FEATURE STORY
Movies for Grownups
And the 2025 nominees are ...
Top row: Sing Sing Best Actor: Colman Domingo; Shōgun Best TV Series. Bottom row: Thelma Best Actress: June Squibb; A Complete Unknown Best Picture.
THIS WAS A GOOD YEAR for film and TV by and for people over age 50, those we call “grownups.” Nearly half the most recent acting Emmys went to grownups, and there were four times as many grownup Oscar acting nominees this year as there were 30 years ago. It’s apt that the 2025 Movies for Grownups Career Achievement Award goes to the still-in-demand Glenn Close, 77, who will accept the honor at this year’s Movies for Grownups Awards at the Beverly Wilshire, a Four Seasons Hotel, on January 11 (to be televised by Great Performances on February 23, 2025, on PBS). For more on Close, see here. Here are this year’s nominees in the top categories. —Tim Appelo, chief AARP film and television critic
Film Nominations
Best Picture
• Conclave Thrillers don’t come any smarter than Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy screenwriter Peter Straughan’s adaptation of Thomas Harris’ book about a ruthless game of thrones when the Pope dies and the Vatican authorities choose a successor.
• Emilia Pérez A lawyer (Zoe Saldaña) helps a cartel kingpin find a new life, a new name—and a new gender. Critic Bilge Ebiri called it “a cross between Mrs. Doubtfire and Sicario.”
• Gladiator II The sequel to the 2001 best picture Oscar winner features Denzel Washington, 69, as a rich man who supplies gory Roman games with gladiators.
• September 5 Steven Spielberg’s 2005 Munich dramatized the hunt for the terrorists who struck the 1972 Munich Olympics, but this pulse-pounder directed by Tim Fehlbaum puts you in the minds of the ABC Sports crew that had to show it to the world.
• A Complete Unknown Timothée Chalamet plays the young Bob Dylan going electric, in a film that will electrify some fans and outrage others—but once upon a time, he looked so fine, didn’t he?
Best Director
• Jacques Audiard, 72, Emilia Pérez Who else had the audacity to make a musical that’s also a soap opera that’s also a tense crime drama?
• Edward Berger, 54, Conclave The director of the World War I epic All Quiet on the Western Front depicts a more secret battlefield: the inner sanctum of the Vatican.
• Ridley Scott, 87, Gladiator II The four-time Oscar-nominated director of Blade Runner is still slaying the competition in the Colosseum that is Hollywood.
• Pedro Almodóvar, 75, The Room Next Door In the Spanish master’s first feature film in English, old friends (Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, both 64) reunite after one is diagnosed with terminal cancer.
• James Mangold, 60, A Complete Unknown He immortalized Johnny Cash in Walk the Line, and now he has brought back the young Bob Dylan, along with the 1960s folk scene.
Best Actor
• Colman Domingo, 55, Sing Sing Acting opposite actual ex-convicts, Domingo plays a prisoner who joins a theater group that turns troubled lives around through drama.
• Ralph Fiennes, 61, Conclave Fiennes takes us into the soul of a man painfully interrogating his flawed fellow clergymen, and his own faith.
• Daniel Craig, 56, Queer In a psychedelic adaptation of William Burroughs’ autobiographical novel, the James Bond star plays a war vet who whisks his lover from Mexico to South America in search of a magic tea to enable him to read the guy’s mind and see if he cares about him.
• Jude Law, 51, The Order Law plays an FBI agent hunting a terrifying neo-Nazi gang in the remote Pacific Northwest. The story is ripped from real 1980s headlines.
• Adrien Brody, 51, The Brutalist His visionary architect character, a Holocaust survivor who makes his masterpiece in Pennsylvania, is haunted by the American Dream.
From left: Conclave Best Actor: Ralph Fiennes; Palm Royal Best TV Series or Limited Series
Best Actress
• Demi Moore, 62, The Substance She daringly plays an actress who takes a youth potion with horrific consequences (and biting commentary about ageism).
• Marianne Jean-Baptiste, 57, Hard Truths An Oscar nominee (Secrets & Lies, 1996), she plays a human tornado who vents her rage on everyone in her path, and her performance makes us feel where all that anger’s coming from.
• June Squibb, 95, Thelma At 84, she got an Oscar nomination for Nebraska. Now she aces her first lead role, as a phone-scam victim who—inspired by Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible—pursues the criminal. And she did her own stunts!
• Nicole Kidman, 57, Babygirl Kidman nails the role of a CEO who risks all for a sizzling fling with a 20-something intern (Harris Dickinson).
• Pamela Anderson, 57, The Last Showgirl The Baywatch veteran is seriously good as a Las Vegas dancer in hard times, defiantly shouting, “I’m 57, and I’m beautiful, you son of a bitch!” The Toronto International Film Festival audience went wild.
Best TV Series or Limited Series
• Shōgun The Emmy-hogging show about the 16th-century ruler who united Japan is a win for Hiroyuki Sanada, 64, its coproducer and titular star. He used to be known as the Tom Cruise of Japan. Now he’s the hottest new talent in Hollywood.
• Hacks Jean Smart, 73, kept her hit show fresh by reaching deeper into her stand-up comic character’s intergenerational love-hate relationship with her protégée (Hannah Einbinder).
• The Crown In the royal drama’s finale, Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) and Princess Margaret (Leslie Manville, 68) die, a melancholy, moving conclusion.
• Slow Horses Oscar winner Gary Oldman, 66, and Oscar nominees Kristin Scott Thomas, 64, and Jonathan Pryce, 77, are superb. Nobody on TV has more fun than Oldman as the slovenly, exuberantly insulting boss of an underdog British spy team.
• Palm Royale Kristen Wiig, 51, is funny as a 1960s Florida social climber blocked by locals, but Carol Burnett is even better as a grande dame who speaks gibberish, yet makes her feelings known. Her performance made her, at 91, the oldest Emmy comedy actress nominee in history.
AWARDS SHOW HOST ALAN CUMMING
AT 59, CUMMING IS an ever-rising star who’s won Emmys, plus Olivier, BAFTA, Independent Spirit and British Comedy awards; received four honorary doctorates; and wrote a New York Times No. 1 bestseller. He’s been dazzling on stage and screen; you won’t want to miss his witty show-tune spoofs at the Movies for Grownups Awards.