Gotham Nominations: A World About to Snap

While Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, a big-budget action movie backed by Warner Bros., leads this year’s round of nominations with six (more than any other film in the history of the awards), Marcus Jones argues at IndieWire that the Gothams have maintained their “overall independent spirit.” Mary Bronstein’s lean and mean If I Had Legs I’d Kick You has scored four nominations, and it’s followed by Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident and Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice with three each. Each of these four front-runners takes a unique approach to a world that’s about to snap.

Variety reports that One Battle, which has been in theaters for a month now, will struggle to break even. But as David Klion writes in the New Republic, PTA “has probably never made such a populist crowd-pleaser, which is a strange thing to say about a sprawling Thomas Pynchon adaptation centered on left-wing revolutionary violence against a fundamentally racist American police state. But One Battle After Another has already delivered Anderson’s biggest box-office opening to date and is almost certainly the most critically hyped movie of 2025, indicating that something—Gen X star power, propulsive action sequences, stoner banter, perhaps even radical politics itself—is breaking through. Somehow, a slacker epic decades in the making turns out to be exactly the movie for right now.”

One of ten nominees for Outstanding Lead Performance, Rose Byrne plays a working mother scrambling to cope with an almost comically eclectic range of challenges in If I Had Legs. Byrne “has the rare ability to seem at once psychologically stripped down and physically invigorated by the unyielding scrutiny of the camera,” finds Justin Chang in the New Yorker. “From scene to scene, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You can feel so formally aggressive, verging on assaultive, that it takes a moment to appreciate that it’s also a movie of strategic elisions and structured absences.”

“Over the past fifteen years,” writes Vikram Murthi for Defector, “Panahi’s work, though always essential, was restricted and self-referential by design, dramatizing the director’s own internment. It Was Just an Accident demonstrates an obvious, potent takeaway: Freedom of movement, literally and psychologically, can facilitate creative renewal.” And for Joshua Bogatin at In Review Online, No Other Choice “plays out the morbid, Darwinist melancholy of our economic lives to its sickest conclusions. It’s the capitalist-realist thriller par excellence, fully working through the logic of the market and playing out its most vile fantasies.”

Nominated for Best Feature along with One Battle and If I Had Legs are Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia, Kate Beecroft’s East of Wall, Sarah Friedland’s Familiar Touch, Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, Alex Russell’s Lurker, Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby, Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee, and Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams. Besides It Was Just an Accident and No Other Choice, Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, Bi Gan’s Resurrection, and Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling are also nominated for Best International Feature. The winners will be announced at a ceremony in Manhattan on December 1.