Stone and Lanthimos are vibing on after “The Favourite” is the real deal. —RL 

5. “Anatomy of a Fall”

They say trends come in threes. And so, nipping on the heels of Alice Diop’s “Saint Omer” and Cedric Kahn’s Directors’ Fortnight breakout “The Goldman Case,” Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or-winning “Anatomy of a Fall” make a compelling case that the courthouse has become the most fertile ground in contemporary French cinema, offering incisive auteurs both motive and opportunity to put social structures on trial. As it calls the institution of marriage to the stand, Triet’s piercing film holds the ambient tensions and illogical loose ends of domestic life against the harsh and rational light of a legal system that searches for order in chaos.

Rounding out her own impressive hat trick, “Toni Erdmann” and “The Zone of Interest” star Sandra Hüller dazzles in a role clearly written with the performer in mind. She plays Sandra, a German-born, France-based bisexual novelist accused of killing her male partner in a way eerily foretold by one of her novels. And if that description calls to mind another icy-blond (in a performance, incidentally, that also shook the Cannes Film Festival, back in 1992), the echo is both wholly intentional and entirely irrelevant. Indeed, “Anatomy of a Fall” is filled with such anti-portents –coincidences or clues, depending on who you ask, echoes or empty noise, depending on who’s listening.

“Anatomy of a Fall” is never really about the trial that follows; at its searing best, the film tracks the destruction of a family with cold precision. If an artist relies on memories, why not also share nightmares? Why not build a polar vortex that crushes fact under fiction, that lifts from last night’s argument, today’s viewing of a ’90s classic and tomorrow’s worst fears? It’s a cyclone that sends the mind soaring, and primes the heart for a hefty fall. —BC 

4. “Oppenheimer”

At first, I thought that if J. Robert Oppenheimer didn’t exist, Christopher Nolan would probably have been compelled to invent him. The exalted British filmmaker has long been fixated upon stories of haunted and potentially self-destructive men who sift through the source code of space-time in a desperate bid to understand the meaning of their own actions, and so the “father of the atomic bomb” — a theoretical physicist whose obsession with a twilight world hidden inside our own led to the birth of the modern age’s most biblical horrors — would seem to represent an uncannily perfect subject for the “Tenet” director’s next epic. And he is. In fact, Oppenheimer is so perversely well-suited to the Nolan treatment that I soon began to realize I had things backwards: Christopher Nolan only exists because men like J. Robert Oppenheimer invented him first.
 
Which isn’t to overstate the degree to which Nolan’s first biopic feels like some kind of grandiose self-portrait (even if the Manhattan Project sequences can seem broadly analogous to the filmmaking process, as large swaths of “Inception” and “The Prestige” did before them), nor to suggest that the director sees himself in the same regard as the man he describes in the “Oppenheimer” press notes as “the most important person who ever lived.” It’s also not to glibly conflate one of the most controversial figures of the 20th century with one of the most controversial figures on the r/Movies subreddit, even if the industry-changing success of “Batman Begins” surely inspired a “now I am become death” moment of Nolan’s very own.
 
Paced like it was designed for interstellar travel, scripted with a degree of density that scientists once thought purely theoretical in nature, and shot with such large-format bombast that repetitive scenes (or at least Nolan-esque slices) of old politicians yelling at each other about expired security clearances hit with the same visceral impact as the 747 explosion in “Tenet,” “Oppenheimer” is nothing if not a biopic as only Christopher Nolan could make one. Indeed, it would seem like the ideal vehicle for Nolan’s career-long exploration into the black holes of the human condition — the last riddles of a terrifyingly understandable world. —DE

3. “Killers of the Flower Moon”

Martin Scorsese may like to think of “Killers of the Flower Moon” as the Western that he always wanted to make, but this frequently spectacular American epic about the genocidal conspiracy that was visited upon the Osage Nation during the 1920s is more potent and self-possessed when it sticks a finger in one of the other genres that bubble up to the surface over the course of its three-and-a-half-hour runtime.

The first and most obvious of those is a gangster drama in the grand tradition of the director’s previous work; just when it seemed like “The Irishman” might’ve been Scorsese’s final word on his signature genre, they’ve pulled him back in for another movie full of brutal killings, bitter voiceovers, and biting conclusions about the corruptive spirit of American capitalism. But if the “Reign of Terror” sometimes proves to be an uncomfortably vast backdrop for Scorsese’s more intimate brand of crime saga, “Killers of the Flower Moon” excels as a compellingly multi-faceted character study about the men behind the massacre. Over time, it becomes the most interesting of the many different movies that comprise it: A twisted love story about the marriage between an Osage woman (the indomitable Lily Gladstone) and the white man who — unbeknownst to her — helped murder her entire family so that he could inherit the headrights for their oil fortune (Leonardo DiCaprio, giving the best performance of his career as the dumbest and most vile character he’s ever played). 

Finding the right balance in this story is a challenge for a filmmaker as gifted and operatic as Scorsese, whose ability to tell any story rubs up against his ultimate admission that this might not be his story to tell. And so, for better or worse, Scorsese turns “Killers of the Flower Moon” into the kind of story that he can still tell better than anyone else: A story about greed, corruption, and the mottled soul of a country that was born from the belief that it belonged to anyone callous enough to take it. —DE

2. “The Zone of Interest”

Holocaust cinema has so implicitly existed in the shadow of a single question that it would no longer seem worth asking if not for the fact that it’s never been answered: How do you depict an atrocity? Is seeing necessary for believing, or are some things too unfathomable to adequately capture on camera? 

A Holocaust drama that’s defined by its rigorous compartmentalization and steadfast refusal to show any hint of explicit violence, Jonathan Glazer’s profoundly chilling “The Zone of Interest” stands out for how formally the film splits the difference between the two opposite modes of its solemn genre — a genre that may now be impossible to consider without it. No Holocaust movie has ever been more committed to illustrating the banality of evil, and that’s because no Holocaust movie has ever been more hell-bent upon ignoring evil altogether. There is a literal concrete wall that separates Glazer’s characters from the horrors next door (those characters being the commandant of Auschwitz and his family), and not once does his camera dare to peek over it for a better look.

The authorless quality of Glazer’s images frees the characters within them from the emptiness of moral judgment. The evil on display is never the least bit in doubt, but its failure to recognize itself as such is only so able to take shape in the absence of its limiting obviousness. By the end, “The Zone of Interest” insists that all of history’s most abominable moments have been permitted by people who didn’t have to see them, and while the film’s ultimate staying power has yet to be determined, its vision of normality is — as Hannah Arendt once described that phenomenon — “more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.” —DE

1. “Past Lives”

Of all the writers retreats in all the summer towns in all of New York, he had to walk into hers. As the sun fades on a perfect Montauk night — setting the stage for a first kiss that, like so many of the most resonant moments in Celine Song’s transcendent “Past Lives,” will ultimately be left to the imagination — Nora (an extraordinary Greta Lee) tells Arthur (John Magaro) about the Korean concept of In-Yun, which suggests that people are destined to meet one another if their souls have overlapped a certain number of times before. When Arthur asks Nora if she really believes in all that, the Seoul-born woman sitting across from him invitingly replies that it’s just “something Korean people say to seduce someone.”

Needless to say, it works.

But as this delicate yet crushingly beautiful film continues to ripple forward in time — the wet clay of Nora and Arthur’s flirtation hardening into a marriage in the span of a single cut — the very real life they create together can’t help but run parallel to the imagined one that Nora seemed fated to share with the childhood sweetheart she left back in her birth country. She and Hae Sung (“Leto” star Teo Yoo) haven’t seen each other in the flesh since they were in grade school, but the ties between them have never entirely frayed apart.

On the contrary, they seem to knot together in unexpected ways every 12 years, as Hae Sung orbits back around to his first crush with the cosmic regularity of a comet passing through the sky above. The closer he comes to making contact with Nora, the more heart-stoppingly complicated her relationship with destiny becomes. And with each passing scene in this film (all of them so hushed and sacrosanct that even their most uncertain moments feel as if they’re being repeated like an ancient prayer), it grows easier to appreciate why Nora felt compelled to mention In-Yun on that seismic Montauk night.

On paper, “Past Lives” might sound like a diasporic riff on a Richard Linklater romance — one that condenses the entire “Before” trilogy into the span of a single film. In practice, however, this gossamer-soft love story almost entirely forgoes any sort of “Baby, you are gonna miss that plane” dramatics in favor of teasing out some more ineffable truths about the way that people find themselves with (and through) each other. Which isn’t to suggest that Song’s palpably autobiographical debut fails to generate any classic “who’s she gonna choose?” suspense by the time it’s over, but rather to stress how inevitable it feels that Nora’s man crisis builds to a bittersweet quiver of recognition instead of a megaton punch to the gut. Here is an unforgettable romance that unfolds with the mournful resignation of the Leonard Cohen song that inspires Nora’s English-language name; it’s a movie less interested in tempting its heroine with “the one who got away” than it is in allowing her to reconcile with the version of herself she once left with him as a priceless souvenir.

In January, we wrote that “Past Lives” was destined to be one of 2023’s best films. That may have been a self-fulfilling prophecy, but it turns out we were still selling Celine Song’s transcendent debut a little short. —DE