The 2025 Oscar-Nominated Documentary Shorts Reviewed And Ranked

Five documentaries seek the Academy Award, but only one deserves it most.

In a yearly tradition going back more than a decade at Film School Rejects, I would review and rank the Oscar nominees in all three short film categories. After a while, the rankings of documentary shorts were primarily housed at Nonfics. Now I’m bringing the idea back for this new version of the site, and as with any rankings I do here, even though it’s also a review post (tied to the theatrical release of the short film nominees via Shorts.TV), I’m making it a paid subscriber exclusive.

The five contenders nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Film this year represent a variety of formats and streaming partners but not diverse subject matter. Two of the documentaries see murderers confronting or confronted by persons who were traumatically impacted by their crimes. Another film also involves a killing. The remaining two remind us that the Academy’s Documentary Branch loves shorts about musicians, particularly those who are a part of an orchestra of some kind.

In alphabetical order, the nominees are Death by Numbers, I Am Ready, Warden, Incident, Instruments of a Beating Heart, and The Only Girl in the Orchestra. They are all fine to very good, so I won’t say the ranking is worst to best. My favorite short documentary of 2024 didn’t make the cut. I don’t dislike any of these nominees, but there are a couple that I’d rather not see win the Oscar. Of the rest, I’d be okay with them being honored due to their originality, craftsmanship, and ability to move me.

5. Death By Numbers

Filmmaker Kim A. Snyder (Newtown) continues to focus on school shootings with Death by Numbers, her second documentary about the 2018 tragedy in Parkland, Florida. For this project, she collaborated with one of the students injured in the shooting, Sam Fuentes, who also appeared in Snyder’s 2020 feature Us Kids. Fuentes is credited as the writer of Death by Numbers and she narrates the film as if she’s reading a personal essay expressing her trauma. The documentary feels very carefully scripted as a result — eloquently and passionately, I’ll add, but it also never shows us any organic moments as it follows Fuentes’s participation in the shooter’s sentencing trial.

At times, I got the impression I was watching a well-made student film. Blame that on Snyder’s odd use of clips from Maya Deren’s Meshes in the Afternoon (a work I’ll admit heavily informed my first film school project, too) or the contrived scene where Fuentes is watching 12 Angry Men on the eve of the verdict. There’s also some ambiguity regarding the point being made by Death by Numbers. This isn’t an issue film concerning gun violence or any sort of political statement. It’s a facilitated self-portrait of a survivor who is reclaiming power. And in its wordiness over natural displays of emotion, it’s only a mildly affecting one at that.