Vague Visages’ live-action short films review contains minor spoilers. This article covers Butcher’s Stain (2025),The Singers (2025), Two People Exchanging Saliva (2024), A Friend of Dorothy (2025) and Jane Austen’s Period Drama (2024). Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays.

While cinephiles debate about whether Best Picture Oscar wins for Green Book (2018) or Emilia Perez (2024) were more damaging to the Academy’s reputation, completionists suggest that the most embarrassing wins of the past decade can be found in the Best Short Film (Live Action) category. The same year Peter Farrelly’s Driving Miss Daisy (1989) riff became the most divisive Best Picture winner since Crash (2004), it was beaten in the league of most misjudged commentary on racism by live-action short winner Skin (2018), in which a white supremacist is kidnapped and has his skin tattooed Black as revenge for a violent and racist assault. A couple of years later, after a ceremony built around the assumption Chadwick Boseman would win a posthumous Oscar ended with a hilarious anticlimax, the triumph of the clunky, heavy-handed Two Distant Strangers (2020) — a Groundhog Day (1993) spin on police brutality — barely warranted a mention. If more people had access to the short films or were at least curious to seek out those available via streaming, it would be the most reliable source of post-mortems about the Academy members’ intentions.

Naturally, this is part of the reason why, heading into this year’s slate of nominees, I was most apprehensive about Butcher’s Stain (2025), the only live-action short that wears its topical subject matter on its sleeve. This is an Israeli production about post-October 7 social tensions, where an Arab man named Samir (Omar Sameer) is threatened to be fired from his deli role at a Tel Aviv supermarket after accusations that he ripped down hostage posters in the break room. The protagonist sets out to prove his innocence and ultimately discovers that seemingly friendly colleagues accused him of sympathizing with terrorists after posting Instagram stories about protesting Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine.

Live-Action Short Films Review: Related — Review: 2026 Oscar Nominees for Best Documentary Short Film

Writer-director Meyer Levinson-Blount plays it a little too safe when it comes to criticizing the national mood of Israel, although his heart is in the right place. His short film isn’t reminiscent of the type of post-9/11 U.S. drama which went out of its way to depict Muslim protagonists as uncomplicatedly “good” and have them vocally denounce terrorism; there is far more faith in the audience, and depth to the central character, to ever need to rely on underlining the film’s obvious thesis. Butcher’s Stain works best as a paranoid drama, remaining with Samir at a voyeuristic level as he listens into micro aggression-laden conversations between his co-workers, all of whom seem eager to find a reason to let him go, as his very presence makes them uncomfortable.

Live-Action Short Films Review: Related — Review: Chloé Zhao’s ‘Hamnet’

Levinson-Blount’s screenwriting is subtle enough to refrain from creating an all-encompassing allegory for the wider cultural picture. The filmmaker pulls back every time Butcher’s Stain lapses into a confrontational melodrama, ensuring the short remains at the level of tense, Dardennes-style social realism. I predict there will be some concern at the film not being unambiguously critical of Israel’s genocide in Palestine (it’s already a recurring theme on the few Letterboxd user reviews available), as Levinson-Blount focuses solely on how political discourse has poisoned society. Personally, I don’t see how a film in which a man is threatened with losing his job for protesting a genocide could be accused of lacking a sufficiently damning stance.

Live-Action Short Films Review: Related — Review: Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne’s ‘The Young Mother’s Home’

Many have wondered whether the traditional brand of “Oscar bait” has died in recent years, thanks to an influx of new international members that have broadened the scope of the type of movies nominated; Green Book and CODA (2021) feel like the last hurrahs of a certain formula of Oscar movie. In the Best Short Film (Live Action) category, that formula is still alive and well, and feels even more dramatically unsatisfying when simplified to its broadest narrative beats. The biggest culprit this year is A Friend of Dorothy, an intergenerational tale of friendship between closeted Black teenager JJ (Alistair Nwachukwu) and the titular widow (Miriam Margolyes) who meet after his football is thrown into her garden. Opening in medias res with the revelation that Dorothy leaves JJ something in her will, the insubstantial 20 minutes which follow feel cynically engineered to tug at the heartstrings as the unlikely friendship blossoms, with Nwachukwu’s character receiving the chance to see a future he never imagined for himself. There’s not a single plot point which hasn’t already been done to the point of cliche elsewhere, and writer/director Lee Knight doesn’t make a single attempt to subvert dramatic expectations. A Friend of Dorothy is the least interesting of the Best Short Film (Live Action) nominees because it adheres to a well-honed formula without any distinguishing flourishes; a tear-jerker that offers nothing unexpected and could trigger a sincere emotional response.

Live-Action Short Films Review: Related — Review: Joachim Trier’s ‘Sentimental Value’

A Friend of Dorothy isn’t the worst of this year’s nominees though. That honor goes to Julia Aks and Steve Pinder’s Jane Austen’s Period Drama, which feels like a rejected Saturday Night Live (1975-) skit that found its way into Oscar eligibility by accident. If you told the average person this was an excerpt from the upcoming premiere of the British SNL variant, they’d never accuse you of lying. The amusing conceit is that it’s a Jane Austen-style period drama where the protagonist’s marriage prospects are ruined after she gets her period, thus baffling a would-be suitor who possesses no understanding of biology. The directorial execution doesn’t add a single joke beyond this, unless you count the half-assed double entendre names of the characters (the male love-interest is called “Mr. Dickley,” for crying out loud), which makes for the biggest endurance test despite the slimmest runtime. The long-running conspiracy theory that Academy members don’t watch anything from the shortlists and vote based on how intrigued they are by the film titles remains alive since A Friend of Dorothy slipped through the net.

Live-Action Short Films Review: Related — Review: Sepideh Farsi’s ‘Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk’

If I were to be uncharitable, I could also say that’s the case with Two People Exchanging Saliva, a high concept love story from directors Natalie Musteata and Alexandre Singh, which feels like a hodgepodge of ideas stolen from the most acclaimed arthouse movies of 2015. There’s the forbidden lesbian department store romance of Carol, the offbeat relationship satire of The Lobster and the contrast of quirkiness with striking black-and-white cinematography à la A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night. In fact, the obvious flaw is that there isn’t a single eccentric idea the filmmakers left on the cutting room floor, as they broke the immortal comedy rule of “putting a hat on a hat.” The romance between Malaise (Luàna Bajrami) and Angine (Zar Amir Ebrahimi) is set in a world where kissing is illegal — from the opening, it’s revealed that anybody caught engaging in the act could be arrested and/or elaborately killed.

Live-Action Short Films Review: Related — Review: Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘One Battle After Another’

However, Musteata and Singh don’t develop a dystopian society in Two People Exchanging Saliva, so their world is filled with pointless, forced eccentricities like the absence of money; customers pay for goods and services via slaps to the face. That the kinky promise of this unlocks something in the two protagonists isn’t surprising, but the dots don’t feel connected in a manner that feels natural. In contrast, the silly world of Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster (2015) functions well because the director understood that the foundations had to be concise — if you add in too many ridiculous rules, it suddenly appears that you’re suggesting the audience shouldn’t take anything too seriously. The belabored quirk of Two People Exchanging Saliva started me off at a remove and only pushed me further away in the near 40 minutes which followed.

Live-Action Short Films Review: Related — Review: Tom DeNucci, Seth Koch and Rick Lazes’ ‘Knock Out Blonde: The Kellie Maloney Story’

Finally, the short which presumably received the most viewership: Sam A. Davis’ Netflix hangout movie, The Singers. With a screenplay credited to Ivan Turgenev — a Russian author who died in 1883 — the short story adaptation compares to Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996) by preserving the original language while transforming the surrounding dramatic context. Davis’ film doesn’t feel archaic, however, so much as it feels out of time. Set in a bar, The Singers wears so few markers of any specific period that it could take place at any point in the past 60 years.

Live-Action Short Films Review: Related — Building the New Queer Canon #5: Dag Johan Haugerud’s Sex/Dreams/Love Trilogy

The Singers’ narrative is simple and joyous. One patron points out that, in a tapestry design on one of the bar ceilings, a hundred-dollar bill is nestled amidst the singles and the barman offers $100 to the best singer of the evening. It’s an obvious layup for the revelation that several of the regulars harbor secret vocal abilities, but Davis captures a cinéma vérité charm that makes the moment feel lived-in, rather than a forced dramatic construct. This is in no small part due to an opening five minutes of rambling, mumbling dialogue straight out of a Robert Altman or John Cassavetes movie, and a fly-on-the-wall vibe akin to Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (2020) or the Nathan For You (2013-17) season 3 episode “Smokers Allowed,” which firmly establishes a sense of place, even if Davis’ bar appears to exist outside the time-space continuum. The Singers is the only prospective crowd-pleaser in the 2026 Oscars’ Live-Action Short Film crop that doesn’t buckle under the weight of contrived plot mechanics, and it’s the only film of the five nominees which I can imagine attaining a cult status in the long run.

Alistair Ryder (@YesitsAlistair) is a film and TV critic based in Manchester, England. By day, he interviews the great and the good of the film world for Zavvi, and by night, he criticizes their work as a regular reviewer at outlets including The Film Stage and Looper. Thank you for reading film criticism, movie reviews and film reviews at Vague Visages.

Live-Action Short Films Review: Related — Building the New Queer Canon #9: Richard Linklater’s ‘Blue Moon’ and the 2026 Oscars