10th Annual Friendly Film Fan Awards

The Friendly Film Fan Unveils Our Winning Picks
​

​Well, the time is finally here for the biggest awards event in movies! Back in February, we unveiled our nominations for the best and brightest work in the cinematic world of 2025, and now the time has finally come to reveal which films rose to the top of the pack. Some of these winners were relatively easy choices, and some we genuinely deliberated on right up to the last possible minute. It’s been a long road through this awards season and we still have two days to go after this, so let’s not waste any time waxing poetic about the state of the movie industry or recapping the whole year right up top (we can do that tomorrow). Here are your 10th Annual Friendly Film Fan Award Winners!

​BEST SOUND DESIGN

• Avatar: Fire and Ash
• F1 – WINNER
• Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
• One Battle after Another
• Sinners

 
When it came to pure sound design, there were a great number of films that pulled off impressive work, but none immersed us in its world quite like the hyper-specific soundscapes of F1 racing. Sure, it may be the most obvious pick of the bunch, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a worthy winner, and sitting in a theater watching fast cars pull off incredible speed was neck and neck with listening to it happen. Congratulations, F1, on winning the first award of the night!

​BEST VISUAL EFFECTS

• Avatar: Fire and Ash – WINNER
• F1
• The Lost Bus
• Sinners
• Superman

 
There really was no other option to choose here, despite the slate of worthy candidates. James Cameron’s Avatar films are simply operating at a stratospheric level above everything with which they find themselves in competition, and Fire and Ash – despite being shot at the same time as the franchise’s previous entrant – somehow sees the series looking the absolute best it ever has. There simply is no one doing it like the Avatar VFX team, and they will deserve their flowers every single time one of their movies comes out.

​BEST SCREENPLAY

• Jafar Panahi, It Was Just an Accident – WINNER
• Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle after Another
• Eskil Vogt and Joachim Trier, Sentimental Value
• Ryan Coogler, Sinners
• Eva Victor, Sorry, Baby

 
When considering what to award Best Screenplay, the debate resulted in one of the tightest races we had to engage with. Ultimately, however, we landed on the idea of a film’s script as its starring quality, the one thing it does better than anything else, and that led us to Jafar Panahi’s inspired work on It Was Just an Accident. The film is often darkly funny, thrilling, tense, and telling a much deeper story in as accessible a way as Panahi has ever told it, and we’re proud to hand this award to him tonight; we’re sure he considers it the highest honor in film awards he could receive.

​BEST SCORE

• Max Ricther, Hamnet
• Daniel Lopatin, Marty Supreme
• Jonny Greenwood, One Battle after Another
• M83, Resurrection
• Ludwig Göransson, Sinners – WINNER

 
There was so much great music this past year from so many different films, we couldn’t even fit everything we wanted to mention into the nominations, but there was one film whose score was so central to its identity that its shadow covered everything within it, and that was Ludwig Göransson’s masterfully blues-infused score for Sinners. We may genuinely need to consider Göransson as one of the great musical geniuses not just in filmmaking, but in the world at large; each and every one of his scores seems to top the previous one, and Sinners is one of his most enjoyable works to listen to over and over and over again. Without question, it is the score we’ve listened to the most all year long.

​BEST CHARACTER DESIGN

• Avatar: Fire and Ash
• Hamnet
• Frankenstein
• One Battle after Another
• Sinners – WINNER

 
When it comes to character design, it’s easy to go for the fanciest competitor, but for our money, the costumes, makeup, and hairstyling of Ryan Coogler’s Sinners does more to enhance its storytelling than anything else we nominated here. Smoke and Stack aren’t just easily identifiable because of Michael B. Jordan’s great dual performance; each also has colors associated with their looks that appear in almost every costume they wear, and to think these were mostly recycled pieces from the tragically-cancelled Blade film! It also shouldn’t be slept on that the makeup work in Sinners gets more impressive the more one watches it, with the vampire transformations looking as genuine as the ways in which each character’s hairstyling speaks to their inner lives. Spoiler alert: this won’t be the last award Sinners wins tonight!

​BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN

• Dylan Cole and Ben Procter, Avatar: Fire and Ash
• Tamara Deverell, Frankenstein
• Qiang Liu, Resurrection
• Jørgen Stangebye Larsen, Sentimental Value
• Hannah Beachler, Sinners – WINNER

 
Production design doesn’t just mean fancy sets and ornate set decoration (though those things are also important); it’s the act of immersing us into a world through the design of its totality, from the character work to yes, the sets, to concepts of the world the characters occupy, and to us, there’s no better example of that than the ways in which Sinners immerses the viewer in the world of the deep south of Mississippi during the Jim Crow era. The church at the film’s start, the train station, the juke joint, the car, the guitar, and Pearline’s at the film’s finale are all distinct ideas rendered beautifully as physical sets, while the concepts for each character and how they move through the world fit like a glove within them. Congratulations, Sinners, on your third straight win in a row tonight!

​BEST FILM EDITING

• Amir Etminan, It Was Just an Accident
• Ronald Bronstein and Josh Safdie, Marty Supreme
• Andy Jurgensen, One Battle after Another – WINNER
• Viridiana Lieberman, The Perfect Neighbor
• Michael P. Shawver, Sinners

 
Film editing is like stitching clothes together: if you can see the seams, it better be part of the design, but if you can’t, that might just be even better. One Battle after Another – which runs a full 2 hours and 40 minutes – is a seamless film, never slowing down for a second once the ball gets rolling, and managing to make single 40-minute stretch of film (from the attack on Bob’s home to his eventual fall off the roof) feel like 5-10 minutes at most. To make something like that happen is a minor miracle, but to pull it off as well as Andy Jurgensen does is as astonishing feat worthy of recognition. Even the car chase at the end of the film is a testament to how brilliantly edited the whole thing is, and we couldn’t be prouder to hand this award to Andy Jurgensen for his astonishing work.

​BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

• Kim Woo-hyung, No Other Choice
• Michael Bauman, One Battle after Another
• Jingsong Dong, Resurrection – WINNER
• Autumn Durald Arkapaw, Sinners
• Adolpho Veloso, Train Dreams

 
Cinematography isn’t just what the frames of a film look like or even how a camera moves, though those things are no less important; it’s also how the frame is lit, what’s in it, how it’s captured, by what sort of lens. Ultimately the question is: what do the images make you feel? And if you were one of the lucky few that got to experience Resurrection in a movie theater, there is only one answer to that question: awe. How Jingsong Dong captures the five different stories Resurrection tells is nothing short of a miracle, and every frame is dripping with sumptuous color and life, so much so one may not notice the entire fifth chapter being entirely one shot (albeit with some hidden cuts, most likely). It is easily the most stunning-looking film from 2025; we cast shame on the Academy for leaving it out of the nominations entirely, but here at The Friendly Film Fan Awards, the ultimate justice has been served.

​BEST STUNT ENSEMBLE

• Avatar: Fire and Ash
• F1 – WINNER
• One Battle after Another
• Predator: Badlands
• Superman

 
Stunt work is an art form as worthy of an Oscar (or a FFF Award) as any other, and thank god the Academy finally came to their senses and announced they would be offering the category for the 100th Oscars two years from now; for now, however, the buck stops here for stunt work, and we were incredibly impressed with how the stunt teams behind F1 blended into all the action within it without skipping a beat. An F1 car is one of the world’s most deadly machines in terms of learning difficulty in transportation, and these stunt people genuinely put their lives on the line to make movie magic happen. Congratulations to F1!
 
(Full disclosure on this: we forgot to include Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning in our original nominations, so we’re unable to award it here; we’re very sorry, Tom Cruise, but boy, you made that wing-walk look incredible, and we salute you.)

​BEST ACTING ENSEMBLE

• It Was Just an Accident
• Marty Supreme
• One Battle after Another
• Sentimental Value – WINNER
• Sinners

 
When one thinks of an acting ensemble, every performance across the board has to be the absolute best or near-best that everyone in the cast has ever given; every actor must come prepared with their A game, and not a single performance can have even one false note – such is the case with Sentimental Value, a perfectly performed movie with perfectly placed actors doing exactly that level of work from start to finish. The film doesn’t work if we can’t feel the souls of everyone on screen through their expressions or movements, and there’s not a weak link in the bunch. The Oscars may have passed over this film for Best Casting despite their four acting nominations, but we have made room for the whole group here, where it really counts.

​BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

• Elle Fanning, Sentimental Value
• Chase Infiniti, One Battle after Another
• Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Sentimental Value – WINNER
• Wunmi Mosaku, Sinners
• Teyana Taylor, One Battle after Another

 
Supporting parts really are the bread and butter of moviemaking. Without them, the leads wouldn’t have anyone to work with or against, and the stories being told can feel isolating and not fleshed-out enough; they’re a crucial piece of a radically difficult filmmaking puzzle, perhaps the most crucial element for enhancing a story’s potential, whether they’re venerated mainstays or brand new discoveries, and there was no brand new discovery more crucial to their film’s success this year than Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas in Sentimental Value. The character of Agnes in the film is the steadfast pillar on which all others lean, and the scene she shares with Renate Reinsve’s Nora at the film’s conclusion is a near-perfect encapsulation of exactly how difficult it can truly be to keep that pillar standing. Lilleaas’ performance under Joachim Trier’s direction is a genuine star-maker as she demonstrates both tremendous resolve and crushing vulnerability; we can’t wait to see what else future collaborations might have in store for her.

​BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

• Jacob Elordi, Frankenstein
• Delroy Lindo, Sinners
• Paul Mescal, Hamnet
• Sean Penn, One Battle after Another – WINNER
• Stellan Skarsgård, Sentimental Value

 
Sometimes all it takes is for a veteran actor to come back in a big way and show everyone how it’s done. Every performance here elevates the material it’s working within, but at the end of the day, Sean Penn in One Battle after Another is just undeniable. The ways in which Penn walks, speaks, moves his face, licks his comb before running it through his awful hair…we’re not sure white supremacists have ever been sent up more than they have by the character of Colonel Steve Lockjaw, and it’s a testament to Penn’s genuine skill in timing that all the comic moments bouncing off of him land just as well as the terrifying ones he brings to bear. Third Oscar or not, he’s won The Friendly Film Fan Award for 2025, and that’s what matters.

​BEST ACTRESS

• Jessie Buckley, Hamnet – WINNER
• Rose Byrne, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
• Renate Reinsve, Sentimental Value
• Emma Stone, Bugonia
• Eva Victor, Sorry, Baby

 
Even more than any other performance category, Best Actress is the one we had the hardest time deliberating on, but ultimately – much like Sean Penn – Jessie Buckley’s sheer power in Hamnet is more than undeniable: it’s impeccable. Buckley’s turn as Agnes is so full of heartbreak, love, fear, elation, confusion, clarity, and everything that comes along with the experience of true grief that one can’t help but fall as in love with her as Paul Mescal’s Shakespeare does, so much so that when the film’s titular character meets his end, her pain becomes ours, her loss becomes ours, and her eventual acceptance becomes ours. To see her so perfectly capture the experience of losing a child without ever having had a child of her own is a remarkable feat, and her inevitable Oscar win is sure to feel almost as good as her Friendly Film Fan Award win here.

​BEST ACTOR

• Timothée Chalamet, Marty Supreme – WINNER
• Leonardo DiCaprio, One Battle after Another
• Joel Edgerton, Train Dreams
• Michael B. Jordan, Sinners
• Wagner Moura, The Secret Agent

 
With so many great lead actor performances to nominate from 2025, it broke our hearts to have to leave Jesse Plemons off the list for his stellar work in Bugonia, but neither could we pass up the opportunity to recognize Joel Edgerton’s soulful career-best performance in Train Dreams. Michael B. Jordan showed new range playing distinct yet unquestionable twins in Sinners, and Wagner Moura’s quiet journey through memory is as difficult a performance to pull off as any. And yet, when all is said and done, no lead performance this year quite blew us away like that of Timothée Chalamet in Marty Supreme. Chalamet is electric in the film, simultaneously pissing off his audience and getting them to root for his character the next minute just so we can see what he’ll get up to. Every minute spent with Marty Mauser is one in which we somehow believe that he’ll accomplish his ultimate goal whilst watching him make every wrong decision along the way to it, and how it all leads to the finale is a sight to behold. But it’s in the film’s final moments when Chalamet finally breaks down that we see what his break-neck performance style was covering up the whole time, and no one has pulled that kind of switch in styles better in any film from last year. So congratulations to Timothée Chalamet for this award; we look forward to calling you one of the all-time greats someday.

​BEST DIRECTOR

• Josh Safdie, Marty Supreme
• Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle after Another
• Bi Gan, Resurrection – WINNER
• Joachim Trier, Sentimental Value
• Ryan Coogler, Sinners

 
Directing can take a lot of different forms; sometimes it’s about how to position nuanced characters around each other as they attempt to reckon with past trauma, sometimes it’s about balancing what forms revolution can take and matching those forms with the characters best suited to them, sometimes it’s about what it means to choose your own path in life and the sacrifices one has to make to preserve that path, and sometimes it’s about creating and executing a vision so singular that no one else could ever possibly attempt to replicate it. Bi Gan’s direction of Resurrection has to be seen to be believed; somehow the film is both in its infancy and fully formed all at once, a stunning monument to dreams and the ways in which cinema realizes them that feels like the work of an old master finally come to fruition. To create and then execute on a film like this – one you can feel in the bone marrow will become one of international cinema’s great works – takes a rare set of talents, and the whole thing could easily fall apart in another director’s hands. We’re also big fans of future Oscar winner Paul Thomas Anderson and his stellar work on One Battle after Another, but for our money, Bo Gan somehow managed to thread the needle between creating an instant classic and nailing a future standard-bearer better than we’ve ever seen it done, and for that, he received the Friendly Film Fan Award for Best Director.

​And now, it’s all come down to this: cinema’s most prestigious award. It’s been a long road getting here, and we’re sure all the nominees are anxious to find out the final results, so let’s not waste anymore time. The winner of the 2025 Friendly Film Fan Award for Best Picture is… 

​BEST PICTURE

• Bugonia
• Hamnet
• It Was Just an Accident
• Marty Supreme
• No Other Choice
• One Battle after Another – WINNER
• Resurrection
• Sentimental Value
• Sinners
• Train Dreams

 
For the year of 2025, there were a few films that managed to define the cinematic calendar, but for us, none of them quite nailed the timeliness of their arrival quite like Paul Thomas Anderson’s revolutionary epic, One Battle after Another. PTA took his larger budget for this film and fulfilled every promise he made with it, from crafting unforgettable set pieces to writing dynamic characters with nuance and flaw to bringing to life a story of revolution in the modern age while reckoning with the idea that while we may have collectively failed in our mission to better the world, those generations who come after us may be the ones in whom we can have hope. In a sea of great works from 2025, to us, this was the movie of 2025. And that’s why we’re awarding it Best Picture at the 10th Annual Friendly Film Fan Awards. 

And those are your winners for the 10th Annual Friendly Film Fan Awards! What do you think of these winners? Any you’re surprised by? Let us know in the comments section below, and thanks for reading! Next up: our FINAL predictions for the 2026 Academy Awards. Stay tuned!
 
- The Friendly Film Fan