Continuing my personal 2025 Oscar nominations, today I will be writing about the race for Best Director.

Barring a major upset, Paul Thomas Anderson is on his way to winning this award for One Battle After Another, and I couldn’t be happier. His competition is strong — Ryan Coogler (Sinners), Josh Safdie (Marty Supreme), Joachim Trier (Sentimental Value), and Chloe Zhao (Hamnet) — but Anderson has been racking up precursors, including the all-important DGA a couple of weeks back.

Anderson and Coogler would make my personal nominee list for this category, along with three of these directors:

Ari Aster (Eddington)
One thing Sinners and One Battle After Another have in common is a masterful blending of tones, and that’s true of most of these picks as well. It’s certainly true of Aster’s film, which ricochets between dark comedy, thriller, neo-Western, and horror. He does all of that while creating an eerily familiar tableau of America in 2020, something nobody else has dared attempt at this scale.

Zach Cregger (Weapons)
With 2022’s Barbarian and now Weapons, Cregger has emerged as a brilliant original cinematic voice. It makes sense that Jordan Peele was furious after losing a bidding war to produce this film — Cregger is his mirror image, having moved from sketch comedy to rich, twisty, allegorical horror. Every shot of this film is carefully calibrated to deliver maximum thrills, gasps, and laughs.

Richard Linklater (Nouvelle Vague)
Linklater deserves recognition for delivering two entirely different movies in the same year. First came Blue Moon, a cozy chamber piece imagining a night in the life of lyricist Lorenz Hart. A few weeks later it was Nouvelle Vague, a love letter to the French New Wave, specifically Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. He meticulously recreates the time and place, portraying a laundry list of the movement’s important figures and crafting his film in a similar style without sacrificing his own auteur’s stamp.

Kleber Mendonça Filho (The Secret Agent)
This is the only film I’ve seen by Mendonça Filho, who started his career as a movie critic before moving behind the camera. I can’t wait to track down his first three movies after being blown away by The Secret Agent. He somehow crafted a political thriller that feels just as much like a laid-back hangout movie. It evokes 1970s Brazil (familiar from his own childhood) with such specificity and warmth it feels like a magic trick.

Park Chan-wook (No Other Choice)
Nobody cleared out the director’s tool bag last year as thoroughly or with as much giddiness as Park. His shot composition, camera movement, and ingenious transitions are a visual feast. He also knows how to squeeze a laugh out of the most insane scenarios, and how to make the audience complicit every step of the way. Park has frequently been compared to Hitchcock, and that Hitchcockian formal daring, obsessive kink, and dark sense of humor is on full display here.