Simpler and With More Laughter Presents: The 2025 Snubbies!

Who needs the Oscars? Even with Conan O’Brien hosting, they’ll be disappointing, overlong, and, this year at least, likely transphobic and weird. So, as a cycle of new films comes to a close (like Rosh Hashanah for movies), let’s take some time to celebrate some of the great snubs of the year with The Snubbies. None of the films on this list are nominated for Oscars despite their cultural impact and, more honestly, my having liked them. So, Welcome to the Snubbies!

Best Picture: I SAW THE TV GLOW

Based purely on how often I thought of this film in the past year, I SAW THE TV GLOW takes the Best Picture Snubbie. Watching it for the first time, I found myself wanting to peer in every corner of every frame of the film, searching for clues, hints, and references. Jane Schoenbrun’s script floats us through our protagonist Owen’s adolescence, becoming crushingly real as adulthood arrives and he is forced to look back. The film’s shifts between the analog horror of THE MIDNIGHT REALM, its X-FILES-on-Nickelodeon magical object and the Lynchian drama of Owen and Maddy’s connection affirms the film’s central concern: that the cultural objects we grow up with shape us. A chilling existential horror film, a testimony about the violence of the closet, Schoenbrun’s film opens and closes with the greatest gift: a reminder that “there is still time”.

Best Original Screenplay: Annie Baker, JANET PLANET

Annie Baker is simply one of the greatest American writers of our time and perhaps any time. I’ve long loved her plays, and eagerly awaited the release of JANET PLANET, her screenwriting and directorial debut. What I didn’t expect was JANET PLANET's wholehearted embrace of the medium of film and its aesthetic possibilities. So often, the first film of a playwright is not much more than conversations in rooms, but Baker’s cinephile tendencies run wild through her screenplay. In her portrait of Lacey, a lovably strange little girl raised by her single mother Janet in early-90s Western Massachusetts, Baker blends her knack for staging conversations that feel like real life (rather than sound like real life) with a confident transcendentalism. JANET PLANET’s sense of place and magical quality are unique to the film, all thanks to Baker’s writing.

Honorable Mention: Kazik Radwanski and ensemble, MATT AND MARA

Movies about writers are either excellent or extremely pretentious. In MATT AND MARA, Kazik Radwanski, by leaning into the fact that writers usually act like idiots and torture each other, actually makes a good film about writers. The partly-improvised script kicks rom-com tropes in the teeth while also investing genuine care in the titular relationship. You could debate about the ethics of an improvised script winning a screenplay award, but MATT AND MARA’s magnetism is all in the text.

Best Adapted Screenplay – Daniele Lucchetti and Francesco Piccolo, TRUST

Perhaps it’s hard to judge an adapted screenplay if you don't know the source material, but a good script announces itself regardless. TRUST, Daniele Lucchetti’s adaptation of Domenico Starnone’s 2019 novel CONFIDENZA, co-written with Francesco Piccolo. is a brutal and sexy thriller. After Pietro, a teacher, hooks up with Teresa, a former student, they each decide to tell each other a secret that would ruin them if it came to light, information that we never learn. Spanning forty years, the film follows Pietro’s success as an academic and his successive reunions with Teresa, haunted not just by his admission to her all those years ago, but the control she has over him by knowing his secret. Wisely, the audience never learns the content of this admission. The restraint at play gives the film a powerful engine, hurtling us into a surreal finale. Lucchetti and Piccolo’s script is brutal and restrained, keeping the audience in a tight grip.

Best Director: Luca Guadagnino

Simply for having two very different (and, in my opinion great) movies come out in one year, the Snubbie for Best Director goes to Luca Guadagnino. A new Guadagnino film has felt like a proper event since CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, and he did not disappoint in 2024. Making the sleek sports drama/erotic thriller CHALLENGERS and the grimy period piece QUEER back to back is a feat. A third, AFTER THE HUNT, is already in post-production. Guadagnino’s love for the process of making film is apparent in his press appearances, and the sheer number of returning collaborators on the two films (particularly costume designer Jonathan Anderson) speaks to the skill and generosity that he brings to his projects.

Best First Feature: Vera Drew, THE PEOPLE’S JOKER

There is no 2024 film more reflective of its creator’s talent and resilience than Vera Drew’s THE PEOPLE’S JOKER. This anarchic semi-autobiographical parody film tells the story of Vera, a trans woman and aspiring comedian, coming to terms with her identity in Gotham City. The real Vera Drew, a mainstay of the ON CINEMA Universe and other Abso Lutely Productions projects, made the film on her own after setting out to make a fan edit of Todd Phillips’ JOKER in 2019. The resulting film, a hilarious and personal and a joyous celebration of queerness and foolishness, was nearly blackballed by the ghouls at Warner Brothers and DC Comics who cited copyright infringement after its premiere at TIFF. Thanks to Drew’s determination, THE PEOPLE’S JOKER got an arthouse run and became an instant cult hit in less than a year. This film is a shining example of rebellious queer art, and we are so lucky to live in a time where Vera Drew can make and release the films she wants to.

Best Original Score: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, CHALLENGERS

I mean, come on. No score infected the cultural zeitgeist like Reznor and Ross’ score for Guadagnino’s CHALLENGERS did. A hard-edged industrial techno symphony, the bubbling synths of the CHALLENGERS score perfectly match the sweaty, slutty sports drama. Tracks like “L’oeuf” and “Lullaby” show restraint, but the whole aim of the project is best encapsulated by the theme entitled “Brutalizer”. CHALLENGERS’ ability to stop an audience dead in its tracks is owed to a lot of things, but the grinding score is simply too gnarly to ignore.

Best Foreign Language Film: SKIN DEEP, PLASTIC, and ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT

This category is, as at the Oscars, kind of tokenizing, and often redundant as foreign-language films (PARASITE, THE ZONE OF INTEREST, I’M STILL HERE) increasingly make it into the mainstream Oscar categories. But, I wanted to spotlight three incredible films from around the world that blew me away this year.

First is the German film SKIN DEEP from brothers/collaborators Alex and Dimitrij Schaad. Starting with a body-swap science-fiction presence, the Schaads use well-worn genre tropes to explore questions of gender identity and sexuality as couples swap bodies at an island clinic. The less information you have, the better, but you should know that Mala Emde and Jonas Dassler’s central performances are engrossing and also well-studied when the swapping kicks in.

Next is Daisuke Mayazaki’s PLASTIC. A ragged and earnest exploration of art’s ability to bring people together, very much in conversation with I SAW THE TV GLOW, PLASTIC follows a doomed teenage romance, brought together by an obscure glam rock album. This is the stuff of well-considered mixtapes and composition-notebook poems, and I was just totally devastated by PLASTIC’s huge heart and sense of itself. While it doesn’t have US distribution at the moment, PLASTIC is an accomplishment worthy of acclaim.

Finally, there’s Payal Kapadia’s ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT, which was rejected by the Film Federation of India for Oscar consideration. Kapadia creates a warm and familiar narrative about Prabha and Anu, two nurses who are roommates in Mumbai. By portraying the demands put on women in modern India and pouring love into her central characters, Kapadia quietly critiques her native country. ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT’s light touch and gorgeous cinematography envelops its audience.

Best Lead Performance: Adam Driver, MEGALOPOLIS

Look, I know what you’re going to say. But does anyone commit as hard as Driver? I admit that MEGALOPOLIS is an absolute mess, but Adam Driver’s performance as beleaguered inventor and super-architect Caesar Catilina meets Francis Ford Coppola’s script where it’s at, i.e. Koo Koo Land, and plays along. Other members of MEGALOPOLIS’ ensemble are so clearly out of their depth in Coppola’s weird techno-Roman Empire, but Driver rolls with the madness. Who hasn’t wanted to see him recite HAMLET’s “to be or not to be” in full? Remember “go back to the clurb”? On the level of sheer commitment and sense of play, Driver’s performance deserves acclaim.

Best Supporting Performance: Jack Haven, I SAW THE TV GLOW

The best supporting actor work is when a performance is so exciting that you wait with bated breath for the character's return. When that character is allowed to rip for a long time, it's even better. I SAW THE TV GLOW stops dead in its tracks for a minutes-long monologue, delivered in an uninterrupted take, where Maddy (Jack Haven) explains where she has been since her disappearance at the end of high school. As the audience takes on the point of view of Owen (Justice Smith), the screen fills with Haven’s face as they narrate a horrific journey to a new life. As this pivotal moment, set in a school planetarium, slowly spools itself out, Haven’s performance opens up and grows to towering heights. In the film’s first act, Haven plays their cards close to their chest, leaving the audience unsure as to whether Maddy is hiding a massive secret or is just a sullen teen. Their absence is felt through the film’s second act, so when they return, stilted and feral, it’s as if lightning strikes the movie. Haven’s performance is defined by a sense of presence through absence, and is the perfect supporting performance for a film as dense and mysterious as I SAW THE TV GLOW.

Best Ensemble: KINDS OF KINDNESS

Yorgos Lanthimos’ black comedy anthology KINDS OF KINDNESS lives and dies by its cast, each of whom appear as several different characters. Lanthimos regulars Emma Stone, Joe Alwyn, and Willem Dafoe are joined by Hong Chau, Margaret Qualley, Mamadou Athie, and Jesse Plemons in each of the chapters, with a special appearance by Hunter Schafer. All are tied together by R.M.F., the film’s one recurring character, played by Yorgos Stefanakos, a notary public and old friend of Lanthimos’. Not only is this an ensemble of some of the best actors working today, each actor’s performance shifts from chapter to chapter. Where one is high-status in part one, they are low-status in part two. An insider in part one is an outsider in part three. While each actor brings their trademarks to each role (Dafoe is always a crackly-voiced authority figure, Plemons speaking in a guileless mumble), there is a sense that each performance is unique to the chapter. Lanthimos’ style requires a particular approach, and the KINDS OF KINDNESS ensemble rises to the occasion, three times each, in the anthology.

Honorable Mention: THE BIKERIDERS

Boys.

Best Documentary: UNION

Brett Story and Stephen Maing’s UNION is an excellent piece of political cinema vérite, following the unionization efforts of Amazon warehouse workers in New York. UNION captures the resistance of the working class against corporate America’s hostility towards them, particularly urgent given how many people uncritically rely on Amazon for their everyday needs. While Christian Smalls, the president of the Amazon Labor Union is the film’s primary protagonist, the film’s focus on the team working to bring the ALU to life is just as important. The audience is put in the middle of countless meetings, actions, and arguments that speak to the sheer force of will required of organizers. Additionally, the film’s skepticism towards Smalls’ charismatic leadership style keeps UNION from being an easy portrayal of a hero. Story and Maing float the possibility that Smalls may not have any idea as to what he is doing, which creates a productive ambivalence. As in all labor campaigns, there are no easy answers for what the right move is. While UNION lets the audience witness the events unfold, warts and all, it never strays from the premise that these workers deserve the dignity they demand.

Best Cinematography: Hélène Louvart, LA CHIMERA

I wrote in my End-of-Year piece about my love for LA CHIMERA, Alice Rohrwacher’s gorgeous anti-adventure about a British former archaeologist living in Tuscany and the band of tomb raiders he has fallen in with. But much of LA CHIMERA’s dusty charm is the work of cinematographer Hélène Louvart. For their third collaboration, Louvart and Rohrwacher worked together across 16mm and 35mm film to capture both the squalor of rural Italy in the 1980s and the dreamlike mystery of Arthur’s imagination. LA CHIMERA is full of playful and gorgeous compositions, creating a distinct visual language that makes the film such a treat to watch.

Best Special Effects: GODZILLA X KONG: THE NEW EMPIRE

No other movie has both Godzilla and King Kong in it. That alone warrants praise. But GODZILLA X KONG: THE NEW EMPIRE also crafts unbelievable fantasy worlds, particularly Hollow Earth, where Kong meets more of his kind. The GXK team also deserves acclaim for making one of the most beautiful CG characters in recent memory, Mothra, and also one of the most repugnant, Mini Kong. It’s hard work, imbuing monsters with enough personality that you can grow to despise one of them (Mini Kong). In a time where most CG work is bland and inoffensive, GODZILLA X KONG: THE NEW EMPIRE has color and personality, successful at manipulating your emotions (Mini Kong) and serving the story.

What a wonderful lineup! The Snubbies also serve as a list of recommendations, so please check these films out if you haven’t seen them. You know what I love about The Snubbies? No one gets slapped. Enjoy a new cycle of moviegoing, and I just might see you next year.