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When we watch the news now, we often ask ourselves: what disaster movie is this? Is it the one where Americans are shot in their cars and on the street, where manicurists and gardeners are hauled off to torture prisons overseas, and where the commander-in-chief pronounces “affordability” like it’s some weird German word. But the inverse is true as well. As American reality has begun to feel like the Hollywood film Civil War, 2025’s Oscar-nominated movies almost all—for the first time in decades—reflect our insecure, tormented reality. But these films do more than echo the bare facts. While they’re about economic and social insecurity, authoritarianism and exploitation, they all represent those forces through the uncanny and surreal.

Take Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, a hyperreal, pulpy and sometimes dreamlike portrait of American political violence. In the film’s most memorable sequence, Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro) aids migrants as they escape the authorities in what he calls a “Latino Harriet Tubman situation:” his allies ride skateboards and jump from roof to roof as if they were samizdat chimney sweeps in Mary Poppins.

The radicals dubbed the French 75, who take on the film’s ICE-inflected police state, get quasi-Pynchonian, performative names like Teyana Taylor’s Perfidia Beverly Hills: their backstory is rendered in commensurately broad strokes, set against backdrops like a desert weed farm-slash-nunnery. As a daughter of Weather Underground members recently wrote in the New York Times, One Battle After Another’s resistance fighters are cartoons of the real McCoy, emanations of an improbable, fantastical style.

These films exemplify “hysterical surrealism,” a genre that fits our age of Trump, erratic state violence, and opulent overlords who treat our country like their private bunker.

In Sinners, Jim Crow-era Black American musicians and entrepreneurs strive for independent spaces for love and commerce, and are robbed of their lives and livelihoods by an Irish vampire with potato famine vibes. Timeframes may........

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