Hamnet

Chloé Zhao followed Nomadland and a Marvel picture with an adaptation of Maggie O'Farrell's 2020 novel, shot in England with a British cast and crew. It premiered at Telluride in August 2025, took the People's Choice Award at Toronto — historically the most reliable predictor in the awards calendar — and converted that into eight Academy Award nominations, of which Jessie Buckley won Best Actress.

O'Farrell's conceit is to write the Shakespeare marriage from the wife's side and to give her back her documented name, Agnes rather than Anne. Buckley plays her as a woman with her own authority — herbalist, falconer, more at home in the field than the household — married to a young Latin tutor, played by Paul Mescal, whose ambition is entirely elsewhere. He goes to London. She raises three children in Stratford, one of them a boy called Hamnet. Emily Watson is his mother; Max Richter wrote the score; Łukasz Żal shot it in close, tactile natural light.

Critics treated it as the year's most effective piece of emotional cinema, and reviewers who had found Zhao's Marvel detour a misstep wrote about this one as a return. What distinguishes it from the usual literary period picture is its refusal to treat Shakespeare as the subject: the play the title points towards is kept at the very edge of the frame, and the film stays with the person history left in Warwickshire.