Film Reviews & More
★★★★☆ A swift but singular filmmaking self-portrait, Leos Carax’s It’s Not Me reflects on the French auteur’s 40-year directorial career, as well as his many cinematic – and canine – influences.
★★★★☆ Ralph Fiennes approaches top form as a spiritually and morally-conflicted cardinal during a Vatican Conclave in Edward Berger’s gripping, oft-humorous follow-up to the multi-Oscar-winning All Quiet On the Western Front.
The winners of this year’s 96th Academy Awards were announced earlier this morning at LA’s Dolby Theatre. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer was the big winner on the night, scooping seven Oscars in total including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor for Cillian Murphy, and Best Supporting Actor for Robert Downey Jr.
The Barbenheimer phenomenon reaches its natural denouement tonight at the 96th Academy Awards ceremony, with Christopher Nolan’s colossal Oppenheimer expected to sweep most of the major accolades. Barbie will likely have to make do with a handful of craft awards, while foreign language festival hits Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest continue the trend of international features breaking into the main categories.
With the UK’s most prestigious film awards returning this weekend (Sunday 18 February), it’s time to enter into a round of foolproof predictions on who will win at the 77th Baftas. The Baftas are traditionally seen as an indicator of Oscar winners, so the outcome on Sunday night will surely be seen as a predictor for the Academy Awards on 10 March.
Christopher Nolan’s monumental biopic Oppenheimer led the pack with 13 nods, while Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things and Martin Scorsese received 11 and nine nominations respectively. Greta Gerwig’s 2023 blockbuster Barbie received eight nominations.
★★★★★ Theodor Adorno famously wrote that poetry was not possible after Auschwitz, but is cinema? Billy Wilder certainly thought so, getting footage from the camps as evidence as much as anything else. Steven Spielberg, Claude Lanzmann, Alain Resnais and Roberto Benigni have all with differing degrees of success tried their hands.
★★★★☆ Once, when talking about Stanley Kubrick’s seminal Barry Lyndon, Martin Scorsese referred to the film’s “almost Japanese sense of time”. If one was to be cynical, one could snipe that it’s just a fancy way of saying a film is boring, but it goes to the point of how cinema makes the relativity of time visible and tangible to the audience.
★★★★☆ Tales of lone assassins and guns for hire are all based on urban myths. That’s the fact gleefully revealed in Richard Linklater’s latest crime comedy Hit Man, premiering at Venice this week. “Think about it,” asks the film’s protagonist Gary Johnson (Glen Powell), “is someone really going to risk the death penalty for a few thousand bucks.” It’s a good point.
★★★★☆ Having won the Jury Prize in 2013 for Like Father, Like Son and the Palme d’Or in 2018 with Shoplifters, Cannes favourite and Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda returns with Monster, a masterful work of intricate storytelling, complemented by a lovely score by the late Ryuichi Sakamoto.
As the anticipation for the summer movie season grows, alongside it, the whispers are starting about the possible contenders for the 2024 awards season, notably the Oscars. Among the contenders, several films have emerged as strong contenders despite not being released yet.
