The "Matties": Part 2
Today we hand out set piece awards, best sequences, and individual acting honors
Previously: "The Matties" Part One
We are back for our second half of Matt at the Movies year in review with part two of “The Matties”. The next set of awards were awe inspiring. They left moviegoers with their jaws on the floor fumbling for their phones to post meme reactions on the walk to the car. Part two’s focus is on the best set pieces, action sequences, individual scene stealers, and performances. Who had the best year in 2025? Read below to find out.
Best Musical Set Piece
2nd Runner Up: Roofman, the locally shot Charlotte true story, ended up being one of the more delightful films of the year. Channing Tatum’s dance montage through the aisles of a fully replicated Toys “R” Us showcases his best skills and lighter side in this dramedy. Read more about the set from my interview with production designer Inbal Weinberg from the premiere at this year’s Charlotte Film Festival.
1st Runner Up: The Life of Chuck was heralded to be an Oscar contender, winning the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival. While I enjoyed a wild trip through the mind of a dying man, I can’t help but focus on Tom Hiddleston’s dance scene. As he hears buskers on a street corner, an image of his grandmother keeping a beat takes over his body. We watch Chuck invoke memories of his past as he dances with onlookers. This scene was beautiful and really captured the tone of the story. And the winner is…
Winner: Apologies for not mentioning The Testament of Ann Lee here, but we’ll get to that film later. The easiest selection of all the awards goes to Sinners and the juke joint dance montage. We could have easily chosen Jack O’Connell’s “Rocky Road to Dublin” Irish step dance, but director Ryan Coogler and composer Ludwig Göransson went all out on this scene. Miles Caton starts things off slowly, but we are transformed through centuries of music and dance blending together to break the laws of time and space. Masterful work all around.
Best 10 Minute Action Sequence
2nd Runner Up: People will point to the twin biplane dogfight scene as Tom Cruise’s apex from Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, but they are wrong. Ethan Hunt deep-diving and traversing a sunken submarine as it rolls off an ocean land shelf to crushing depths had my heart pounding. Unique, harrowing, and edited to perfection.
1st Runner Up: There is a reason F1 snuck in as the tenth Best Picture nominee. The film was incredibly fun, crowd-pleasing, and eventized itself with racing set pieces that you had to see on the big screen. Director Joseph Kosinski created new cameras, shot angles, and driver footage that made us feel like we were ripping 200 mph down the Hangar Straight at Silverstone. Take your choice here, from the twenty-four-hour opening race at Daytona to the finale at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, for some goosebump moments. And “The Mattie” goes to…
Winner: When you mention Paul Thomas Anderson, the first words coming out of your mouth are usually auteur or Boogie Nights, not “action.” From the moment Willa breaks out of the militia camp and Bob hotwires a 1991 Nissan Sentra, Anderson becomes Tony Scott reborn in One Battle After Another.
The beating Jonny Greenwood drum track, with quick cuts to up to four vehicles in pursuit pumping up and down the literal “River of Hills” section of Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, almost made me nauseous watching on an IMAX screen. Not only was this one of the most distinctive chase scenes of the last several years that gives a visceral reaction, but Anderson ties together multiple plotlines at once, making you feel all the more weight in your viewing.
Best WTF Moment (Light Spoilers)
2nd Runner Up: Weapons featured several tense, cover-your-eyes-type moments. The spooky intro running montage to the midnight haircut to the possessed principal death sprint all caught me off guard. We’d be remiss not to bring up the children’s chase and destruction of Aunt Gladys at the film’s conclusion. It felt like an episode of Jackass mixed with B-movie gore from writer/director Zach Cregger. A chef’s kiss to you, Zach!
1st Runner Up: You feel gaslit through the eyes of an anti-capitalist conspiracy theorist loon for nearly ninety minutes as Jesse Plemons’s character kidnaps and tortures an “alien” who apparently moonlights as a tech CEO on planet Earth. Aggrandized speeches, awkward interactions, and self-fulfilling prophecies are constantly spewed at you while you roll your eyes. Unless all of it was true? The final twenty minutes of Bugonia will make you shake your head and laugh at director Yorgos Lanthimos’s wild dark humor. Taking home this year’s “Mattie” is…
Winner: I’ll say it… this film was robbed of being nominated for Best Picture by the Academy. The final scene of Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident sent absolute chills and feelings of dread down my spine. Panahi took us on a rollercoaster of emotions for two hours as former political prisoners kidnap who they think was their torturer. They have to make the decision to bring this “supposed” terrible person to justice with a vengeful death or let him go.
When everything settles at the end, our main character is starting a new life, content with his decision. Then we heard a familiar sound that caused hairs to rise on my arms. If this didn’t make sense to you then I highly suggest streaming to find out for yourself. Master storytelling from an underrated filmmaker.
Most Uncomfortable Conversation
2nd Runner Up: Marty Supreme. At the table tennis world championship in London, Marty Mauser, played by Timothée Chalamet, is trying to woo an older woman married to an American industrialist. To curry favor with the businessman, he introduces himself along with his closest ping-pong partner, Béla Kletzy, who also happens to be a Jewish concentration camp survivor. Mauser goads Béla into telling his “Holocaust honey” story to the man, with wild visuals as well as sidebars from Marty to really ramp things up on the uncomfortable/hilarious scale.
1st Runner Up: Sentimental Value features generational broken children raised by broken adults in an art-centric Norwegian family. As the estranged director father, now grandfather, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård) tries to come back into the fold after his ex-wife’s death, his recompense has more than just a few bumps with his daughters. At his grandson’s ninth birthday party, he gives him DVDs of The Piano Teacher and Irreversible to set the tone of his patriarchal aloofness.
After a few hours and several drinks, Gustav and his eldest daughter, Nora (Renate Reinsve), square off. Nora, slightly inebriated, brings her sharp wit to focus on Gustav, prying at his newfound interest in their family. Watching the two size each other up and try to make sense of their standing to one another, the scene showcased some outstanding acting and awkward realizations of their failed relationship. And “The Mattie” goes to…
Winner: My favorite scene of the whole year comes from Steven Soderbergh’s stylish spy thriller Black Bag. Michael Fassbender plays a counterintelligence officer with a knack for weeding out moles within the agency. He is tasked with flushing out a traitor from a small group, which includes his wife, so he invites everyone to dinner at their posh London home.
Over the next twelve minutes, Fassbender introduces a game where each dinner guest will select a resolution for the person on their right. The guests don’t know their food is spiked with truth serum, and the resulting game goes completely off the rails in minutes. Resentment, old wounds, and straight nastiness come to the forefront, ending in oddly hilarious and well deserved aggravated assault.
Turning It Up To “11” Award
Bringing things up to “11” is a reference to the great director Rob Reiner’s 1984 satirical documentary This Is Spinal Tap. Reiner, who tragically passed away this December, has the concept of an amp that can go to eleven explained to him. The idea is that there is always a performance that can be ramped up to the extremes, and we would like to highlight the best of them in this next category.
2nd Runner Up: Michael Stuhlbarg in After the Hunt. The great character actor, Stuhlbarg excels at playing highly intelligent but emotionally flawed roles. As Frederik Mendelssohn, Julia Roberts’s psychiatrist husband, his outbursts over always being second fiddle to his wife’s various muses caused the most snickering I had at the cinema this year. Whether a snide but true remark over wine or prying questions for his wife’s affection, Stuhlbarg’s pettiness knows no bounds.
The saving grace of this film is his petulant blow-up during a small dinner where he feels unwanted in front of his wife and her prized student, causing him to leave the kitchen. He cranks up Ryuichi Sakamoto’s “É Preciso Perdoar” in the living room and bursts back into the kitchen several times to grab simple items to show his disdain for everyone else in the scene. 11/10 on the trifling scale.
1st Runner Up: Jennifer Lawrence in the Lynne Ramsay-directed Die My Love. In my short post walking out of the theater, I described the film as, “...postpartum depression felt through the lens of someone on psilocybin.” Isolated with a newborn in rural Montana, we see Lawrence’s character change from an indie punk rock soul to a woman experiencing full psychosis over a tragic series of events. Her completely absent, self-absorbed husband further gaslights her loneliness, and you can see her slipping away with manic outbursts over the two-hour runtime. Her performance was eccentric and one of the most overlooked of the awards season. The winner is…
Winner: Ralph Fiennes as Dr. Kelson in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. As we get to know his character, we see a loving man who is trying to bring as much grace as he can to this unforgiving, zombie-ravaged world. Kelson sees the humanity in each person, infected or not, and like a true academic, he’s always searching for the next discovery. Through each Duran Duran song played on his record player, we embrace his longing to reconnect with a world that’s long gone.
When asked to become the physical manifestation of Satan for a roving murder cult leader in order to appease his acolytes, Kelson delivers elevenfold. In full Lucifer-inspired garb, Kelson performs a maniacal lip-syncing delivery of Iron Maiden’s “The Number of the Beast,” featuring fire, incredible pyrotechnics, and surreal showmanship that leaves everyone in awe.
Actor of the Year
2nd Runner Up: Elle Fanning had a fantastic 2025. Her role as American actress Rachel Kemp in Sentimental Value was a calming litmus test to explore the family dynamics of the Borg family. She showcased an energy and honesty that was the vehicle for introspection with the other main characters. It also brought her an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.
She also shined in a dual role playing androids Thia and Thessa in the sci-fi action film Predator: Badlands. Her legless android character brought the humor and exposition to a new chapter of the series. It also became the highest-grossing entry, bringing in over $183 million worldwide.
1st Runner Up: Jack O’Connell had a historic year playing villains on the big screen. In Sinners, O’Connell plays Remmick, the wandering Irish vampire with a full catalogue of traditional tunes from the Emerald Isle. Preaching ideas of liberation and cultural assimilation, he wants to take Black Southern music into the fold of his Celtic background. His rendition of “Rocky Road to Dublin” was a total banger of a scene that complemented the musical journey of the film—an integral role for a record-setting, sixteen-Academy-Award-nominated blockbuster success.
Technically, he performs the role of Sir Jimmy Crystal twice in the span of six months for the 28 Years Later releases. Mimicking the aesthetic and gross nature of the British TV host and sexual predator Jimmy Savile, O’Connell’s character also grooms young children into sadistic murders who worship at the altar of the all-father Satan. His steadfast cruelty and preacher showmanship lend themselves to a lot of crossover with Remmick. The most interesting roles, but only second to this year’s top prize…
Winner: Amanda Seyfried. What a calendar year for an incredibly talented actor with the range to do it all. She started off the year in the Peacock miniseries Long Bright River, playing a Philadelphia police officer on the hunt for her addict sister who has gone missing. The role garnered her a Golden Globe nomination.
Next, we have the book adaptation of smash hit The Housemaid, an erotic psychological thriller where she plays opposite Sydney Sweeney. This movie is bonkers and toes the line of being incredibly fun yet almost terrible. If you have seen films like Chloe, Seyfried can play an insecure woman with baggage quite well. Making $310 million globally on a $35 million budget, it’s one of the biggest surprises of 2025.
We finish with her Golden Globe (and should-be Oscar) nominated performance in The Testament of Ann Lee. Seyfried is a trained singer who has used her talents previously on the big screen for Mamma Mia! and Les Misérables. We see her play Ann Lee growing up in Manchester, England, and becoming involved in the Shaker religious movement, eventually becoming its leader, “Mother Ann.” Through many hardships of faith, we see her resolve grow. In the late 18th century, she and her followers travel across the ocean to set up their own society in upstate New York. Her acting, singing, and dancing showcased her diverse talents.
Well, there you have it—another year of “The Matties” in the books! We’ll take a little break to prepare for our annual Oscar preview. Catch up on your missing nominations and prepare your ballots for the big night. Dana Gillis and I will be back before the big night on March 15th, breaking down all the categories before heading down to the Independent Picture House for their annual Oscar fundraiser. Thanks again for reading Matt at the Movies over at Y’all Weekly.
 | A guest post by
|