‘Oscar-Nominated Shorts 2025: Live Action’ Review: A Mix of Issue-Driven Dramas That Mostly Favor Subject Matter Over Storytelling
As often is the case with live action shorts nominated by the Academy, issue-driven narratives tend to take precedence over innovative storytelling and cinematic craft, sometimes to a fault. At its best, the 2025 program of five selected works highlights a range of problems afflicting nations around the world: xenophobia, child labor, extreme poverty, artificial intelligence, endangered species, and the terrors of ethnic warfare. If the shorts themselves aren’t always memorable, the issues, alas, will remain.
In A Lien, directed by David and Sam Cutler-Kreutz, a family of three rushes to a green card interview at their local Department of Homeland Security office, only to find themselves snared in a sudden crackdown by ICE. As immigrants are rounded up without warning, an American mother loses track of her Salvadorean husband and their daughter, racing against the clock to save them before they’re carted off.
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Shot with a handheld immediacy that recalls the Dardenne brothers, the film maintains a raw level of tension with the help of a few twists that feel too movie-ish, leading to a finale that’s capped off by on-screen titles explaining that these round-ups actually happen in DHS faciliites around the country. If A Lien (pronounced “alien”) can feel a bit like a public service announcement in thriller form, it laudably condemns a phenomenon that will only get worse during President Donald Trump’s second term.
Adam J. Graves, a “philsopher-turned-filmmaker” per the press notes, trekked all the way to New Delhi to make his docudrama short, Anuja. The film’s titular character is a gifted 9-year-old who works at a sweatshop with her older sister, Palak, toiling for long hours with only one 15-minute break per shift. Anuja’s harsh daily life and gloomy future are thrown into question when she’s given the possibility to pass a test for boarding school, prompting Palak to hatch a scheme so they can raise the money to pay for it.
Shot in a rather predictable style and nestled in a fair amount of cheesiness, the movie nonetheless benefits from its plethora of real locations and two charming young leads, neither of whom are professionals. Despite the poverty Anuja and Palak are steeped in, they face life’s challenges with shrewdness and optimism, which is a more meaningful message than what’s explained to us in the end title cards.
Explanatory title cards also round off the South African short The Last Ranger, making one wonder: Do Academy voters need the theme of every movie spelled out for them in bold typeface? Needless to say, this handsomely helmed drama from director Cindy Lee is crystal-clear in its messaging and offers little in terms of ambiguity (the title cards explain, among other things, that it’s based on a real story).
Set in a sumptuous natural reserve captured with countless drone shots, The Last Ranger follows a young girl, Litha, who finds herself caught in the crossfire between a female ranger fighting to protect the park’s endangered rhinos and a band of heavily armed poachers trying to steal their valuable horns. There’s nothing particularly arresting about the filmmaking, which recalls, at times, an action-packed spot for the World Wildlife Fund. But the 28-minute short offers a few jarring moments — especially the sequence in which a poacher suddenly whips out a chainsaw, using it to do the unspeakable.
The only short in the bunch that makes an attempt at comedy, or at least dark comedy, is Dutch director Victoria Warmerdam’s high-concept technology tale, I Am Not a Robot. Set in an office in the not-too-distant future, the film’s look and subject matter definitely recall Spike Jonze’s Her. This time, the “her” is a music producer working at a bespoke record label who gets blocked on her laptop by a CAPTCHA asking her to prove she’s not … well, you get it.
The twist is that she keeps failing the test, and what starts off as a tiny dilemma that we all face whenever we go online turns into an existential fight to prove whether one is, in fact, human. Sleekly made if a bit stretched at over 20 minutes, this one-trick-pony (or is that robot?) is bolstered by confident filmmaking — especially the artfully muted photography and production design — that leaves us with a queasy taste of the world to come.
The strongest short in the selection is, ironically or not, also the shortest. Winner of a Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, Croatian director Nebojsa Slijepcevic’s The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent does in 13 minutes what many movies fail to do in two hours, creating an authentic sense of dread and moral complexity in a story set entirely on a train that’s been stopped by armed militants in the countryside.
When the militia men climb on board and ask everyone for their papers, they haul those without ID into a waiting vehicle, and one can only imagine where they’ll wind up. One passenger learns that the young man across from him is undocumented, and the dilemma is whether he’ll stand up to the gun-toting thugs and protect a stranger. Slijecevic surprises us with his conclusion, revealing how everyday heroes are not always at the center of the drama.
Shot with technical flair, including a roving long take that opens the action, the film alludes to the violent ethnic conflicts that swept through the Balkans in the 90s, when neighbors turned on each other out of nationalism and religious extremism. If the theme here is more historically specific compared to the other shorts chosen for this year’s Oscars, it’s handled with such tact that it achieves a rare kind of universality.
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