Celine Song’s indelible drama takes us through three life chapters and wrecks us in the process

Its warmth makes it an outside bet, but the seriousness the Academy values is here amid the Christmassy redemption, and it has already won many hearts

Bradley Cooper studied conducting for six years to perfect his role as Leonard Bernstein in his extraordinary biopic of the great US composer

Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster hit has become a cultural phenomenon and reignited cinema after the pandemic – it’s also daring, subversive and fun

Jonathan Glazer’s Holocaust drama is a disturbing reminder of how easily evil can surface when humans look the other way

Martin Scorsese has made the ultimate western, showing the racism, greed and corruption on which America was really founded. It’s a world-changing work

This scabrous and risky melodrama, with a magnificent performance by Emma Stone, is an object lesson in real art rising above social media scolding

Justine Triet’s psychothriller was shut out by France’s Oscar committee, but this genre-bending courtroom procedural, marriage drama and whodunnit feels totally new

Jeffrey Wright is in a role of a lifetime as a frustrated Black professor driven to write a cliche-riddled crime saga – and makes universal his struggle to be seen and heard

Christopher Nolan’s biopic is precision tooled to tick all the right boxes – epic scale, lavish spectacle, meticulous craft, plus: explosions! The bookies have it as 1/25 on for a good reason

The director of The Favourite teams up again with the fearless Hollywood star in a funny, filthy and explosively inventive spin on Frankenstein

The film that even Steven Spielberg has called ‘the saviour of cinema’ deserves credit for reviving the industry – but more than that, it’s a genuinely great blockbuster that truly hits deep

Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical ode to film-making is expertly assembled, shrewdly scripted and full of feeling. It deserves a golden statue

Martin McDonagh’s well-crafted tragicomedy says something original about our relationships with ourselves. His characters are outlandish but relatable

Projectile vomiting and exploding toilets aside, Ruben Östlund’s satire about the super-rich is more thoughtful than it initially appears – it’s a film for our times

Gut-churning battlefield realism and the unfamiliar German perspective take this powerful first world war film outside the usual war movie territory

Cate Blanchett is wonderfully commanding as the sociopath musical megastar whose life is crumbling around her but it is the steely menace in Todd Field’s film that is simply delicious

Let’s be real: its nomination for best movie was the win. But Sarah Polley’s film is predicated on action, a #MeToo film that questions with the aim of moving forward

People may sniff, but this was a superbly realised grand spectacle, which has done far more to literally save cinema than any of the other nominees

Baz Luhrmann’s dreamlike, alien biopic takes profound liberties with the truths of Elvis’s life to instead capture his messianic status in American culture