Movies for Grownups Awards 2025: Meet the Winners!

AARP honors 2024’s finest film and TV achievements by talents 50+

Tim Appelo,

AARP

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Published February 08, 2025

AARP’s annual Movies for Grownups Awards have arrived!

Last year was a good year for film and TV by and for people over age 50, those we call “grownups.” Nearly half of the most recent acting Emmys went to grownups, and there were four times as many grownup Oscar acting nominees this year as there were 30 years ago. Many people use AARP’s awards to predict who’ll win at the Oscars on March 2. But for viewers over 50, whose support is crucial to movies and shows worth watching, the big news is today’s Movies for Grownups Awards. Watch the highly entertaining ceremony hosted by Alan Cumming, 60, on PBS Great Performances on Feb. 23. And the winners are.…

Best Picture

Courtesy Searchlight Pictures.

A Complete Unknown

Timothée Chalamet looks, sounds and smirks a lot like Bob Dylan, but that's just the beginning of what’s great about this film about the legendary singer-songwriter. Edward Norton, 55, is even better as Dylan’s folkie mentor, Pete Seeger, and Monica Barbaro conveys Dylan’s musical harmony and personal dissonance with Joan Baez. For many AARP members, Dylan is the ultimate musician, and it is hard to imagine a better movie about what he gave the world.

Best Director

Why Not Productions/Pathé Films/France 2 Cinéma

Jacques Audiard, 72, Emilia Pérez

Who else had the audacity to make a musical that’s also a soap opera that’s also a tense crime drama? His rampageous musical fantasia/crime drama about a ruthless Mexican drug lord with a heart of gold — mostly — is the genre and gender bender of the year.

Best Actress

Courtesy Universal Pictures

Demi Moore, 62, The Substance

She daringly plays an actress who takes a youth potion with horrific consequences (and biting commentary about ageism). Her lightning-bolt performance earned the highest praise of her nearly 45-year blockbuster career — just when she was on the verge of giving up.

Best Actor

A24/Courtesy Everett Collection

Adrien Brody, 51, The Brutalist

His László Tóth, an obsessive, cantankerous architect making his masterpiece in America, makes The Fountainhead’s Howard Roark look meek. Brody’s character is a monumental achievement in a monumental film.

Best Supporting Actor

Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection

Peter Sarsgaard, 53, September 5

He nails an extraordinarily tricky role as Roone Arledge, the ABC Sports exec running coverage of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, conveying the character’s complex mix of brilliance, high ideals, deep compassion and ruthless thirst for ratings (“He’d throw his grandmother down the stairs to be first on the air with breaking news,” wrote critic Mick LaSalle).

different actors and scenes from movies and tv shows

Clockwise from top left: Magnolia Pictures/courtesy Everett Collection; Dominic Leon/A24/Courtesy Everett Collection; Katie Yu/FX; Universal Pictures/Working Title Films/Courtesy Alamy; Macall Polay/Searchlight Pictures /Courtesy Everett Collection; Giles Keyte/Universal Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection.

Best Supporting Actress

Focus Features/Courtesy Everett Collection

Joan Chen, 63, Didi

The Twin Peaks star peaks higher than ever in the deeply moving role of a Taiwanese immigrant mom raising an all-American teenager — not a stereotyped Tiger Mom, but one with poignant artistic dreams and infinite patience.

Best Screenwriter

Universal/Courtesy Everett Collection

Winnie Holzman, 70, and Dana Fox, Wicked

Holzman, who wrote the book for the Wicked stage musical that’s run for decades, and Fox had a big potential obstacle in adapting it to the screen: fans’ expectations that it should be exactly like the original show. But by staying true to the story of the not-really wicked witch of Oz fame, yet making it cinematic, the duo won over legions of fans old and new.

Best Intergenerational Movie

Magnolia Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection

Thelma

In a film inspired by director Josh Margolin’s grandmother’s experience with a fraudster, a phone-scam victim decides to get her $10,000 back from her scammer. June Squibb — in her first lead movie role at 94 — made Thelma as fearless as Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible, and her rapport with her grandson and partner in crime fighting (Fred Hechinger) is utterly sweet.

Best Ensemble

A24/Courtesy Everett Collection

Colman Domingo, 55, Clarence Maclin, 58, and Paul Raci, 76

Sing Sing

In a film about Sing Sing prison’s real-life Rehabilitation Through the Arts program, where some inmates put on plays, the entire cast is stellar — not just the famous actors like Domingo and Raci, but Maclin, one of a dozen former prisoners who play themselves in the film (he’s not bad at Shakespeare, either).

Best Documentary

Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story

Christopher Reeve made Superman real onscreen, and this heartrending, soul-lifting film conveys his artistic achievement, complex family life, deep friendships with fellow stars, and incredible achievement as an activist after his paralyzing accident. It’s impossible to imagine a more insightful documentary about an actor who became a star, and responded to disability by becoming an even greater man.

Best Time Capsule

A Complete Unknown

Most music biopics try to peel back the onion to reveal the celebrity’s true self. Brilliantly, this one does something different, and arguably more valuable. It lets the “real” Dylan remain rather unknown and instead depicts a moment when our boomers’ entire culture shifted on its axis. It dramatizes the change from the folk era to electric rock, using the loving but painful conflict between Dylan and Seeger to illustrate not just a personal clash but a transvaluation of values that we will never forget. It brings that time back alive in all its creative ferment and exhilarating contradictions.

Best TV Series or Limited Series

Katie Yu/FX

Shōgun

The show about the 16th-century ruler who united Japan is a win for Hiroyuki Sanada, 64, its coproducer and titular star. He used to be known as the Tom Cruise of Japan. Now he’s the hottest new talent in Hollywood, and his version of the classic saga was even better and smarter than the 1980 original miniseries watched by 120 million.

Best TV Actor

FX Networks/Courtesy Everett Collection

Jon Hamm, 53, Fargo

After his historic triumph on Mad Men, he was in major danger of typecasting. But he leaped right out of charming Don Draper’s vast shadow as Fargo’s diabolical Roy Tillman, the terrifyingly corrupt North Dakota sheriff who takes the law into his own dirty hands.

Best TV Actress

HBO/Courtesy Everett Collection

Jodie Foster, 62, True Detective: Night Country

In a show that was much inspired by her epochal film The Silence of the Lambs, Foster’s character, an Alaskan police chief investigating mass murder, was very like what Clarice Starling might have grown up to be had her career gone worse. Even by Foster’s sky-high standards, it’s a dazzling, moving performance.

Movies for Grownups Career Achievement Winner

actor glenn close sits on the hood of a car, which is parked in the middle of open land

Andy Anderson

Glenn Close, 77

Close proves that a Career Achievement award winner need not be one gazing back on past glory (which in her case includes scads of major award nominations and wins). She starred in the 2024 Netflix horror hit The Deliverance and will be featured in both the upcoming Knives Out mystery, Wake Up Dead Man, and Ryan Murphy’s Hulu legal drama, All’s Fair.

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Tim Appelo covers entertainment and is the film and TV critic for AARP. Previously, he was the entertainment editor at Amazon, video critic at Entertainment Weekly, and a critic and writer for The Hollywood Reporter, People, MTV, The Village Voice and LA Weekly.