After 30 years and 10 features that have put him near the apex of American cinema, the director Paul Thomas Anderson finally broke through with Academy voters with “One Battle After Another,” his shaggy political thriller about a long-in-the-tooth revolutionary (Leonardo DiCaprio) called back into action after raising his teenage daughter (Chase Infiniti) in hiding. In addition to best picture, Anderson picked up awards for his direction and adapted screenplay, and the film also took home the inaugural prize for casting, for editing and for Sean Penn’s supporting performance as a military man with primal urges.
“One Battle After Another” and the night’s other big winner for Warner Brothers, Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners,” are both streaming on HBO Max and available to rent on other major platforms, along with most of the other winners, with only a couple of exceptions. The James Cameron adventure epic “Avatar: Fire and Ash” is still in theaters only, and the animated short winner, the French Canadian stop-motion gem “The Girl Who Cried Pearls,” isn’t yet streaming in the United States. (All 15 of the Oscar-nominated shorts, however, are currently circulating in anthology programs around the country.)
‘One Battle After Another’
Won for: Best picture, director, supporting actor, adapted screenplay, film editing, casting.
How to watch: Stream it on HBO Max. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Fandango at Home, Google Play and YouTube.
From its opening siege on a detention center at the United States-Mexico border, led by a leftist revolutionary group that calls itself the French 75, Paul Thomas Anderson’s rousing combination of political thriller, shaggy-dog comedy and large-format action spectacle feels uncannily like a movie of the moment. Loosely adapting Thomas Pynchon’s “Vineland,” Anderson casts Leonardo DiCaprio as a former French 75 munitions expert who’s been living on the lam and raising his daughter (Chase Infiniti) for the past 16 years. When a renewed push by the authorities arouses him from his stupor, “One Battle After Another” sends him on an odyssey through the underground, as a network of sympathetic operatives, like a karate sensei/community leader (Benicio Del Toro), shield him from an obsessed colonel (Sean Penn) and a shadowy right-wing organization.
‘Sinners’
Won for: Best actor, original screenplay, cinematography, score.
How to watch: Stream it on HBO Max and Amazon Prime Video. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Fandango at Home, Google Play and YouTube.
Having established himself as a Hollywood craftsman of the first order with hits like “Black Panther” and “Creed,” the writer-director Ryan Coogler combines his keen commercial instincts with a startlingly audacious treatment of racism and cultural appropriation in America. Before busting out into a no-holds-barred horror film about vampires laying siege on a juke joint, “Sinners” patiently evokes life in the Jim Crow south, as the Smoke Stack Twins (both played by Michael B. Jordan) return to their Mississippi hometown in 1932 after a lucrative stint working for the mob in Chicago. Recruiting from the local community, the twins invest their money and muscle into converting an abandoned sawmill into a lively road house, but their grand opening is disrupted by creatures of the night.
‘Hamnet’
Won for: Best actress.
How to watch: Stream it on Peacock. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Fandango at Home, Google Play and YouTube.
With her 2020 novel “Hamnet,” Maggie O’Farrell sketched in a crucial piece of William Shakespeare’s biography by writing about his wife and the death of their 11-year-old son, which would inform perhaps the greatest play ever written. As with previous films like “Nomadland” and “The Rider,” the director Chloé Zhao draws on the natural world to help define her lead character, who isn’t Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) but his wife, Agnes (Jessie Buckley). Agnes’s connection to the woods and pagan practices makes her a seemingly odd fit for a sophisticated playwright. Yet “Hamnet” makes sense of their relationship and registers the devastating fallout of the illness that seizes their son, which inspires the tragedy that bears his name. Anchored by Buckley’s emotionally raw performance, the film understands the play through a fresh, powerful vantage.
‘Weapons’
Won for: Best supporting actress.
How to watch: Stream it on HBO Max. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Fandango at Home, Google Play and YouTube.
The writer-director Zach Cregger’s first feature, the sleeper hit “Barbarian,” revealed the grim secrets of a double-booked Airbnb. His follow-up turns on an even juicier hook: In the middle of the night, all but one student from the same elementary classroom disappear simultaneously, leaving the townspeople grief-stricken, puzzled and looking for answers. Suspicion naturally falls on the kids’ teacher (Julia Garner), who’s relatively new to the position, but the truth is far stranger and gnarlier than anyone could guess, bringing new characters like Amy Madigan’s blissfully deranged Aunt Gladys into the mix. As with “Barbarian,” Cregger loves to pull the rug out from under the audience, and his overlapping time structure gives him the opportunity to view key events from a range of perspectives. Plus, for a horror film, there’s a notable abundance of big laughs.
‘Sentimental Value’
Won for: Best international feature.
How to watch: Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Fandango at Home, Google Play and YouTube.
Continuing a run of literate, keenly observed dramas like “The Worst Person in the World” and “Oslo, August 31st,” the Norwegian director Joachim Trier gathers an exceptional ensemble cast for this story of a family whose long-simmering dysfunction gets processed into art. Stellan Skarsgard stars as the chief instigator, a notable filmmaker who resurfaces in the lives of his estranged daughters, one an actress (Renate Reinsve) with crippling stage fright and the other a historian (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) with a more stable home life. When Skarsgard arrives with a new personal project, he’s forced to cast an American star (Elle Fanning) in a role he’d written for his actress daughter, but that doesn’t prevent old resentments and recriminations from bursting to the surface.
‘KPop Demon Hunters’
Won for: Best animated feature, original song.
How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.
With a title that sounds like high-concept refrigerator magnet poetry, “KPop Demon Hunters” brazenly fuses the fizzy, colorful, ascendant teen subculture from South Korea with a supernatural adventure that would be right at home on Crunchyroll. Yet the mash-up proves irresistible, gaining boundless energy from a soundtrack loaded with arena-friendly bangers, including the chart-topping (and Grammy and Oscar-winning) “Golden” alongside other radio singles like “Takedown” and “How It’s Done.” When they’re not performing in front of a sea of fans, the members of a popular girl-group trio have a secret obligation to protect the populace from demons. Yet their latest target, a rival five-member boy band, is complicated by a romantic entanglement that threatens to undermine the mission.
‘Frankenstein’
Won for: Best production design, costume design, makeup and hairstyling.
How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.
In an almost inevitable addition to a career full of lush period fantasies like “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “The Shape of Water,” the director Guillermo del Toro’s sumptuous adaptation of the Mary Shelley novel emphasizes gothic atmosphere and the all-encompassing price of hubris. Hewing closely to the book, “Frankenstein” carefully details the events that lead Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Issac), the wayward son of a renowned doctor, to assume the godlike role of creating new life out of reanimated flesh. But the film gains in power once the Creature finally emerges from the laboratory and Jacob Elordi leverages his size and sensitivity into a performance that brings a tragic dimension to the classic monster.
‘F1’
Won for: Best sound.
How to watch: Stream it on Apple TV. Buy it on Amazon, Fandango at Home, Google Play and YouTube.
True to a racing circuit known for its high-tech sleekness, ruthless efficiency and conspicuous wealth, “F1” is an impeccably machine-tooled blockbuster that’s faithful to the team dynamics and technical language of Formula One while customizing itself around Brad Pitt’s lead performance. In a young guy’s sport, the idea of a middle-aged driver returning to F1 after a 30-year absence seems absurd, but Pitt’s preternatural confidence allows him to play a brush hotshot and a seasoned mentor all rolled into one. The racing sequences are the film’s true star, however, and the director Joseph Kosinski captures the incremental grind of the F1 season, when cumulative success only arrives after small improvements and painful stretches of trial and error.
‘Mr. Nobody Against Putin’
Won for: Best documentary.
How to watch: Stream it on Kino Film Collection. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV and Fandango at Home.
The “Mr. Nobody” of this documentary is Pavel Talankin, a bespectacled young primary schoolteacher in Karabash, Russia whose job as a classroom videographer grew significantly more complicated after the country invaded Ukraine in 2022. As part of an effort to squash dissent and ramp up support, the government required schools to push a patriotic, pro-war curriculum and use video to demonstrate that they were in compliance. Among Talankin’s many small acts of resistance was to make his own documentary on the fly about government oppression and reach out to an American director in Denmark, David Borenstein, to assemble what becomes “Mr. Nobody Against Putin.” Though the tone is surprisingly whimsical at times — Talankin is quite a character — the film underscores the dangers of submitting to an authoritarian regime.
‘Two People Exchanging Saliva’
Won for: Best live action short (tie).
How to watch: Stream it on YouTube.
This eerie, luminous black-and-white science-fiction short takes place in a dystopian future in which kissing is punishable by death but romantic desire isn’t so easy to suppress, even with the requisite sticks of garlic gum. Currency in this world is similarly peculiar and harsh, with payments coming in the form of firm slaps to the face, which explains the bruises that darken the visages of customers at a high-end department store. Yet an unlikely connection develops between Malaise (Luàna Barjami), a lowly clerk in her twenties, and an elegant middle-age client (Zar Amir Ebrahimi) who has just subjected herself to 31 slaps for a luxury gown. While “Two People Exchanging Saliva” plays off the darkly comic absurdity of its premise, its sentiments about the power of love are touchingly sincere.
‘The Singers’
Won for: Best live action short (tie).
How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.
Inspired by an Ivan Turgenev story, Sam A. Davis’s compact, evocative 18-minute short takes place entirely in a dive bar that seems to exist on its own spectral plane, like some ghostly working-class hub of unspecific origin. It’s here that a collection of roughnecks appear to be drinking their sorrows away silently, at least until they decide to bet each other on an improvised sing-off. As it happens, these men are all of fine voice and the songs they choose are surprisingly rangy a cappella numbers, with occasional piano accompaniment. Davis shot “The Singers” himself in 35 mm and the film’s primary pleasure, apart from the soundtrack, is the amount of attention he pays to its boozy, soul-rending ambience.
‘All the Empty Rooms’
Won for: Best documentary short.
How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.
Over a seven-year period, Steve Hartman, a broadcast journalist known for human interest stories, brought his cameraman, Lou Bopp, along on a special project to photograph the rooms of children killed in school shootings. The idea was to remember the victims as specific, precious individuals and keep the public from feeling too numbed by this nationwide epidemic of violence. “All the Empty Rooms” samples a few visits toward the end of the tour and reveals how much these well-preserved spaces tell us about the kids who once occupied them. It is a shattering experience to be sure, but also a humane acknowledgment of the lives we’ve lost and continue to lose.
The post Where to Stream the 2026 Oscar Winners, From ‘One Battle After Another’ to ‘Sinners’ appeared first on New York Times.
