Great Oscar Nominees:
Anatomy of a Fall
Review: I’m a big fan of this icy, intelligent, and ultimately emotional crime/legal drama because of its bold decision to pursue ambiguity in both logic and morality. Writer/director Justine Triet doesn’t achieve this by withholding “court evidence”, but rather by deploying it strategically and objectively. However, each revelation only carries further complexity, which makes for a genuinely thrilling experience. It is loaded with excellent performances, especially Sandra Huller's complicated and contradictory lead performance, but Milo Machado Graner's turn in one of the best child performances you'll ever see has sadly flown under the radar. Tales are made better by their telling, and this one is told exquisitely.
Nominated For: Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Editing
The Zone of Interest
Review: You’ll hear a lot of people who see this say they haven’t seen anything like this before, and I’m one of them. Jonathan Glazer’s fourth film in nearly 20 years is quite special, portraying the commandant of Auschwitz and his family existing in their house and garden which shares a wall with the camp. He employs a brilliant sound design scheme during these long stretches where we hear the godawful horrors and constant churn of factories and furnaces, but rarely do we see them. Significant portions of the near-plotless film are focused on the almost-recognizable tedium of what this career must have looked like: he worries about a new promotion, feels pressure to “hit his numbers” and fields pitches for technology to make his work better. These are not passive “deniers”, and complicity is the wrong words to use – they are active participants. It’s a harrowing experience, but one hell of a pristinely crafted film.
Nominated For: Best Picture, Best Director, Best International Feature, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Sound
The Holdovers
Review: This charmer, just sitting on Peacock, is a throwback to the odd-pairing character dramedies of yesteryear and is quite a delightful watch. It focuses on an intelligent but troubled student, a strict and surly professor, and a grieving but kindly cook “holding over” across the holiday break at a New England boarding school. You can see some of the story beats coming, but this film is a bit cleverer in its plotting and resolution than you might think because it is so rooted in its wonderfully conceived and performed characters. They may not "make them like this anymore", but that didn't stop this one from getting made.
Nominated For: Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Original Screenplay, Best Editing
May December
Review: Todd Haynes’ latest is on Netflix for your viewing pleasure, but I’d forewarn you that it’s a bit of a tonal whatsit. It dips into extremely self-aware, almost meta levels of melodrama that reflect its premise (an actress studying real-life subjects to make a film), as well as the medium in which tabloid-bait stories like this one’s of a woman who began a relationship with a teenager usually get adapted: Lifetime originals. Having not seen many (any?) of them, it took me a little bit longer to get on this movie’s wavelength but what’s undeniable is the craft that Haynes brings to bear behind the camera and the talent in front of it. You may not know how to feel every minute of the film’s runtime, but you’ll know you’re watching something as unique as it is good.
Nominated For: Best Original Screenplay
American Fiction
Review: One of the best writer-director debuts of the year, Cord Jefferson’s tale of a Black professor who writes a vile tale of life in the ghetto out of frustration with the media landscape only for that novel to be widely celebrated effectively walks its thematic tightrope. It’s exceptionally funny, anchored by a terrific lead performance by the perennially underrated Jeffrey Wright, and Jefferson shows extreme confidence behind the camera. What I wasn’t prepared for, and was pleasantly surprised by, was how warm most of the film is; when he isn’t hilariously masquerading under his criminal pseudonym, he’s experiencing death in the family, taking care of his dementia-stricken mother, exploring a new relationship, reckoning with his estranged brother, and watching those around him find love. That said, when the movie aims satirical criticism, its aim is lethal.
Nominated For: Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Score
Other Oscar Nominees:
Maestro
Review: I was very excited to see Bradley Cooper’s follow-up as Writer/Director/Producer/Star since the last time he did it for 2018’s excellent A Star is Born, and I was a little disappointed by what I got. I appreciated Cooper’s attempt to do something atypical with the biopic genre in his rendering of Leonard Bernstein’s life and career by focusing nearly exclusively on his turbulent and affair-laden marriage with actress Felicia Montealegre, but the beats in that rendering often felt rote and overwrought. In terms of Bernstein’s career, it’s not on the movie to teach us literally everything about his achievements, but the film has no sense of stakes or struggle to contextualize each thing we see Bernstein accomplish or hear him discuss accomplishing; similarly, it doesn't show much of whatever Felicia was sacrificing. I was left wondering what this movie is in service of, since it doesn’t seem to be communicating very much, and all I could come up with was Cooper himself.
Nominated For: Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Makeup
Rustin
Review: Another biopic, another highly touted performance, another entry just sitting on Netflix. Rustin stars Colman Domingo as Bayard Rustin, the key behind-the-scenes organizer of 1963’s March on Washington in a condensed format that focuses on his struggle to bring that event to life in the face of resistance from his fellow Civil Rights activists. Domingo is excellent, taking a performance and a role that could easily fall into cheap imitation and making it into a fully realized three-dimensional character. He’s far better than the movie he’s in unfortunately, as everything else – especially the visuals – are flat and predictable.
Nominated For: Best Actor
The Creator
Review: Unlike Rustin, this film looks amazing. Unfortunately, it’s a dumb movie even if you’re willing to turn your brain off and enjoy the spectacle. It’s not dumb because it lacks ideas, but because it’s so full of half-baked ideas you’d think that writer/director Gareth Edwards would have stumbled into something somewhere. It alternates between being derivative, oddly brutal but not graphic, and potentially offensive in its depiction of futuristic (?) Asian cultures and people. The visual prowess of Edwards (who previously directed Rogue One) almost makes up for the confused mess of a script. Almost.
Nominated For: Best Visual Effects, Best Sound
No Noms, Good Watch:
The Killer: Netflix again! David Fincher’s long-awaited return to feature filmmaking tells the story of a hitman on a streak of vengeance after a botched attempt leads to people close to him getting hurt. It’s an incredibly subjective story, placing us inside the head of this “master” assassin who is paranoid, calculating, and precise in everything he does almost to a fault. While there’s an obvious comparison to be made about Fincher himself given his reputation for demanding many takes, digitally supplementing his films to realize his vision when it’s not feasible during production, and the ice-cold films he tends to make, it’s also a perfect character study in the way few movies are. Why he breaks his self-set rules, what (if any) moral compass he possesses, and just how good at his job he actually is is all up for debate in a very exciting fashion.
Afire: This German film by Christian Petzold is a portrait of a frustrated (and potentially middling) artist not terribly unlike Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up, though only through their first halves. As this story of romantic intrigue, writer’s block and one of the grumpiest guys you’ll ever see ambles on, it expands into a climate change allegory by way of an ever-encroaching wildfire and moves from offbeat dramedy to something quite profound and moving. I won’t spoil any specifics, but there’s a reason we’ve been telling stories about grouches having their hearts softened forever; they just work.
The Iron Claw: When I learned that this movie was going to tell the story of the Von Erich family, I (after a Google search since I’m not a wrestling fan) kind of dreaded it; on paper, this movie is an all-time downer slog, While the film doesn’t shy away from the tragedy at the heart of the story, it avoids excessive ghoulishness and is far more entertaining and tender than you would expect. The first half is bang-up sports entertainment, and though the second half gets increasingly tragic, director Sean Durkin keeps his touch light. I would be remiss if I didn’t praise Zac Efron’s performance here; not only is it an amazing physical transformation, but he brings a lot of restraint to a role that could easily have been overblown.
Passages: Ira Sach’s story of a two-man-one-woman love triangle isn’t for everyone, since it has graphic depictions of sex and a rough edge, but if you’re willing to meet its subject matter where it is, you’ll find something special. Each of the three lead performances, but particularly Ben Whishaw’s, have stuck with me since I saw this drama about a man living in slight delusion over his ability to make things work, and whose second chances are running out. Franz Rogowski is equally fantastic as Tomas, the character in question whose life is turning into a trainwreck that we – and he – can’t turn away from.
Priscilla: Writer-Director Sofia Coppola consistently turns in interesting work, but turning her eye to this high-profile a real-life subject is her first time doing so since 2006’s Marie Antoinette. You could draw a lot of comparisons between the two, as she’s as interested in the shape and structure of the gilded cage this young woman lives in as the woman herself, though she gives plenty of space for relative newcomer Cailee Spaeny and Jacob Elordi to fully and naturally bring their characters to life in ways that feel contemporary, recognizable, and most importantly – looking at other movies about The King – grounded. As is customary with Coppola, the design of the costumes, sets, and music choices are as considered as any of the story beats, and complement each other perfectly.
Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning (Part One): Just because they retroactively dropped the Part One from the title doesn’t mean that I don’t know the truth, and that this is an incomplete story is also evident to any viewer. For a film with a 2.5-hour-plus runtime, it’s pretty cool that the vast majority of it is spent on four or five extended set pieces that feature both action and dialogue, but the rest of the plotting in this film is anything but crisp. We’re treated to multiple rounds of exposition about the same thing while some of the minor characters’ arcs are oddly plotted and resolved. Regardless, it’s an exciting and thoroughly well-mounted blockbuster, but if it were more cohesively plotted, we would have had a special popcorn experience.
Fair Play: This indie thriller, the debut feature of writer-director Chloe Dumont, is sitting on Netflix and is a perfectly enjoyable watch. It was the highest-profile acquisition out of Sundance and so carried a bit of Oscar buzz once upon a time, and while there’s a lot to recommend about it I don’t know if it was worthy of that hype. There’s plenty of psychological and at times psychosexual interplay between our two leads as they navigate the complexities of gender and relationship dynamics in the same workplace. Tonally, Dumont takes the audience out of their comfort zone early on and then keeps them there throughout the runtime, which is definitely praiseworthy. Overall, it wasn’t as sharp in its unraveling of the conflicts between career, relationship, and gender as I was hoping but it’s quite a promising debut for a writer/director to keep an eye on.
Well, I Watched It:
Saltburn: Friends, this film isn’t it. It sits high atop Amazon’s most-watched chart, is super buzzy, obviously very provocative, my sources tell me TikTok is eating it up (although I’ll have to consult with my sources on if they actually like it), but I’m here to say it isn’t it. Look past the gorgeous visuals and people; past the instances where this film is actually funny (mostly when Rosamund Pike gets turned loose); past the surface-level shocks; past the spottily fun soundtrack; there’s not much underneath. Good provocation is as intellectual as it is visceral, and so this film’s several gross-out efforts fail to rise beyond being just that. People are having a lot of fun with this movie, and good for them, but this film does not exist beneath its polished and obviously-desperate-to-shock surface. Don't let a guy like me kill your groove though.