Oscars 2026: Movies you shouldn’t miss based on this year’s results

Guillermo del Toro reimagines Mary Shelley’s 1818 Gothic classic in Frankenstein, which won two Oscars: Best Production Design and Best Costume Design. Jacob Elordi’s performance as the Creature moves between tragedy and menace, capturing the brutal loneliness of human creation gone awry. Costume designer Kate Hawley breathes decadent life into the film’s visual landscape, with haunting robes, lavish gowns and claustrophobic sets that shift from icy wilderness to apocalyptic ruin. The result is a visually arresting spectacle that balances horror and beauty. In del Toro’s hands, the monster becomes both sinner and saint—a creature terrified, yearning and, somehow, heartbreakingly human.

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Winning four Oscars—Best Actor (Michael B Jordan), Best Original Screenplay (Ryan Coogler), Best Original Score (Ludwig Göransson) and Best Cinematography—Sinners is this year’s artistic powerhouse. The film reframes the Black experience in Jim Crow-era America as a chilling psychological horror. Jordan delivers one of his finest performances to date as one of twin brothers who return to their Mississippi hometown, only to face an unspeakable evil lurking beneath the familiar. Coogler’s script weaves family bonds, fear and racial trauma into a bold allegory of history repeating itself. Sinners doesn’t just invite viewers to look—it dares them not to look away.

Jessie Buckley’s deeply felt performance in Hamnet earned her the Oscar for Best Actress, making her the first Irish actor to claim the category. Adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, it links Shakespeare’s loss of his only son to the creation of Hamlet. Buckley embodies Agnes—Shakespeare’s wife—with rare balance: fierce, funny and devastatingly human. Her portrayal captures the ache of grief and artistic birth in one sweeping motion. Elegant and restrained, Hamnet is a meditation on love, loss and legacy, rendered through luminous cinematography and a score that lingers long after the curtain falls.

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This multilingual Norwegian family drama, told in English, Norwegian, Danish and Swedish, won Best International Feature Film. Sentimental Value tells the story of two sisters reuniting with their estranged father, a retired film director determined to dedicate his final project to one of them. When a charismatic actor enters the picture, old wounds reopen. Directed with poise and sensitivity, the film examines reconciliation, regret and the blurred boundaries between art and intimacy. Every frame hums with precision; every silence feels deliberate. Sentimental Value is proof that emotions, like good cinema, transcend language.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s darkly comic action thriller One Battle After Another confirmed his mastery with six Oscar wins, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor, Best Film Editing and the Academy’s new category, Best Casting. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio as a washed-up revolutionary lost in paranoia, the film spirals into chaos when his daughter disappears. Anderson captures a world balancing self-destruction and absurdity—stylised violence meets biting social satire. It’s kinetic, dazzling and politically charged: proof that Anderson still makes the kind of cinema that cuts through the noise.

Speed and sound steal the spotlight in F1, which clinched the Oscar for Best Sound. Directed by Joseph Kosinski (Top Gun: Maverick), the film enlists Hans Zimmer—of Dune, Inception and The Dark Knight fame — to craft a thunderous score that throbs with adrenaline. The racing sequences are pure cinematic immersion: screeching tyres, surging engines, the roar of the crowd. Every sound, from the rev of an engine to the sigh of a pit crew, feels tuned to emotional perfection. F1 doesn’t just depict velocity—it lets you feel it.

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