Gotham Nominations: Five Films Lead With Four Nods Each

Five films — All of a Sudden, Clarissa, La Gradiva, The Invite and Tender Loving Care — lead the 2026 Gotham Film Awards nominations with four nods each, the Gotham organization announced. The 35th edition of the awards takes place Monday, Nov. 30, at its longtime home, Cipriani Wall Street in New York.

The five-way tie at the top is unusual, and it spreads the leadership across categories rather than concentrating it. Only two of the five leaders — Clarissa and The Invite — compete for best feature. The other three earned their four nominations in international feature, director and screenplay races. What does this change for the race? It flattens it: no single film enters Cipriani as the presumptive frontrunner.

Who made the best feature list?

Eleven films compete for the top prize:

• Clarissa (Arie and Chuko Esiri, NEON)
• Club Kid (Jordan Firstman, A24)
• The Debut (Jesse Eisenberg, A24)
• Dreams in Nightmares (Shatara Michelle Ford, Lunette Films)
• The Invite (Olivia Wilde, A24)
• Josephine (Beth de Araújo, Sumerian Pictures)
• Mouse (Kelly O'Sullivan and Alex Thompson, Independent Film Company)
• Paper Tiger (James Gray, NEON)
• Primetime (Lance Oppenheim, A24)
• Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (Jane Schoenbrun, MUBI)
• Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother (Bassam Tariq, Amazon MGM Studios)

A24 claims four of the eleven slots — Club Kid, The Debut, The Invite and Primetime. NEON counters with two (Clarissa, Paper Tiger). Emma Stone produces The Debut alongside Eisenberg, Dave McCary and Ali Herting; Robert Pattinson and Ari Aster both produce Primetime.

How the voting actually works

Gotham nominees are selected by committees of critics, journalists, festival programmers and film curators. Separate juries — writers, directors, actors, producers, editors and others directly involved in making films — then determine the final winners. That two-stage structure means the nominating committees' preferences do not bind the juries; a four-nomination leader can walk away empty-handed. The ceremony's history supports that caution: recent Gotham winners include Oscar winners One Battle After Another, No Other Land, Everything Everywhere All at Once, CODA, Nomadland, Marriage Story, Moonlight, Spotlight and Birdman, plus the documentary American Factory — a strong but not automatic correlation with the Academy.

The Hollywood Reporter disclosed that its reviews editor and film critic Jon Frosch served on the nominating committee for original and adapted screenplay.

Where the international and documentary races stand

Best international feature pits Ryusuke Hamaguchi's All of a Sudden (NEON) against Pawel Pawlikowski's Fatherland (MUBI), Andrey Zvyagintsev's Minotaur (MUBI), Lee Chang-dong's Possible Love (Netflix), Mike Leigh's Tender Loving Care (Bleecker Street) and five others: Ben'Imana (Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo), Blue Heron (Sophy Romvari), Everytime (Sandra Wollner), Filipiñana (Rafael Manuel) and La Gradiva (Marine Atlan). MUBI carries three entries in this category.

Best documentary feature lists five films: Closure (Michal Marczak), A Fox Under a Pink Moon (Soraya Akhlaghi and Mehrdad Oskouei), NAZA (Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor), Once Upon a Time in Harlem (David Greaves) and You Can See Everything (Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim).

The craft and performance races

Best director nominees mirror four of the international entries — Hamaguchi, Wollner, Zvyagintsev, Leigh — plus Schoenbrun. Breakthrough director includes Romvari, Firstman, Aleshea Harris (Is God Is), Atlan, Joel Alfonso Vargas (Mad Bills to Pay) and John Early (Maddie's Secret).

Original screenplay: Everytime, La Gradiva, Possible Love, Tender Loving Care and Martin McDonagh's Wild Horse Nine (Searchlight). Adapted screenplay: All of a Sudden, Clarissa, The Invite (Rashida Jones and Will McCormack), Minotaur and Primetime.

Outstanding lead performance spans ten names: Mahershala Ali, Gillian Anderson, Jeon Do-yeon, John Early, John Malkovich, Ian McKellen, Julianne Moore, Sophie Okonedo, Andrew Scott and John Turturro. Supporting performance lists Tom Courtenay, Esmé Creed-Miles, Penélope Cruz, Adam Driver, Andrew Garfield, Skyler Gisondo, Sandra Hüller, Kate O'Flynn, Tao Okamoto and Channing Tatum. Breakthrough performer covers Adia, India Amarteifio, Guitarricadelafuente, Colas Quignard and Mason Reeves.

The Gotham Audience Award fields nine titles, including Backrooms (directed by Kane Parsons, with Shawn Levy, James Wan and Osgood Perkins among producers), The Drama (Kristoffer Borgli), Michael (Antoine Fuqua), Project Hail Mary (Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, with Ryan Gosling producing) and double-dippers The Invite and You Can See Everything — the only films nominated in both juried and audience categories this year.

A caveat for handicappers: the announcement was marked "more to come," so the list above reflects the nominations as first published. The juries still have the final word on Nov. 30.