Hidden gems at the 2026 Oscars: 10 nominated films you might not have seen

The quality of this year's Oscar best picture race is of a very high standard – with frontrunners Sinners and One Battle After Another joined in the category by a number of other tremendous films including The Secret Agent, Sentimental Value and Marty Supreme.

But as well as those big-hitters, there are several other movies in the running in various other categories that may have slipped under your radar. As ever, many of those can be found in the best international and best documentary feature categories – with the likes of Sirât and Mr Nobody Against Putin among those worth seeking out.

Meanwhile, we've also selected a few films that have picked up a stray nomination in a below-the-line category but have otherwise been largely snubbed, such as make-up and hairstyling nominee The Ugly Stepsister.

Check out our list of 10 hidden gems from the Oscar nominations list below – including our official Radio Times reviews and details on where to watch each film.

1. If I Had Legs I'd Kick You

Nominated for: Best actress – Rose Byrne

RT Review: Motherhood is a mountain to be exhaustingly climbed in this scathing, innovative comedy drama from American writer/director Mary Bronstein (who also pops up to play a patronising paediatrician). Rose Byrne is sensational as Linda, a woman whose life, and ceiling, is tumbling down around her. She's grappling with the demands of her daughter (a largely unseen Delaney Quinn) whom she feeds via a gastric tube, while trying to maintain her career as a psychotherapist.

Her ship-captain husband Charles (voiced by Christian Slater) is away with work, and her own therapist (Conan O'Brien) seems to despise her. Things get really ugly when Linda is forced to move herself and her daughter into a motel (run by A$AP Rocky's James) and she starts behaving recklessly, while a client's crisis touches a nerve.

Bronstein confronts the depth of Linda's depression and the judgements she faces in imaginative, interrogatory style, punctuating her film with sometimes wildly funny farce. A never-better Byrne, deservedly Oscar-nominated, thrives under the film's intense focus, juggling comedy and tragedy with aplomb. – Emma Simmonds

Where to watch: In cinemas

2. The Voice of Hind Rajab

Nominated for: Best international feature

RT Review: A five-year-old Palestinian girl trapped in the crossfire of an Israeli attack in Gaza calls for help in this harrowing true-life docudrama produced by Brad Pitt and Joaquin Phoenix. Set entirely in a Red Crescent emergency centre, the film uses real audio of Hind Rajab, alone in a stationary vehicle with her relatives all dead around her as bullets rain down.

Volunteer Omar (Motaz Malhees) takes her call, desperate to get an ambulance to her, but clashes with his protocol-following colleague Mahdi (Amer Hlehel) making it an agonising process. Tunisian film-maker Kaouther Ben Hania (Four Daughters) pulls together an urgent and often difficult-to-watch piece, as the frightened child begs to be rescued.

Ben Hania handles the material sensitively right to the end, even when footage of the real car is shown. Some may question the ethics of using a real distress call, but the result is a devastating anti-war work. – James Mottram

Where to watch: Available to rent and buy

3. Mr Nobody Against Putin

Nominated for: Best documentary feature

RT Review: One man's mundane filmed reports become a diary of growing oppression and militarisation in this excellent documentary from Russia. Pavel "Pasha" Talankin is the events co-ordinator and videographer at the school in his small Ural hometown. Shortly after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin implements a "patriotic education policy" that mandates state propaganda in schools, and the ensuing indoctrination lessons and tub-thumping displays must be filmed as proof of compliance.

Over the next two and a half years, doggedly filming his life in and around the school, Talankin does his best to combat disinformation and encroaching nationalism, but the risk of being labelled a dissenter starts to grow too real to ignore. Credited as co-director and cinematographer, Talankin shares direct and personal insights laced with lively wit and humanity.

American film-maker David Borenstein marshals Talankin's extensive footage, crafting a compact and compelling story with a range of interesting participants. Various youngsters provide emotional resonance - several of Pasha's male ex-students face imminent mobilisation - but it's a quietly fanatical pro-Putin history teacher who is arguably the most memorable character. A deserved BAFTA winner and Oscar nominee, the film is both an invaluable document of an urgent situation and living proof of the deep-rooted link between large-scale politics and the seemingly provincial. – Calum Baker

Where to watch: BBC iPlayer

4. The Perfect Neighbor

Nominated for: Best documentary feature

RT Review: On 2 June 2023, mother-of-four Ajike Owens was shot and killed by her neighbour, Susan Lorincz. This harrowing Oscar-nominated documentary follows the build-up to the incident and its aftermath, with footage comprised almost entirely of recordings from police officers' bodycams.

What unfolds is the story of Lorincz, a 58-year-old white lady, terrorising the black residents of her street with complaints about children playing near her property. The police are called over and over again to deal with her 911 calls until Lorincz finally makes her horrifying decision.

The incident was a test of Florida's controversial "stand your ground" laws, and this film dissects their inadequacy with a very sharp scalpel. With the permission of Owens' family, film-maker Geeta Gandbhir explores their shock and grief on the night of the shooting, and the community outrage that followed. It's a difficult watch, but a true feat of documentary film-making: a howl of escalating fury captured, with deceptive simplicity, by law-enforcement officers who sadly failed to connect the dots. – Jayne Nelson

Where to watch: Netflix

5. Sirât

Nominated for: Best international feature

Taking its name from the Arabic word for a bridge between heaven and hell, this mercilessly tense thriller from Galician writer/director Oliver Laxe holds its audience in a vice-like grip. It follows Luis (Sergi López), a middle-aged Spanish man who takes his pre-teen son and dog to an illegal rave in the Moroccan desert, having heard that his missing daughter might be there.

When it gets shut down, he continues his search by following a group of partygoers (many of whom played by non-professional actors) towards the Mauritanian border. A perilous road trip follows, and as Luis becomes a fish increasingly out of water, nods to Heart of Darkness or Mad Max give way to the four-wheeled hallucinatory kicks of William Friedkin thriller Sorcerer.

There are breathtakingly cruel bumps in the road and a political backdrop that may feel inelegantly plotted, but such concerns give way to the overall sensory experience - and an existential edge to the survival story. As an electronic music score sends basslines throbbing and the ravers' subwoofers pulsing, this utterly exhilarating film becomes a parable for our relationship with fate and the sublime. – Max Copeman

Where to watch: In cinemas

6. The Alabama Solution

Nominated for: Best documentary feature

This harrowing documentary uses illicit cell phone footage filmed by Alabama prison inmates to reveal the appalling conditions they are forced to endure. Filmed over six years - after inmates reached out to a team who had been hired to film a sanitised social event - it's a brutal, stomach-churning, blood-soaked, rat-infested chronicle of abuse, slave labour and death.

But even with the federal government demanding changes, Alabama officials double down on dealing with the problem in their own way. There must be an "Alabama Solution," says the state governor, seemingly unaware how close that sounds to "Final Solution". This is not an easy watch, but it's utterly compelling.

Even if you attempt to watch it with a healthy dose of cynicism - is it one-sided? Does it romanticise the prisoners into plucky rebels? - in the end, the weight of horrific visual evidence means the inmates come out of this with far more humanity than their political leaders. And while the documentary doesn't claim this is a specifically black-and-white issue, you're left in little doubt that racism is the root of the problem. – Dave Golder

Where to watch: NOW

7. The Smashing Machine

Nominated for: Best make-up and hairstyling

In a role not so far removed from his own experience as a one-time WWE wrestler, Dwayne Johnson gives a fine performance as real-life UFC competitor Mark Kerr in this sports-themed drama. Set between 1997 and 2000, Ultimate Fighting Championship – a bruising mixed martial arts combat sport – is taking off with the undefeated wrestler Kerr among its leading lights. But as his addiction to painkilling opioids takes hold and arguments flare with girlfriend Dawn (Emily Blunt), his world begins to fall apart.

Winner of the best director award at the 2025 Venice Film Festival, Benny Safdie (co-director of Uncut Gems) strives for realism rather than triumphalism here. Authenticity is furthered by casting folk from the real UFC world, including the excellent Ryan Bader as Kerr's friend/trainer Mark Coleman.

While a spray-tanned Blunt and a wig-wearing Johnson are great, the low-key narrative never quite hits the dramatic heights, perhaps because Kerr's own story isn't exactly filled with fist-pumping moments. Sometimes too on-the-nose, it's nevertheless a bold look at a misunderstood sport. – James Mottram

Where to watch: Available to rent and buy

8. The Ugly Stepsister

Nominated for: Best make-up and hairstyling

Offering a fresh twist on the classic Cinderella fairy tale, this Norwegian horror focuses on a less traditionally attractive member of the family and the grotesque attempts to beautify her. Lea Myren stars as the wallflower sibling subjected to extreme medical procedures by a mother determined to turn her daughter into desirable marriage material.

First-time director Emilie Blichfeldt satirises the gruesomeness and cruelty prevalent in numerous Brothers Grimm stories, although the main thrust of the narrative is a commentary on peer pressure, modern-day attitudes to body image and the perception of glamour. The minefield of dysfunctional familial relationships is addressed with dark humour, helping to undercut the scenes of primitive, barbaric surgery that more squeamish viewers may find discomforting.

All told, the film presents an unsettling blend of folklore and feminism that, while well intentioned, ultimately asks more questions than it answers. Nonetheless, it's held together by a captivating, heartbreaking performance by former child star Myren as the supposedly unlovable ingenue. – Terry Staunton

Where to watch: SHUDDER

9. All the Empty Rooms

Nominated for: Best documentary short

This short documentary follows American TV journalist Steve Hartman as he concludes a long-gestating project: documenting his country's proliferating school shootings via the now empty bedrooms of murdered children. It's far from easy viewing as Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp visit four sets of grieving parents across California, Texas and Tennessee, who have kept the rooms – bedding, stuffed toys, handmade art – largely preserved.

Two of the adults mention the smell of their late kids, in just one of the film's many affecting nods to how memories can linger via physical spaces, objects and sensations. One victim, teenager Gracie Muehlberger, had her next couple of days' outfits planned; they still hang on her rail. Director Joshua Seftel structures his film around Hartman's four visits in 2025, allowing the parents to memorialise their children and providing the viewer a simple, stark sense of what is taken from the world in the wake of these violent events.

Between each scene, the reporter shares his motivations for the project, which provides its own moving subplot - that of a journalist known for his cheery human-interest pieces choosing to take a stand against one of his society's more peculiar and disturbing regular phenomena. – Calum Baker

Where to watch: Netflix

10. Little Amélie or the Character of Rain

Nominated for: Best animated film

This delightful animated tale paints a world seen through the eyes of a toddler. Our narrator is Amélie (voiced by Loïse Charpentier), who lives with her Belgian family in 1960s Japan. At two and a half, she assumes that she is the centre of the universe -perhaps even God! Annoyingly, she can't bend the world to her will. But she can bond with housekeeper Nishio-san (Victoria Grosbois), until lines blur and she is unsure whether she feels Belgian - most of the dialogue is in French -or Japanese.

Deftly adapting from Amélie Nothomb's memoir The Character of Rain, directors Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han use delicate brushstrokes to tell Amélie's story up to the age of three. As she experiences more of life, they expertly contrast washed-out watercolours with more vibrant hues.

Taking a leaf out of Studio Ghibli's book, they also focus on small moments to build mood: someone gently straightening a pair of shoes, for example. The result is elegant, sweet and, with its subtle themes of post-Second World War national tensions, surprisingly poignant. – Jayne Nelson

Where to watch: In cinemas

Check out more of our Film coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.