2025 BEST DIRECTOR NOMINEES
Earlier films from this year's Oscar nominees for Best Director.
THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD 2021
Renate Reinsve won the Best Actress prize at Cannes for the revelatory, complex performance that anchors this sprawlingly novelistic film by Norwegian auteur Joachim Trier, an emotionally intricate and exhilarating character study of a woman entering her thirties. Amid the seemingly endless possibilities of the modern world, Julie (Reinsve) wavers over artistic passions and professions, the question of motherhood, and relationships with two very different men: a successful comic-book artist (Trier regular Anders Danielsen Lie) and a charismatic barista (Herbert Nordrum). Working with a team of longtime collaborators, Trier and his perennial cowriter Eskil Vogt construct in The Worst Person in the World, the Oscar-nominated third entry in their unofficial Oslo Trilogy, a liberating portrait of self-discovery and a bracingly contemporary spin on the romantic comedy.
Friday, March 6
Sunday, March 8
Director: Joachim Trier
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Starring: Renate Reinsve, Anders Danielsen Lie, Herbert Nordrum
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Runtime: 128 min., Norway
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Language: Norwegian w/ English subtitles
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HARD EIGHT 1996
An auspicious debut that is also somewhat atypical among Anderson’s films due to its relatively small cast and genre trappings, this tight, terse neo-noir introduces the first of the writer-director’s many makeshift families to come: Sydney (Philip Baker Hall), a professional Reno gambler; John (John C. Reilly), a simple, skint “stranger” raising money for his mother’s burial who Sydney decides to mentor; and Clementine (Gwyneth Paltrow), the escort who John falls for, hard. With Samuel L. Jackson as an unwelcome reminder of Sydney’s past, and Philip Seymour Hoffman in an unforgettable cameo (“Shaka lacka doo, shaka lacka doobie doo…”) (Metrograph)
Friday, March 13
Saturday, March 14
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson​
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Starring: Philip Baker Hall, John C. Reilly, Gwyneth Paltrow
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Runtime: 102 min., USA
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Language: English
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THE RIDER 2017
Hamnet director Chloe Zhao’s breakthrough docufiction, shot among the Lakota Sioux residents of South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation, has its nonprofessional rodeo rider cast playing subjects whose lives (and injuries) mirror their own, with Brady Jandreau—who Zhao first encountered shooting her first film, Songs My Brother Taught Me—giving a performance of rare simplicity and veracity as an ex-champ and horse trainer forced to put his days of arena competition behind him following a near-death experience with a bucking horse. A lyrical, compassionate portrait of a tight-knit community depicted with disarming intimacy, and a compelling tale of the struggle between one man’s still-eager mind and compromised body.
Friday, March 20
Sunday, March 22
Director: Chloe Zhao​
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Starring: Brady Jandreau, Tim Jandreau, Cat Clifford​
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Runtime: 103 min., USA
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Language: English
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FRUITVALE STATION 2013
A 22-year-old Bay Area resident who wakes up on New Year’s Eve, 2008, and decides to get a head start on his resolutions: being a better son to his mother, being a better partner to his girlfriend, and being a better father to T, their beautiful 4-year-old daughter. He starts out well, but as the day goes on, realizes that change will not come easy. As Oscar crosses paths with friends, family and strangers, we see that there is much more to him than meets the eye. But it is his final encounter of the day with police officers at the Fruitvale BART station that will shake the Bay Area to its very core, causing the entire nation to witness the story and tragic death of Oscar Grant.
Friday, March 27
Director: Ryan Coogler​
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Starring: Michael B. Jordan, Melonie Diaz, Octavia Spencer​
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Runtime: 82 min., USA
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Language: English
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HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT 2014
A chance encounter with Arielle Holmes, a homeless teenage heroin addict, led to the creation of this bracing verité slice-of-life, based on Holmes’s self-penned unpublished memoir recalling a mutually destructive relationship, and starring Holmes herself opposite Caleb Landry Jones, who plays her partner/obsession/nemesis with frightful youthful malevolence. The Safdies evoke the spirit of an earlier era of run-and-gun independent New York filmmaking, but their urgent, often abrasive film is distinctly contemporary, immersed in the lives of the social outcasts who manage to just barely eke out an existence in a sanitized, uncaring post-Bloomberg city.
Sunday, March 29
Director: Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie​
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Starring: Arielle Holmes, Caleb Landry Jones, ​
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Runtime: 97 min., USA
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Language: English
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