"One Battle After Another" leads the SAG Actor Award Nominations

by Eric Blume

Going lead was a risky move for Chase Infiniti, but it's paying off.

SAG Award nominations (for the newly-rebranded “The Actor Awards”…oy vey) were announced today. As usual, they are pretty lame.

The key thing to remember here is that the voting body for the SAG Awards consists of about 160,000 members. This number includes a large number of people who, for example, might have stood in the background of an insurance company commercial, or did a promo spot for a dishwater detergent brand. So, let’s just say these are not the most… discerning… group of people, if you know what I’m saying. And while there is some crossover between SAG Award voters and Oscar voters, it's not as big as you might think...

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Split Decisions at the Critics Choice Awards

by Nathaniel R

ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER takes Best Picture. It's finally Paul Thomas Anderson's trophy time.

While Sinners led the nominations by a comfortable margin there wasn't a clear "favourite" to emerge at the the Critics Choice Awards this past Sunday night. Three films dominated with One Battle After Another taking Picture, Director and Adapted Screenplay, Sinners winning Original Screenplay, Young Actor, Casting, and Score, and Frankenstein taking Supporting Actor (Jacob Elordi), Costume Design, Production Design, and Hair and Makeup. Three to four awards is nothing to complain about but they all lost some key races, too. As we move on to the Golden Globes (Sunday) and the SAG Awards it remains to be seen if any one film will become a threat for a mini-sweep at the Oscars, or if it will be more of a spread the wealth kind of year like this. 

After the jump the full list of winners and a few comments... 

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Best of 2025: Bi Gan dreams the death and “Resurrection” of cinema

by Cláudio Alves

Before dropping my top ten of 2025, sometime near the end of the season, there are a bunch of excellent films that have gone unreviewed at TFE. Let’s fix that…

With Warner Bros. for sale and Netflix as its most likely buyer, cinephiles worldwide are despairing over the future of the theatrical experience. As monopolies keep forming stateside, Hollywood seems bound to reach a breaking point any time soon, and the effects are already being felt beyond borders. And then there’s AI and a rising devaluing of human artistry, the production of content above all else. That said, to speak of the end feels premature, foolish even. Even if the mainstream American movie industry as we know it ceases to be, cinema is bigger than that. Indeed, it’s an art form still in its infancy, still transforming and coming into itself. If death is coming, it manifests as transformation and, in metamorphosis, there’s longevity that beckons hope. So, stop doomscrolling and hold tight to what you love, be it the medium itself or the communion of sitting in a dark room with others, facing the collective dream projected on a bright wall.

There’s a way to accept the pain of change without giving in to despair, to believe, to honor, to delight in the miracle of the moving image without falling into grief. Chinese wunderkind Bi Gan's latest, Resurrection, embodies such notions in ways few films have done. As it regards the past, it speaks to the present and the mystery of a future none of us can yet grasp. With equal parts adoration and sorrow, intellect and earnestness, sadness and a strange strain of fatalistic optimism, this multi-chaptered odyssey through the human senses whispers and screams: Cinema is dead. Long live cinema…

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AFI 100 Years… 100 Movies: An Overdue Update

by Juan Carlos Ojano

CITIZEN KANE (1941) was the top-placer in both editions.

I ended my 2025 by watching the remaining films from the AFI 100 Years… 100 Movies, both from the 1997 and the 2007 editions. From the egregiously racist The Birth of a Nation (1915) to the broodingly dark Blade Runner (1982), it was fulfilling to finally finish these films, an endeavor that I started back when I was in high school and just finished now in my 30s.

So this reminded me that AFI was supposed to do the 100 Movies list every ten years, but they only revisited it once, with 2017 marking its supposed update but crickets from the institute. While it is probably a longshot, 2027 marks another chance for the AFI to release an updated version of the list. For the 2007 version, the most recent films they considered were three films from 2005: Brokeback Mountain, Crash, and Good Night, and Good Luck.

 So with 2025 now over, let’s do an exercise: which films from 2006 to 2025 would most likely be considered to be added to an updated list should it happen soon? Let’s go…

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Happy New Year - May 2026 *Not* Be A Disaster!

If you were CINEMA itself, what would your New Year's Resolutions be?

Can't wait to hear your answers...