How to look at the 2026 Oscars’ prime nominated movies at house: From steamy vampire romp Sinners to crime epic One Battle After Another, the 12 months’s most acclaimed films are at your fingertips

The Oscar 2026 nominations have finally been revealed as the glitzy awards ceremony returns to our screens in a matter of weeks. 

The 98th annual ceremony will take place on March 15 and will see the best actors and actresses gather at the Dolby Theatre in Ovation Hollywood. 

There are a number of incredible films from over past year that are receiving recognition on the world stage.

These include steamy vampire romp Sinners, crime epic One Battle After Another and tear-jerking animation Elio. 

Fortunately they’re all available to stream from the comfort of your home, so if you’re a discerning coach potato you have some of the year’s most acclaimed films at your fingertips. 

Sinners (Sky/Now)

Ryan Coogler’s electrifying Deep South supernatural drama, up for a record-setting 16 Oscars

This darkly atmospheric horror comes to us from the writer/director of Creed and Black Panther, Ryan Coogler. In Sinners he directs his frequent leading man Michael B Jordan in not one but two roles – as twins Smoke and Stack, who return to the Mississippi Delta in the 1930s after a stint in Chicago.

Their aim is to open a juke joint – essentially, a really lively bar – and they’re going to face challenges doing it, some of them supernatural.

Coogler and Jordan’s prior collaboration really shows in Sinners; the lead roles are played flawlessly by Jordan, who was part of the project from the early stages and has bagged an Oscar nomination for his efforts, one of the film’s record-setting 16 – including Best Picture and Best Director.

But perhaps the most surprising performance is from newcomer Miles Caton, who plays young bluesman Sammie – he has a real youthful energy, and Caton excels at putting across the desire of a young man ready to really make something of his life.

He gets involved in some of the singing too, and the score – featuring classic blues and folk numbers as well as original tracks by Ludwig Goransson – is a real treat.

It helps situate the film in its time and place, along with all the wooden churches, southern accents and retro motors.

Watch out too for Hailee Steinfeld (Hawkeye), who stars as one of the brothers’ love interests, as well as Jack O’Connell (SAS: Rogue Heroes) as a creepy, singing villain, and an Oscar-nominated Delroy Lindo – and don’t turn the credits off too quickly. (138 minutes)

One Battle After Another (buy/rent on Amazon, Apple, Sky etc)

Leonardo DiCaprio stars in Paul Thomas Anderson’s satire, up for 13 Oscars and available to rent at home

Leonardo DiCaprio is no stranger to satirical movies after his starring role in 2021’s Don’t Look Up – though in that film, his climate scientist character was not the target of the satire. One Battle After Another is a bit different. 

Neither DiCaprio’s ageing revolutionary Bob Ferguson or Sean Penn’s macho baddie Colonel Lockjaw are safe from ridicule and the result is as sharply hilarious as you would expect from the deft hand of director Paul Thomas Anderson.

The film, now nominated for no less than 13 Oscars, opens on all sorts of shenanigans, with Bob and his revolutionaries bumping heads with Lockjaw. 

Then, we pick up the story 16 years later with Bob raising a daughter alone while drinking, taking drugs and generally acting like a layabout. 

Penn, meanwhile, strives to join an elitist white-nationalist group but his attempts are hampered by his own sexual fantasies. 

Then Bob’s daughter goes missing – and the two enemies cross paths once again.

It’s a serious film dealing with serious issues, along with plenty of gun fights and car chases, but the core of the film is also deeply funny, a satire of extremists of all kinds, and both the Oscar-nominated DiCaprio and Penn’s characters are tragic, bitter and pathetic – deeply flawed but ashamed of it and trying to project strength. 

It’s maybe a pessimistic movie, but we’re saved from any overt moralising by the fact no one is shown in a particularly good light.

It’s closer to three hours than two, but honestly, that flies by. One Battle After Another is a poignant and important film, but on top of that, it’s just great fun.

Train Dreams (Netflix)

Joel Edgerton stars in Clint Bentley’s beautiful Best Picture contender about a logger’s life in the 20th century

A drama following a taciturn logger through the 20th century doesn’t sound like must-see cinema, but anyone familiar with the work of this movie’s director, Clint Bentley – his soaring 2024 prison drama, Sing Sing, was unlucky to miss out on an Oscar – will know that Train Dreams is likely to be something special. And special it is. 

Based on the novella by Denis Johnson, this grounded western is one of those films in which an ordinary life becomes extraordinary by sheer depth and deftness of storytelling, and it’s one of the contenders for the Best Picture Oscar as a result.

Joel Edgerton stars as Robert Grainier, an orphan who is never told how his parents died. As an adult, he falls for the forward Gladys (Felicity Jones) at church. 

They build a cabin and have a child together, but Robert’s logging work takes him away from his family for long periods of time, and change eventually comes to them all.

Throughout much of the film, Robert is something of a blank slate, the kind of person you might not notice, and it’s only by the end that you’ll actually come to know him – because it’s only by the end he really fully knows himself, and understands where he belongs.

It’s never a dull process. 

Along the way he meets plenty of outwardly rich characters, including William H Macy as a veteran logger and Kerry Condon as a woman of the frontier with a sadness all of her own. 

Overall the film is so simple yet so beautiful in its execution that it deserves to be savoured. Don’t watch it with one eye on anything else. (102 minutes)

F1: The Movie (Apple TV)

Brad Pitt plays the old hand back on the track in this exhilarating race movie

Given it was directed by Joseph Kosinski, who helmed the hands-on Top Gun: Maverick, it’s no surprise that Brad Pitt actually learned how to drive a Formula 1 car for F1: The Movie. 

The wider film, from its action sequences to its humour and even the plot (a has-been proves to the world he can do it as well as the young guns), also bears a striking resemblance to Tom Cruise’s 2022 fighter pilot sequel and, just like Maverick, it’s been nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.

Pitt’s Sonny Hayes was an up-and-coming F1 driver in the 1990s. His career went south after a big crash and he spent decades bumping about on the fringes before being brought back into the mix by old pal Ruben (Javier Bardem), now owner of the struggling APXGP F1 team. 

Sonny is paired with arrogant rookie Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), a combination that promises fireworks and delivers.

As far as the racing goes, it’s fun, it’s loud and the action on the tracks – all the way to the last GP in Abu Dhabi – looks incredible. 

It’s a little far-fetched at times but this is Hollywood, so no complaints there.

The cast also includes Tobias Menzies as a slippery corporate type and Kerry Condon as Pitt’s tech specialist and love interest, and there are quite a few famous faces from the motor racing world in the background. 

Because some of the scenes were shot at real GPs, pretty much every F1 driver (at least, those who were racing in 2023) makes an appearance, although some of them are better at acting than others. (155 minutes)

Frankenstein (Netflix)

Guillermo del Toro’s visually lavish take on Mary Shelley’s novel, up for nine Oscars

Director Guillermo del Toro (The Shape Of Water) has dreamed of making his own version of Frankenstein since he was a boy, and you can feel his passion for the story in this visually lavish, two-and-a-half hour epic that earned a cinema release before arriving on Netflix. 

The movie opens with Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) rescued from apparent doom by ice-trapped sailors in the Arctic.

Victor then relates his story in flashback, before the creature (Jacob Elordi) picks up the tale from his perspective. 

The film seeks to explain both of their lives and torments and, in doing so, gives them a slightly different ending to that granted by Mary Shelley in her book.

The scale of the Oscar-nominated production is mind-boggling, from the estate where Victor grows up, to the ice-trapped ship where he looks back on life to the terrifying tower where the creature is forged.

Isaac radiates a dark energy as the fiercely focused Frankenstein, layering that with a charm that can make you see why his brother’s fiancée, Elizabeth (a wonderfully ethereal Mia Goth), could find him attractive.

The stuff he gets up to in the lab with the dead bodies is grim, and del Toro doesn’t flinch from any of the details, presenting them with a macabre yet matter-of-fact flourish. It’s a miracle, really, that this is not an 18.

As the creature, Saltburn star Elordi lets his soulful eyes do most of the talking although, when he does start to speak in full sentences, he does so in a northern accent – which he would, because that’s how the blind man (David Bradley) he learns from speaks. 

The film is full of neat little moments and choices like that from its cast, all of which help give it a sense of individuality and even humour.

If you’ve never seen a Frankenstein story on screen before, this one should knock your socks off with its sheer scale and the surprise of its human drama. 

And, if you’ve seen plenty and you’re well familiar with who the real monster is here, then the scale, the costumes and the detail in the performances should deliver more than enough entertainment.

It would have made a hell of a three-part TV series but, of course, then it wouldn’t be eligible for an Oscar. 

As it was, it picked up nine nominations including Best Picture and one for Elordi, so the gamble paid off. (149 minutes)

Bugonia (buy/rent on Amazon, Apple, Sky etc)

Emma Stone is Oscar-nominated as a kidnapped CEO in a black comedy now available to rent at home

Emma Stone gives a precise, unsettling and Oscar-nominated performance as a big pharma CEO who poses as an advocate for change but is really just a new face on the same old, same old. 

The film is a typically out-there black comedy from the director Yorgos Lanthimos, with whom Stone has worked before (see also Kinds Of Kindness, Poor Things, The Favourite), and in this one her slick executive is kidnapped by two idiots who think she’s an alien trying to destroy Earth.

But are they idiots, though? We’ll leave that to the film to reveal, but the journey to finding out is full of thought-provoking moments about the state of the world, how we talk to each other and what’s happened to the bees. 

Stone is, as always, fully committed at every moment, even having her head shaved for the role – it happens early on, on camera.

Not that that’s the most amazing thing anyone has done ever in the world for a film, but it’s a sign of how committed she is to the script, and it’s that which allows it all to work so well.

What we will say about the plot is that the film takes a visually stunning turn later on, not long after it takes a very bloody one. Is it hopeful story, in the end? Perhaps. 

It depends on your perspective, and on how much you like bees.

Weapons (buy/rent on Amazon, Apple, Sky etc)

Top psychological horror set in small town America, now available to rent at home

Weapons is a top-notch psychological thriller that develops into full-on and decidedly gory supernatural horror. 

The writer-director is Zach Cregger, whose debut solo feature was the electrifyingly tense Barbarian (2022). 

This is a terrific follow-up, a fascinating portrait of a small American town traumatised by a terrible episode: in the dead of night, at precisely 2.17am, 17 children from a single primary school classroom get out of their beds and run away from home, disappearing without trace.

Many of the parents and townsfolk suspect the children’s teacher, Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), of knowing more than she is letting on. 

Miss Gandy thinks the mystery must have something to do with Alex, the one child in the class who didn’t vanish (a super performance by nine-year-old Cary Christopher).

Cregger tells the entire creepy story in six chapters, examining many of the same events from the perspectives of half a dozen key characters.

There are deliberate hints, not least in the title, of Weapons being a kind of metaphor for all those school shootings that scar modern-day America. 

But that’s not what has happened to these children, so what has? You’ll find no clues here, but we can tell you there are some whopping jump-scares, and a wildly overwrought ending that’s tempered by some nicely judged humour. 

It’s an ingeniously crafted tale, exceedingly well told, and with an Oscar-nominated performance from Amy Madigan as Alex’s ageing relative, Gladys, that will stay with you long after the film is over.

Other nominations

Jurassic World: Rebirth (buy/rent on Amazon, Apple, Sky etc)

Scarlett Johansson leads a fresh band of adventurers in the dino blockbuster, now available to rent at home

When Jurassic World Dominion came out in 2022 it was seen as the finale to the blockbuster dino franchise, bringing together characters from the two trilogies thus far for one big adventure. 

People love dinosaurs, though, and so it was that Jurassic World Rebirth hit the summer box office in 2025 with an all-new cast: Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey and Rupert Friend are the strong acting quartet headed to an equatorial island populated by particularly large and dangerous dinosaurs. 

Once there they must extract samples essential to the development of medical science, etc etc.

So much for the plot, which isn’t really what matters here – what about the dinosaurs?

While Rebirth is, ironically, set in a world in which ordinary people are bored by the scaly giants, the on-screen examples here are thrilling, including the aquatic Mosasaurus and the terrifying genetic mutant Distortus rex, which is like something out of Alien. 

On the opposite end of the scale is a cute little Aquilops that’s so sweet one of the characters gives it a name: Dolores. 

The visual effects look great, and earned the film an Oscar nomination.

And the humans? Johansson has form carrying action movies from her Marvel days and really rises to the challenge of the Jurassic franchise, acting the lead with a neat mix of humour, emotion and a very convincing physicality. 

The characters rather take a back seat to the adventure later but then, such is the way of these movies.

Rebirth was directed by Brit Gareth Edwards, whose breakout hit in 2010 – inventive creature feature Monsters – also hailed from a similar genre. 

If you choose to buy the film via Sky Store or Apple TV, it comes with a range of bonus features including deleted scenes, a gag reel and commentary from Edwards. Just like in the good old DVD days… (133 minutes)

The Lost Bus (Apple TV)

Matthew McConaughey stars in a real-life thriller about a bus driver saving children in the California wildfires

Paul Greengrass’s arresting real-life thriller is inspired by the astonishing true story of an American school bus driver who, against all the odds, managed to drive 22 children to safety through the 2018 California wildfires.

Matthew McConaughey stars as Kevin McKay, a man who, at the start of the film, is at a seriously low ebb.

Rejected by his teenage son and stuck in a dead end job with an ailing mother to care for and a beloved pet dog to put down, it seems his day can’t get any worse.

Then the fire takes hold – and Kevin is given no choice but to put all his focus into saving the children.

This is a redemption story, then, but it’s not a simple one that hits the usual Hollywood beats. 

Greengrass has a long track record with real-life thrillers (Bloody Sunday, United 93, Captain Phillips) and you can feel all that skill in how he conveys the horrifying experience of being trapped in an uncontrollable situation. 

The fire feels terrifyingly real, and the visual effects earned it an Oscar nomination.

The camera follows it sweeping through the forest like a predator as it grows and grows, cresting the hillside with McKay’s town in its sights, while emergency services do their best and looters start drawing their guns.

America Ferrera joins McConaughey on the bus as Mary, a school teacher – also a real-life figure – and there are moments of Speed-style banter between them but the script, from Mare Of Easttown’s Brad Ingelsby, is mostly concerned with giving us a small-town human story to hold onto through the stress. 

Don’t expect your hands to unclench for a little while after the credits, but the journey is worth the relief at the end. (129 minutes)

The Smashing Machine (buy/rent on Amazon, Apple, Sky etc)

Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson plays a UFC fighter in a bruising biopic available to rent at home.

Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson dug deep and donned Oscar-nominated prosthetics to star in this biopic about the wrestler Mark Kerr, an early star in the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) scene, which is written and directed by Benny Safdie, previously the director (with his brother Josh) of tense films such as Uncut Gems.

The film tracks Kerr’s path through the UFC in its edgy early days and how he tackles a rough patch that leads to opioid addiction and recovery, along with his home life and rows with girlfriend Dawn (Emily Blunt, doing her best from an arguably underwritten position), and it’s certainly a good performance from Johnson, particularly during in-the-ring fight scenes, that are suitably hard to watch.

His name wasn’t enough to draw big audiences at the box office but it’s certainly a film worthy of note in the field of sporting biopics, which also includes the Mickey Rourke-starring The Wrestler from 2008 and Christy, the Sydney Sweeney boxer movie that came out at around the same time, and also failed to attract crowds despite its big-name star. 

Ultimately, it’s the less dramatically interesting film, but the fight scenes are arguably more spectacular.

Animated/documentary

KPop Demon Hunters (Netflix)

Oscar-nominated animation about a K-pop girl group who hunt demons on the side

Launched with little fanfare early in the summer of 2025, Sony’s snappily titled and now Oscar-nominated animation became a word-of-mouth sensation on Netflix. 

It’s the story of a wildly popular Korean pop girl trio named Huntr/x who just happen to be super-powered demon hunters in between concerts. 

Their nemeses in the film turn out to be a hunky K-pop boy band who are secretly demons, although that situation isn’t quite as simple as it first appears.

Packed with catchy pop songs that spread across social media like wildfire, KPop Demon Hunters is the kind of film that sounds absolutely awful until you actually watch it. 

There’s something of Buffy The Vampire Slayer to its premise (the power of the trio is inherited across generations) and, like that show, it weaves a lot of myth into its story. It’s certainly not for everyone, but Huntr/x’s popularity is undeniable and their song Golden (actually co-written and performed by South Korean singer-songwriter Ejae) even hit number one on the UK singles chart.

A sing-along version is also available. (99 minutes)

Elio (Disney+)

Pixar’s visually dazzling, Oscar-nominated coming-of-age tale about abduction by aliens.

In Pixar’s sweet, weird and Oscar-nominated animated family comedy, 11-year-old orphan Elio lives with his aunt but is struggling to fit in at school. 

He longs to be taken away from it all by aliens and, one day, he gets his wish – being whisked away to a strange world where he’s mistaken for Earth’s leader.

That’s a little more high stakes than he had in mind, given the presence of a threatening intergalactic warlord to deal with, but it’s certainly a welcome break from the norm.

A visually dazzling coming-of-age tale flows from there, as Elio encounters all manner of odd landscapes and beings, some of whom are on emotional journeys of their own.

The movie is admirable for being an original story in a sea of sequels and remakes, and delivers some fun and rather nutty twists throughout its fairly efficient running time. The solid voice cast includes Zoe Saldana, Shirley Henderson and Jameela Jamil and, while Elio didn’t hit big at the box office, it could well find a bigger audience at home on streaming. (98 minutes)

The Perfect Neighbour (Netflix)

Oscar-nominated documentary about Florida neighbourhood tensions that led to murder

A steadily mounting portrait of tension on one street in Florida, Geeta Gandbhir’s documentary tracks what happens when one woman, Susan Lorincz, keeps calling police to deal with the noise being made by her neighbours’ children, and what she sees as threats to her property.

It’s been painstakingly edited together using the police bodycam footage from those visits, a story that culminates in Lorincz shooting dead the single mother of one of the children.

Dealing with issues of racism and Florida’s controversial Stand Your Ground law – which permits deadly force in the pursuit of self-defence – The Perfect Neighbour is a compelling picture of how easily events can take a fatal turn in a society where firearms are so simple to obtain. 

How many seemingly low-level disputes on the likes of The Jerry Springer Show or Judge Judy could so easily have gone this way?

It’s also universally relatable in the sense that everyone, at one point or another, has presumably been a noisy child on a street. 

Whatever perspective you’re watching it from, it’s undeniably a tragic waste of life. (96 minutes)

Come See Me In The Good Light (Apple TV)

Moving, Oscar-nominated documentary about living life in the face of death

‘My story is one about happiness being easier to find once we realise we do not have forever to find it.’ 

The American poet Andrea Gibson died from cancer in July 2025, aged just 49. The documentary Come See Me In The Good Light captures the struggle with the disease and, as Andrea is a poet, the expression of the experience raises a lyrical spectrum of emotions across the length of the documentary.

Andrea’s wife Megan Falley (also a poet) is present throughout and the bond between them as they navigate life in the face of death is the uplifting star of a film that’s likely to leave you in tears before the end. 

Gibson didn’t expect to live to see the documentary, but was able to attend a screening at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2025. (104 minutes)

The Alabama Solution (Sky/Now)

Oscar-nominated documentary insight into the conditions inside Alabama prisons

‘I never thought I would be in this situation. That I would have to care how someone was treated in prison.’ 

This horrifying documentary tracks the conditions inside prisons in the state of Alabama. Made for HBO in the US, The Alabama Solution is hinged around the case of Steven Davis, a prisoner who was beaten to death by a group of guards, amid conflicting accounts over the level of threat he presented. 

That quote at the start comes from Davis’s mother, who has since pursued justice for the sake of her son. Since Steven was killed, as of the film’s release, one of the guards has been promoted twice.

Co-directed by Andrew Jarecki (who won an Emmy for true crime documentary great The Jinx) with Charlotte Kaufman, The Alabama Solution benefits from extraordinary levels of access to prisoners who document the conditions inside with contraband mobile phones. 

It also benefits from patience – it was six years in the making. The film’s title comes from the reaction of the authorities to the case, who said that the problem needed to be addressed by the state of Alabama, rather than the federal government. But was it?

Included on the Oscar long-list for 2026, this is also a wider portrait of a system that is a part of society, just one that’s closed off from general consideration. 

The reasons for that are understandable and present in the attitudes expressed by Sandy Davis at the top, but the results of that lack of consideration also carry consequences for everyone. (117 minutes)