The Best and Worst of Nollywood This Year, According to Us

Any honest year-end accounting of Nollywood has to start by acknowledging the sheer volume involved, a release calendar crowded enough that no single critic plausibly sees everything, which makes any "best and worst" list inherently a matter of informed opinion rather than comprehensive survey. With that honest caveat in place, this year's crop offered a genuinely interesting split, several films that pushed the industry's craft forward in ways worth celebrating loudly, and a parallel set of well-marketed disappointments that reveal exactly where Nollywood's commercial instincts and its creative ambitions still frequently talk past each other.

On the strongest end, the year's quiet standout was a restrained family drama that resisted the genre's usual pull toward shouting matches and public confrontations, instead building its tension through what several generations of one family deliberately choose not to say to each other across a single, tense festive gathering. It is the kind of film that will likely be undervalued in immediate box office terms relative to louder, more heavily marketed releases, but that critics and discerning audiences will almost certainly still be recommending well after flashier competitors have been forgotten, exactly the kind of slow-burn cultural staying power that box office numbers alone consistently fail to capture.

Where the Year Disappointed Most

On the weaker end, the year's most dispiriting trend was the continued proliferation of star-studded ensemble comedies that assemble an impressive cast of recognizable faces and then give almost none of them anything genuinely interesting to do, relying instead on the cumulative star power of the poster to generate opening-weekend curiosity regardless of script quality. Several of this year's most heavily marketed comedic releases followed this exact pattern, strong recognizable casting, thin scripts, a reliance on individual performers' established comic personas rather than any genuine ensemble chemistry built through actual rehearsal and character development, and audiences, increasingly, are catching on, with noticeably steeper second and third-weekend box office drop-offs for films following this formula compared to previous years.

The most genuinely surprising development of the year was a quiet comeback for the horror and supernatural thriller genre, which had languished somewhat in recent years relative to its stronger period roughly a decade ago, producing at least two genuinely effective entries that moved away from the genre's older reliance on overt, heavily telegraphed jump scares toward a slower, more atmospheric dread built from Nigerian folklore and spiritual belief systems treated with genuine narrative seriousness rather than exploited purely for shock value. Both films found real audiences specifically because they trusted that Nigerian supernatural tradition, handled with care and genuine craft, did not need imported horror conventions grafted on top of it to feel credible or frightening to a contemporary audience.

The industry's biggest problem this year was never a shortage of talent in front of the camera. It was a continued shortage of scripts willing to actually use that talent for something more than a recognizable face on a poster.

Streaming originals, considered separately from theatrical releases, produced a similarly uneven year, with the clear highlight being a tightly plotted limited series that resisted the common streaming-era temptation to stretch a six-episode story across twelve installments purely to maximize engagement metrics, delivering instead a genuinely complete, well-paced narrative that respected its audience's time. The lowlight of the streaming year was the continued glut of hastily produced romantic thrillers that have begun to feel almost interchangeable with each other, differentiated mainly by cast rather than by any meaningful difference in plot or execution, a pattern that risks genuinely exhausting audience goodwill for the entire genre if it continues at the current pace without any real creative differentiation between entries.

Performance-wise, the year's most significant development was less about any single spectacular lead turn and more about a noticeable uptick in genuinely strong supporting performances across several otherwise middling films, actors clearly bringing far more craft and specificity to smaller roles than their scripts strictly required or rewarded, suggesting a depth of acting talent within the industry that current screenwriting, on average, is not yet consistently matching or making full use of.

If there is one overarching lesson from this year's crop worth carrying into the next, it is that Nollywood's craft, cinematography, production design, and increasingly its acting talent, has genuinely continued improving at a pace that deserves real recognition, while its screenwriting, on average, still lags noticeably behind that improvement, remaining the industry's most consistent bottleneck between genuinely talented people and the genuinely great films they are clearly capable of making when the script actually gives them room to do so. The films on this year's best list all share exactly that quality, a script that trusted its cast and its audience in equal measure, and that remains, frustratingly, still the rarer achievement than it should be.