Five Films, Five Worlds at the Oscars

The Academy’s Best International Feature Film lineup for the 98th Oscars is the kind of slate that reminds you why this category is often the most thrilling part of awards season. Announced on January 22, 2026, the five nominees are The Secret Agent (Brazil), It Was Just an Accident (France), Sentimental Value (Norway), Sirât (Spain), and The Voice of Hind Rajab (Tunisia), selected from a 15-film shortlist.

And honestly, if there is a year where predicting a winner feels almost pointless, it is this one.

Every film here carries the weight of a filmmaker with something urgent to say, and each time I watched one, I walked out convinced I had just seen the inevitable frontrunner. Then I’d see the next nominee, and suddenly my certainty would collapse. That is not confusion, that is the rare luxury of a category where excellence is not an exception, it is the baseline.

Another headline worth mentioning: NEON’s absolute chokehold on this race. Four of the five nominees come from the same distributor, and it is not subtle. This is what a studio looks like when it understands international cinema not as an afterthought, but as an awards-season battleground.

What makes the lineup even stronger is how much it overlaps with the Academy’s major categories. The Secret Agent and Sentimental Value didn’t just show up here, they broke through elsewhere, while It Was Just an Accident earned a well-deserved Best Original Screenplay nomination, and Sirât made serious noise in Best Sound. These aren’t “international picks.” These are heavyweights.

And yes, Cannes once again leaves its fingerprints all over the final five: Panahi’s Palme d’Or-winning moral grenade, Trier’s aching family excavation, Mendonça Filho’s political fever dream, and Laxe’s hypnotic desert descent. Cannes doesn’t always predict the Oscars, but this year it practically curated the conversation.

What excites me most, though, is that none of these films feel manufactured for prestige. They are raw, specific, deeply personal, and fearless in their craft. Each one builds its own language, its own atmosphere, its own emotional gravity. These are films that do not simply play in theaters, they linger there, long after the lights come up.

Here is how these five films stack up, not as competitors, but as reminders of why international cinema continues to be the Academy’s most exciting category.

It Was Just an Accident (France)
Written & Directed by Jafar Panahi

Jafar Panahi Turns Trauma Into Defiance

Some films rattle you with their artistry. Others shake you because of what they stand for. Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident somehow does both at once, delivering one of the most blistering, humane, and darkly funny films of the year.

The film arrives with the weight of history behind it. Panahi has once again pulled art out of the jaws of repression. His own story is etched into the bones of this project, shaped by years of imprisonment, blindfolded interrogations, solitary confinement, and later confinement alongside hundreds of other political detainees who argued fiercely about what resistance really meant. Listening became a survival tactic. Deprived of sight, Panahi trained his ears to notice every squeak, shuffle, or breath that might reveal something about those holding him captive.

That heightened awareness of sound, memory, and dread flows directly into this film.

On the surface, It Was Just an Accident plays as a tense moral thriller about a working-class man who believes he has stumbled across someone from his past, someone who may have inflicted irreversible harm. But Panahi has no interest in the surface alone. What begins as a story that looks like revenge soon spirals into something thornier, funnier, and far more unsettling.

The question is not simply whether revenge is possible. The question is whether it is even desirable. Can pain ever truly be buried. And if you try, who else gets buried with it.

What struck me most is how effortlessly the film blends dark comedy with dread. There are moments of absurd humor that make you laugh, then immediately regret laughing. That tonal balancing act is vintage Panahi. Laughter becomes silence. Silence becomes anxiety. Anxiety becomes rage. It is the lived comedy of a filmmaker who has been punished for creating art, yet refuses to stop creating.

And still, despite the anger running through it, the film never becomes a bleak slog. Panahi’s humanism remains intact. His characters argue, joke, hesitate, doubt, and stumble through impossible choices. Their messiness is what makes them feel real.

The ensemble cast deserves serious praise. There is a lived-in quality to their performances that makes you forget you are watching actors. Panahi’s use of non-professionals, paired with a single professional lead, creates a dynamic that feels unpredictable but grounded. Their conversations carry the looseness of improvisation, but the precision of lived truth.

From a craft standpoint, this is Panahi at his sharpest. The cinematography is deceptively simple, relying on long takes and wide frames that force the audience to sit with discomfort rather than escape it. Sound plays an equally vital role. Footsteps, shuffles, even the squeak of a prosthetic leg becomes an auditory ghost of memory.

One of the boldest choices Panahi makes is how he leans into ambiguity. He does not spoon-feed answers. He does not offer clean catharsis. Instead, he forces you to wrestle with questions of justice and complicity in a world where justice rarely exists.

By the final stretch, the film builds to a crescendo that left me breathless. Without revealing anything major, I will just say the last twenty minutes are among the most powerful I have seen in years. Panahi refuses neat conclusions, choosing instead to leave you with questions that echo.

It Was Just an Accident is tense, morally tangled, emotionally devastating, and somehow still alive with humor and tenderness. It is not just one of the best films of the year. It is one of the most necessary. Panahi does not just make films. He reminds us why films matter.

Sentimental Value (Norway)

Directed by Joachim Trier
Written by Joachim Trier & Eskil Vogt

When Art Becomes the Only Language Left Between a Family

Joachim Trier reunites with Renate Reinsve, and also brings Anders Danielsen Lie into the mix, for Sentimental Value, another intimate dramedy from a director who knows how to excavate family pain without turning it into melodrama.

The film revolves around Gustav, a once renowned filmmaker, and his eldest daughter Nora, a talented stage actress. Gustav wants to cast Nora in a new film, but what begins as a creative pitch quickly becomes something else entirely. This project is not just about art. It becomes a form of therapy, a battleground, and a desperate attempt at connection.

From the opening moments, Trier establishes the family home as a living archive. It is a house filled with generational memory, joyful gatherings, and emotional fractures that never fully healed. For Nora and her sister Agnes, the house is both a physical space and a wound. Even a crack in the wall feels symbolic, as if the building itself has absorbed decades of unresolved pain.

One of the film’s greatest strengths is Trier’s ability to capture emotional complexity without announcing it. His framing is elegant and precise. Faces are often separated by windows, by doorways, by light. Static scenes resemble paintings. Characters occupy the same room but live in entirely different emotional realities.

Renate Reinsve is magnificent, as expected. She holds Nora’s emotional weight with restraint, letting anger and longing simmer beneath the surface. She can convey an entire history in a glance. Anders Danielsen Lie, though less central, brings quiet gravity, like someone who knows exactly what has been said and what has been left unsaid for years.

Elle Fanning enters the story as a young Hollywood actress who becomes part of Gustav’s creative orbit, and she brings a surprising tenderness. Her presence is not just a narrative curveball. She becomes a mirror to the family, someone who does not carry their history, yet still gets pulled into the emotional debris.

Trier’s pacing is deliberate, sometimes almost too patient. There are moments where the film drags, and a few subplots feel underdeveloped. I found myself wanting more time with Agnes, whose pain is present but not always explored beyond her connection to Nora and Gustav.

But the film delivers where it matters most. Its final act brings together themes of betrayal, regret, love, and legacy in ways that feel earned. Trier does not aim for easy reconciliation. He allows discomfort to linger. He allows silence to speak.

One of the most haunting sequences involves Agnes researching family history in a library, receiving a folder labelled disturbing. It is not a shocking moment, but it is one of the most suspenseful scenes in the film because it captures the dread of uncovering what was deliberately buried.

Sentimental Value is not about filmmaking. It is about inheritance. About what we carry. About what we refuse to say out loud. And about how art sometimes becomes the only language left between people who no longer know how to speak to each other.

It may not hit with the same emotional force as The Worst Person in the World, but it is still deeply humane, beautifully acted, and quietly devastating.

Written & Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho

A Memory That Refuses To Stay Quiet

Kleber Mendonça Filho has always made films that feel like roaming spirits. They wander through rooms, drift down streets, and hover above people as if searching for something only memory can provide.

The Secret Agent feels like a spiritual companion to Neighboring Sounds, yet it stands fully on its own. Set in Recife in 1977, it captures a Brazil caught between joy and fear, humor and repression, community and authoritarian surveillance. The film is long, but it never feels heavy. It breathes. It moves with the rhythm of life.

The story follows Marcelo, played with quiet intensity by Wagner Moura, a technology professor returning to his hometown during Carnaval. But this is not a homecoming filled with nostalgia. Marcelo is trying to escape a violent past in São Paulo and plans a dangerous departure for himself and his young son.

From the opening scene at a gas station, Kleber creates a feeling of hyper reality. Every surface feels tactile. Every sound feels alive. The camera lingers on textures, faces, and street corners like it is recording a city that might disappear tomorrow.

What makes The Secret Agent so compelling is how it refuses to become a conventional thriller. The regime’s presence is everywhere, yet it remains invisible. The tension builds not through plot twists but through atmosphere, through the constant sensation that someone is watching, listening, waiting.

Kleber’s gift has always been patience, and here he refines it further. Scenes stretch with tenderness. Silences breathe. One quiet car scene between Marcelo and his son becomes the emotional anchor of the film, holding affection and fear in the same frame.

The film’s structure also fractures time. Present day scenes interrupt the past, showing young women listening to cassette recordings that connect directly to the events we are witnessing. These jumps feel abrupt, like cracks in memory itself. Voices echo across decades. Cinema becomes the tool that tries to reconstruct what history attempted to erase.

Even the humor carries weight. It does not relieve tension. It coexists with it. Dona Sebastiana, played by Tânia Maria, is a standout presence. Warm, funny, deeply human. Her kindness becomes a reminder that communities survive because of people like her, people who offer refuge even when the world feels dangerous.

The historical recreation is immaculate, but never showy. Kleber finds Brazil not in obvious symbols, but in music floating through windows, in crowded streets, in the pulse of Recife during a time of fear.

The ending may divide audiences, but it fits the film’s logic. The Secret Agent behaves like memory itself, incomplete, fractured, refusing clean closure. It is a political film, a personal film, and above all, a cinematic one. It left me moved, shaken, and grateful.

Directed by Oliver Laxe
Written by Oliver Laxe & Santiago Fillol

Hypnotic Descent Into Noise, Sand, and Moral Confusion

Oliver Laxe’s Sirât is a film I walked into completely blind, and for long stretches of its runtime, it took over my body more than my mind.

The setup is simple. A father and son arrive at a rave in the mountains of Morocco searching for their missing daughter and sister. They decide to follow a group of ravers toward another gathering deeper in the desert. That is the spine of the story, but the film quickly becomes something stranger, more abstract, and at times almost spiritual.

The use of electronic music here is extraordinary. The sound is not background. It is the bloodstream of the film. These characters are people who go into the desert, take drugs, and dance for hours in search of an ecstatic loss of self. Sirât quietly asks what happens if that loss begins to become real.

The night sequences are breathtaking. Trucks moving through darkness feel like submarines sinking into deep water. The desert becomes a battlefield of sound. At moments, the film feels like a trance. It is physical, overwhelming, and hypnotic. If you see this film, it has to be in a theater with serious sound.

But admiration eventually fractures into discomfort.

The film provides almost no meaningful context for the Western Saharan conflict, despite using the region as a setting. That absence feels less like artistic ambiguity and more like a moral void. The desert becomes an aesthetic canvas, a place of danger and mood rather than a lived political reality. It is difficult to ignore how real suffering becomes background texture.

The casting of marginalized and disabled actors is notable and rare, but the film does not always give them depth. At times, they feel like symbols rather than fully realized people, used for impact rather than explored with dignity.

And yet, I cannot dismiss the experience. The craft is undeniable. The sound design is masterful. The dance sequences are electrifying. Some moments hit with unexpected emotional force. The desert has rarely felt so alive on screen.

By the end, Sirât left me conflicted. It is an aesthetic triumph trapped inside a morally confused shell. I respect the ambition. I admire the execution. I question the soul. That might be the most honest reaction the film invites.

Written & Directed by Kaouther Ben Hania

When a Child’s Cry Becomes a Global Indictment

There are films that leave you emotional, and then there are films that leave you changed. Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab belongs to the second category, the kind of cinema that does not simply tell a story, but forces you to bear witness.

Set on January 29, 2024, the film follows the hours after Red Crescent volunteers receive an emergency call from a child trapped in a car under fire in Gaza. A call center in Palestine receives a call from a 6-year-old child trapped in a car constantly strafed by the Israeli army. Her name is Hind Rajab.

Much of the film takes place inside that call center, where volunteers and dispatchers work with limited resources, overloaded lines, and the crushing awareness that time is never on their side. It is an effective chamber drama that makes extensive use of visual projections, including maps, sound, photos, drawings, and location tracking.

These are not stylistic flourishes. They feel like evidence.

The film focuses on problem solving and the inability of people with all the right intentions in the world to cope with hierarchical oppression. Everyone is trying to do the right thing. Everyone is trying to move faster. And the system refuses to cooperate.

Ben Hania makes one devastating choice that changes everything. The phone recordings are authentic. It is the child’s real voice you hear. The film blurs the lines between reality and fiction by also showing videos of the real events. There is no protective distance. No performance to hide behind. The voice is real, trembling, terrified, pleading.

It becomes impossible to separate the film from the reality that created it.

The Voice of Hind Rajab is a critique of the slowness and inefficiency of the system, but above all, and obviously, of the mechanisms put in place by Israel to continue massacring local populations. No amount of bullets should ever be fired at anyone, let alone a car with multiple children.

The 90 minutes are long, not because the film drags, but because the subject matter is crushing. It may be a bit too much in terms of pathos at certain moments, but in all sincerity, it is impossible not to identify with these characters, with their desperation, their frustration, their anger.

This is not an easy watch. It is extreme cinema. But it is necessary cinema.

Despite receiving the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and being met with a record-breaking standing ovation, it was still an absolute fight for the film to find a US distributor. It finally did, and that matters. Because this is the kind of film that reminds you what cinema can do when it stops trying to please and starts trying to document.

The Voice of Hind Rajab does not ask you to watch. It demands that you listen.

Whoever wins Best International Feature Film this year, all I can say is they absolutely deserve this win.

This lineup is not just strong. It is stacked with writer-filmmakers who understand cinema as resistance, as memory, as grief, as survival. From Panahi’s defiant moral thriller to Trier’s intimate family excavation, from Kleber’s haunting political time capsule to Laxe’s sensory descent into desert chaos, to Ben Hania’s devastating act of testimony, every nominee here feels like it is fighting for something bigger than awards.

And maybe that is what makes this category so special. It is where cinema still feels dangerous. Still feels urgent. Still feels alive.

If the Oscars are supposed to celebrate the best of what film can be, then Best International Feature Film is the category that proves the art form is not just surviving. It is evolving, screaming, and refusing to be ignored.