Here's my (mostly) annual blog assessing the Academy Award-nominated films based on previous source material.
Often a theme emerges throughout the films, and this year it’s clearly the grieving process.
(See also FTP's short YouTube series Grace in Grief: Hope After Loss.)
Asian on my mother’s side, I also appreciated stories from Korean and Japanese cultures, in particular the Korean-inspired original animated film KPop: Demon Hunters. See blog on that movie here.
And now for this year's films that began life in another form (including ones that are film sequels) ...
NOTE TO PARENTS: These films represent the votes of Academy members and cover a wide swath of genres and intended audiences. Their inclusion here is not an endorsement of them as family-friendly films.
For this dark, sci-fi comedy, Yorgos Lanthimos remakes the South Korean film Save the Green Planet! Jesse Plemons plays a conspiracy theorist who captures a CEO of a tech company (Emma Stone) thinking she’s an alien disguised as a human.
The comedy is easier to pick up on than in the Korean version, as is the case of many English-language adaptations of foreign comedies.
Guillermo del Toro helms a unique take of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. He essentially asks the question, can the monster created by Dr. Frankenstein, a godless killing machine who never had a coming-of-age and human formation, eventually be redeemed?
Del Toro ends his movie with a hopeful notion, but puzzlingly excises the part from the book that provides for the redemption: the monster gains intelligence through introspection, thus moving toward remorse.
Director Chloe Zhao remains the most faithful to the source material of all the nominees.
The movie considers grief. For some, grief can be overcome organically by the nature of their profession as Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) composes Hamlet. His wife, played by Jessie Buckley, takes a longer and unexpected road to acceptance.
I wrote more about the concluding sequence in the Old Globe Theater, also depicted in the Maggie O’Farrell novel here.
The film tones down the vulgarity from the rather forgettable Thomas Pynchon novel, Vineland.
I was pleasantly surprised with the Paul Thomas Anderson adaptation. Playing against type, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Bob raises his daughter, Willa (Chase Infinity) many years after giving up his domestic-terrorism ways.
The story shows the need for peaceful protesting, but exposes the futility of violence when protesting escalates.
This drama premiered at Sundance last year, and I read the Denis Johnson novella on the plane ride to Park City, Utah. Clint Bentley tells the story of a logger (Joel Edgerton) dealing with the death of his wife and child in a forest fire.
Begged to be seen on the big screen, the beauty and brutality of nature are both achieved through the panoramic cinematography.
This musical drama began as a documentary written and directed by Greg Kohls. Mike (Hugh Jackman) and Claire Sardina (Oscar nominee, Kate Hudson) headline a Neil Diamond tribute band called Lighting and Thunder.
Life on the road is difficult. Life on the road with one’s professional partner and spouse is another level of difficulty.
The film portrays the honesty of the joys and sorrows of marriage, making it one of the better family films of 2025 (it gets its PG-13 for thematic material, some strong language, some sexual material, and brief drug use).
I might be one of the last die-hard fans of James Cameron’s Avatar series. I found this third offering the most nuanced of the trilogy.
Whereas the previous two films depicted humans as bad and the Naavi as good, the characterization grows more complex in this most recent film.
There is considerably more religious imagery and an allusion to the life beyond in the concluding scene.
I always try to cull something positive out of the adaptations I analyze, but there wasn’t much that stood out from this nth version of Jurassic. Subtitled “rebirth” the series might contemplate, rather, a temporary extinction until better ideas come along.
Matthew McConaugley plays real-life bus driver, Kevin McKay, who's looking for a direction in his life. The 2018 wildfire in the small California town of Paradise pushes him along this path, figuratively and literally.
Paul Greengrass’ realistic, documentary style is perfectly suited to this type of filmmaking.
The treacherous drive out of the middle of the fire recounted exactly how I’d imagined it from the Lizzie Johnson book. It was truly a “how did they do it” moment, in terms of the visual effects of the culminating scene.
Rated R primarily for language, it also has harrowing, intense scenes. Editor Kate O'Hare and I wrote about it in detail here.
This Danish film stands as the most original of the adaptations. Inspired by the Brothers Grimm tale Cinderella, this is not a sanitized Disney version.
Instead, it's a black comedy, a body-horror show that somehow respects the roots of these Germanic fairy tales, as consequences await the wayward actions of teens.
No wonder generations of Europeans scared their children into good behavior with these stories.
*The film is European, so it doesn’t come with an MPAA rating. I would say it’s “R” and/or “Mature” rating.
Author Amélie Nothomb brings to life the legend that some Japanese believe children are gods until falling to earth at age three.
The main character, a child named Amélie comes of age in post-WWII Japan. The animation touchingly tells this story from the point-of-view from the innocence of a small child adapting to her family move back to Belgium.
Japanese culture often seems elusive to Westerners, and I think the point made by the author and director is that one needs to experience it unvarnished, at the youngest of ages.
(Another blogger for Family Theater wrote the animated categories, including Zootopia 2, in the previous blog.)
Nominated for best live-action short film, this brisk story comes from the Ivan Turgenev short story of the same name.
Barflies take turns singing a song in competition for a $100 prize offered by the bartender. The little wager becomes a moment for the bartender to externalize the grief of losing his wife.
Image: Adobe Stock
Father Vince Kuna, C.S.C., is a Holy Cross priest and a 2016 graduate of USC's film school. Click here to visit Father Vince Kuna’s IMDB page.
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