Category: Oscar Contenders

Film is often about redemption, the seeking of absolution or, at times, both.

There’s tales about comeback kids, underdogs, the forgotten, the unforgiven, the unforgivable, the isolated.

In a way, director Darren Aronofsky’s latest feature is a bit of all of this, most notably being a return to stardom for Brendan Fraser with the year’s most committed, devastating performance. 

Structurally, The Whale tells the story of a reclusive, obese English teacher and his attempts to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter at all costs to his health and psyche. But it’s also an allegory with strong evocations and outright references to the Hermann Melville classic “Moby Dick” and a treatise on mental health traumas.

There’s a depth of humanity to the film that shouldn’t be there at first glance, but the screenplay from Samuel D. Hunter based on his 2012 play of the same name opens up opportunities for Fraser to overwhelm audiences with a tremendous heartfelt performance.

Aronofsky and Fraser approach Charlie with such care that once viewers become accustomed to his size, all the matters at the core of the film are the purity of Charlie’s heart and how his inner pain forced him to succumb to chronic overeating and isolation. 

The weight and eating aren’t done as circus spectacle, though the technical skill and expertise required to design and fit Fraser with a prosthetic suit to realistically make the heavy-set actor appear as if he weighed 600 pounds.

It’s more clearly, once the story unfolds, that Charlie is a mere vessel by which Aronofsky could reasonably explain intense isolationism and its effects on those around them.

Unquestionably, it’s Fraser’s most introspective, emotional and powerful performance to date and Aronofsky is able to mine the depths of Fraser’s soul for raw emotional and honesty that hasn’t been shown so far in the veteran actor’s career.

The film’s small ensemble cast do a solid job helping to frame Charlie’s plight in a larger social context and it’s in scenes between Charlie and his daughter Ellie played by Sadie Sink that the most intriguing, provoking scene-work is done.

Sink provides The Whale with a raw emotion of blind rage masked behind layers of manipulation as Ellie. Her relentless combativeness doesn’t come across as pure malice, but weathered pain from the toll a strained relationship with Charlie brought upon Ellie during her formulative years.

It’s a terrific contrast to Hong Chau’s more empathetic, nurturing yet stern caretaker role as Liz, who takes the pain she feels from her own traumas and latches onto Charlie with sympathy rather than disdain.

The one odd duck in the ensemble is the presence of wandering missionary Thomas, played by Ty Simpkins. While the actor isn’t out of place with his performance, the character of Thomas unnecessarily muddies the waters and takes away from the larger allegory at play.

The Whale can be a bit heavy-handed in its dialogue at times, especially in the rare moments when Charlie isn’t at the center of conversation. The secondary storylines can become a bit clunky and forced to make additional, unnecessary points about organized religion and homosexuality.

Audiences will not be capable of being apathetic to the story and its larger themes. The Whale is especially overwhelming in this regard, bathing viewers in a constant tsunami of anger, frustration and sentimentality.

From a production standpoint, cinematographer Matthew Libatique excels at the ability to make the confining space of Charlie’s small apartment constantly feel large by approaching scenes of dialogue from fresh angles and perspectives to reframe audiences and prevent a stale, monotonous feel to the film.

With Fraser as a clear-cut Best Actor contender, The Whale was always going to be in the awards season race, but it’s become increasingly likely that it could exceed a single acting nomination and join the Best Picture race, with Chau also receiving enough support to have a chance at a supporting actress nod as well.

While it certainly won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, The Whale touches upon important social issues from an emotional, yet respectful place and is worth cinephiles spending two hours on at home or in theaters this awards season.

When auteur directors get to the point in their careers where they have established the pedigree to have carte blanche with a studio’s checkbook, it opens all sorts of possibilities.

Damien Chazelle – who burst on the scene with Whiplash and is best known for his Oscar winning musical La La Land – dips his toe back in the waters of making movies about Hollywood with a roaring 20s, gallant and audacious examination of the transition from silent films to “the talkies.”

A three-plus-hour epic odyssey, Babylon follows two newcomers to the industry who are thrust into the spotlight in different ways as well as a veteran silent film star struggling with hubris and finding his place in a changing landscape for the moviemaking business.

For a film led by Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie, the true star of Babylon is Chazelle.

From the opening sequence – a relentless, lavish and indulgent 30-minute cavalcade of debauchery in the home of a film producer – Chazelle overwhelms his audience with a plethora of sights and sounds that are bold and audacious, reveling in the same sort of excess as Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf Of Wall Street would, but in a more frivolous, carefree Hollywood ideal.

Chazelle masterfully whips the camera around a room filled with drugs and nudity as if it were an ingenue taking in the spectacle of Hollywood and succumbing to the seductive, illicit appeal.

When it comes to the technical aspects of Babylon, the film truly shines in Chazelle’s ability to capture nuance, referencing small pieces of early film history that would take scholars several viewing to find minute trivialities, but at the same time, making the most of modern cinema in order to fully engulf the viewer in the world of Babylon.

As Nellie, Robbie is a firecracker whose fuse is brightly flickering close to explosion through the entire 180-minute run time. 

While her franticness as the starry-eyed wild child comes to define everything about Nellie’s character, it’s incredibly impressive just how much control Robbie must change gears at a moment’s notice from laughter to a single tear to everything in between in a split second. 

In stark contrast, Diego Calva’s Manny is the most restrained character in the film, with Chazelle hoping viewers will view Babylon through his earnest eyes. Amidst the world of chaos, Calva is demonstrably calm and resourceful in the ways Manny climbs the ladder of success and it’s a breakout role showcasing vulnerability and empathy.

Pitt feels a bit on an island of his own as the silent film star Jack, but it’s a welcome salve from the main storyline of Manny and Nellie. Pitt excels at masking his inner pain and age with the bravado of a typical flawed leading man and the culmination of Jack’s arc throughout the film wouldn’t make any sense with the longing and brooding Pitt is able to subtly bring out in Jack’s eyes.

If there is a major flaw within the film, Babylon suffers at times with haphazard pacing and balance between its three lead stars which often leaves audiences disoriented and ready for a finale that doesn’t come until much later than expected.

Babylon features several of what could be considered false endings that jar casual viewers when the credits don’t roll.

This isn’t to say that the editing is bad by any means. Chazelle and editor Tom Cross are quick on the knife to make vibrant cross-cutting sequences that transport viewers back and forth between different film sets to heighten the urgency of the moment. While there’s a kinetic energy to Babylon, it doesn’t come out evenly which leaves more individual sections of the film as highlights rather than one cohesive piece of cinema.

At its strongest points, Babylon embraces the artistry of moviemaking whether it be small, intimate tidbits like filmmakers adding dialogue to silent films with handwritten messages on chalkboards to a side-splitting sequence where Nellie must repeat a scene over and over because sound and picture difficulties prevent shooting.

As is the case with most noisy movies about the film industry, Babylon is sure to be a major player this awards season in everything from best picture to best director and actress to any number of technical categories like production design, costuming, cinematography and composer Justin Hurwitz’s radiant score.

It’s going to be particularly hard for audiences to completely digest, or even stomach at times, everything that’s going on in the loud, boisterous world of Chazelle’s Babylon, but viewers willing to take the time and effort to allow themselves to be overwhelmed by grandiosity may reasonably find themselves loving and/or loathing enough of the three-hour odyssey worth a trip or two to the biggest screen possible.

James Cameron hasn’t made a new film in over a decade.

The blockbuster spectacle-creator behind epic movies like Aliens, The Terminator and Titanic last showed his craft on the big screen in 2009 with a technologically revolutionary feature about human colonizers on a space world in Avatar, an Oscar nominee for Best Picture that won several technical awards.

Since then, Cameron has long sought to make a follow-up, but sequels languished in pre-production for world building and then a four-year shoot for the next two installments has kept his burgeoning Avatar franchise on hold.

The wait finally ended this past weekend as Avatar: The Way of Water arrived to great fanfare in theaters nationwide. The immersive world of Pandora takes on new life thanks to digital innovations Cameron adds to his arsenal as audiences are transported under the sea creating new depths and expanding the universe of Cameron’s narrative.

Way of Water catches up with Jake Sully and his Na’vi family ten years after the events of the original film which saw the tribal clan run Earth military off Pandora completely.  Sully believes himself to be at peace until the “sky-people” return to hunt him down and fully colonize Pandora.

Returning from the original film, Sam Worthington is less stiff in his second foray as Sully, in part because he doesn’t have to emote in human form and the expressiveness on his face is partially digitized. Even still, Worthington has more of a gruff military persona than anything although it’s clear that he’s capable of showing Sully’s sense of duty as a father. 

For whatever reason, the Avatar films aren’t as much about character as they are about spectacle. Cameron is less interested in telling a story than crafting a world and this comes through in elongated sequences that take 20 minutes when two would have sufficed.

Because the characters ultimately don’t matter, the actors portraying them are left with little to identify with. 

This is especially true of the film’s female performances, where Zoe Saldana is largely left to sob and showcase her action prowess while being shoved into the background after her Neytiri was a pivotal character in the original.

Kate Winslet joins the cast as a rival chief’s wife and perhaps has 10-15 lines of dialogue despite being in most scenes, while Sigourney Weaver returns as her character’s own daughter in a perplexing, disjointed bit of storytelling that might only make sense when the next film arrives in theaters.

If there are any stars of the show, they come in the form of the film’s young actors who play the next generation of Na’vi, but truly in Avatar, the only character that matters is Cameron himself.

For the most part, audiences will come to see Way of Water not for the story, but for the visuals that define the franchise.

It’s a film that’s gorgeous to look at even with the sound completely off that truly takes advantage of a cinematic master’s ability to visually world-build.

Underwater sequences bring new life to Way of Water and break up segments of the film that often feel somewhat repetitive to the original film and although it’s somewhat engaging for viewers to feel Pandora just beyond their fingertips, Way of Water isn’t a feature that demands viewing in 3D despite Cameron’s crafting the mold for blockbuster films to leap off the screen for the better part of a decade.

The film’s over three-hour running time is especially draining on viewers not completely immersed in the story-telling. 

Despite the visual wonders, there isn’t enough substance to justify the length and Cameron’s cut of the film lacks proper pacing to balance out story with visuals. It’s almost as if the veteran filmmaker decided to leave almost nothing on the cutting room floor, allowing each one of his sequences to play out fully because they look cool rather than adding to the overall narrative.

As a result, Way of Water can feel at times like a theme park ride rather than a theatrical movie experience.

Regardless, the film – if on pedigree alone – will be a major contender this awards season for both best picture and a frontrunner in many technical categories, with Cameron likely to be given a best director nomination as well.

With the holidays bringing families together at the theaters, Avatar: The Way of Water will likely appeal to those wanting to get out of the house and yet feel closer to their own families. Now will be as good a time as ever to see Way of Water the way Cameron intends, but at the end, the sequel fails to live up to the promise of the original.

One of an auteur’s favorite things to center their films around is the art of cinema itself.

Filmmakers started off their careers as moviegoers and these experiences color and impact everything about how they write, direct and produce their own work.

Sam Mendes’ extensive theater and filmmaking background come to fruition with his latest film, Empire of Light, a languishing, self-indulgent look at the world of cinema through the eyes of a box office manager at the Empire Theater in south England.

It’s a movie that just screams out “CINEMA!” at the top of its lungs even though it doesn’t really understand what exactly that entails or means in the context of the story Empire is trying to tell.

At the core of its storytelling, Empire is a simple tale of a shy older woman played by Oscar winner Olivia Colman, who befriends and later falls for a black coworker played by Micheal Ward while she is simultaneously coerced into a sexual relationship with her boss.

Though he’s credited as the lone screenwriter, Mendes isn’t terribly concerned with the narrative at all. It simply serves as a basic structure to center his motif-driven feature on cinematic wonder during a formative time in the early 1980s. This makes Empire exceptionally inaccessible for some audiences who may struggle with the looseness of the narrative and lack of significant plot, yet at the same time, Mendes may draw in certain viewers with the painstaking care to which he showcases the meticulous craft of cinema.

Structurally, there’s a significant issue relating Colman’s character to Ward’s in a cohesive way as Mendes would rather show than tell audiences how their unlikely romance begins. 

Empire is more of a think piece than a considered theatrical experience, ironic given how many films are shown within Empire, most notably the Oscar-winning Chariots of Fire which plays a pivotal role in the second act.

Colman tremendously creates layers to her Hilary, especially as the film lingers on and audiences come to learn more of her backstory which complicates her relationships with everyone around her.

While it is not as bombastic nor driven as efforts by Cate Blanchett in Tár or Michelle Yeoh in Everything Everywhere All At Once, Colman has the ability to be equally as transfixing and carry the overall narrative forward with a performance that’s among the year’s best.

Her primary counterpart in Ward’s Stephen is equally as subdued with a quiet earnestness and sentimentality that makes him somewhat a compelling character although much like James Gray’s Armageddon Time, Empire struggles to find the right tone when it comes to racial and societal implications it’s making and a pivotal scene to open the final act really isn’t properly foreshadowed well enough to balance with the overall tone of the film.

The supporting cast led by Firth as the theater head and Toby Jones as the projectionist is solid but given light character work due to Mendes’ very loose brushstrokes on plot development.

Without question, the MVP of Empire is the dynamic cinematography from director of photography Roger Deakins, a master at his craft who make every second of Mendes’ film a joy to watch even when the storytelling doesn’t live up to the same expectations.

He is especially adept at using light in all its forms, both in bright open spaces and tight confining moments as well as the contrasting nature of pitch-black darkened theaters to illuminate the picture coming through the Empire’s projector.

Many of the moments that work best in Empire come from Deakins’ ability to capture Mendes’ artistic vision for what cinema truly means to both moviegoers and the people who work to bring these cinematic tales to life. 

Though Empire of Light certainly isn’t for every moviegoer, ardent cinephiles willing to overlook the film’s structural shortcomings and live in the broader pen strokes of Mendes’ vision will find the film to be an intriguing experience in theaters.

Steven Spielberg has always been a director who cares deeply about the artistry behind his films.

Influenced by some of the great filmmakers of the past – most notably John Ford – Spielberg is an exceptional, introspective master of cinema with a clear voice and vision who truly wants to bring magic to the screen at every opportunity.

His latest film, The Fabelmans, is a semi-autobiographical experience that captures so much about what makes Spielberg a great filmmaker, especially when audiences see things through the eyes of young protagonist Sammy.

But at the same time, The Fabelmans has major flaws due to the film’s uneven storytelling and general lack of cohesive chemistry between its three notable stars.

Set over a decade from the mid-1950s to early 1960s, the film follows a young boy whose worldview changes so completely because of his first moviegoing experience that he sees life through a camera lens. The Fabelmans also fashions itself as a larger domestic drama in a loving Jewish-American family that struggles with the malaise of the American dream amid unspoken marital problems.

The most prestige-laden film of 2022, The Fabelmans is a languid cinematic experience that will certainly divide audiences who love the storytelling but not necessarily all the characters throughout.

At the core of The Fabelmans is a magnetic performance from Gabriel LaBelle as teenage Sammy. The newcomer allows viewers to see things from a completely fresh perspective in an almost reverse ingenue sort of way.

From the time he first appears on screen about 20 minutes into the film, LaBelle is thoroughly engaging but not overwhelming in becoming a perfect protagonist for audiences to project themselves onto, or more aptly, to project Spielberg himself onto.

The parents Burt and Mitzi, capably portrayed by Paul Dano and Michelle Williams respectively, are terrific in individual moments though their complete lack of on-screen chemistry is only somewhat incentivized by the screenplay and it’s often unclear how or why the couple are meant to be together in the first place.

When audiences are allowed to see their relationship through Sammy’s worldview, it makes somewhat more sense, but scenes work much better when the two actors are separated physically as much as emotionally.

Williams is especially heartbreaking in the dramatic moments and Dano has the capacity for stoic emotional strength, but Spielberg’s major interest isn’t in either character or exploring their relationship, but rather how Sammy’s parents impact Sammy himself.

Seth Rogen’s awkward placement in the film as Uncle Bennie really stands out like a sore thumb as his natural affability plays against Rogen’s need to be more grounded in the story and it’s always at the front of audiences’ minds that it’s Rogen and not Uncle Bennie, which severely hurts a major plotline.

On a technical level, The Fabelmans astounds with some captivating cinematography from Janusz Kaminski who has the difficult job to create the world of The Fabelmans overall but on a smaller scale, capturing Sammy’s individual filmmaking style and cinematic vision with period cameras.

Over the course of the film, audiences see Sammy – and by proxy, Spielberg himself – evolve as a filmmaker and some of the most intriguing moments of The Fabelmans come from seeing a scene play out naturally with Sammy capturing it all and then almost immediately reenact that scene from Sammy’s perspective behind the camera. Both are masterfully captured by Kaminski in different styles that create a layered cinematic texture to Spielberg’s film.

Without question, Spielberg’s film is sure to receive much acclaim this awards season as the presumptive frontrunner for Best Picture at next year’s Oscars although it certainly isn’t the best film of the year. The Fabelmans is a shoo-in for up to double-digit nominations including in picture, director, original screenplay, actress, cinematography, score and production design.

Certainly among the year’s most prestigious films, The Fabelmans celebrates both youthful exuberance and a bright-eyed wonder for cinema that makes it a must see in theaters and despite not being quite at the upper echelon of Spielberg’s illustrious career, it’s a movie that will remain in the back of cinephiles’ minds for some time to come.

For whatever reason, 2022 seems to be the year in which celebrated auteurs have decided to collectively look back at their childhoods to mine their youth for dramatic themes and commentary on modern society.

Whether it be the isolation of the COVID pandemic or these veteran filmmakers actualizing their own autobiographical works, it seems moviegoers will have no shortage of self-indulgent drama this holiday season with Netflix putting their weight behind Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Bardo, and Steven Spielberg pushing towards another best picture bid with The Fabelmans.

The first of these major films to play upon this narrative comes from writer/director James Gray, whose film inspired by his youth growing up in 1980s Queens is a captivating yet troubling portrait of an America that feels so far away yet so close.

Armageddon Time follows a young Jewish-American boy who befriends an African American classmate after both are picked on by an overbearing teacher and follows him as he struggles to adapt to familial expectations and a world filled with prejudice.

While not overly political in nature, Gray’s film certainly takes more advantage of opportunities to villainize one side of the current political spectrum and yet at the same time is a wonderfully touching time capsule of the intimate family drama that Hollywood isn’t really interested in making these days.

The core of what makes Armageddon Time a movie worth watching are the fantastic ensemble performances, most notably from the two young leads Banks Repeta as Paul and Jaylin Webb as Johnny.

Because so much of the film leans heavily on Paul’s perspective, Armageddon Time required Gray to find a young performer capable of showing naivety but also a relentless charm amid the tomfoolery of innocent childhood. As Paul, Repeta anchors the film with a steady presence that allows the characters around him to be much more demonstrative, especially his parents played by Jeremy Strong and Anne Hathaway who give compelling performances while not being over-the-top as stereotypical Jewish-American parents.

While Gray isn’t really interested in the emotional connection between Paul and his parents, both Strong and Hathaway give layered, nuanced turns in limited screen time more separately than in tandem as Armageddon Time primarily operates in one-on-one dialogue scenes.

The best performance in the entire film and the best chemistry Repeta is able to create with another character comes in Paul’s relationship with his maternal grandfather, Aaron, played by Oscar winner Sir Anthony Hopkins.

Hopkins’ Aaron is the sort of jovial, heartwarming best friend figure that Paul needs and while Hopkins isn’t necessarily the best choice to round out this family dynamic, on an individual level in scenes with Repeta, Hopkins truly makes Gray’s emotional drama come alive with poise and gravitas that the film does not otherwise have.

It’s perhaps the most poignant and beautiful supporting performance so far this year and is worth the price of admission alone especially for a pair of scenes between grandfather and grandson that do little to further the film’s narrative but sets the emotional core of the entire feature.

Armageddon Time has issues relating to a “white savior” narrative or more broadly the racial commentary that Gray doesn’t completely understand that he’s making, but despite this, Webb steals scenes with ease as Johnny despite the problematic ways in which the character is written and underdeveloped. It’s unclear if Gray truly considers Johnny’s financial and societal plight worthy of examination or simple pity at all, which holds the overall film back.

There’s a world in which Armageddon Time dials back the political commentary in deference to the social and would probably make a more well-rounded film. This is especially true as it relates to the inclusion of members of the extended Trump family into the narrative for little reason, although Jessica Chastain is exceptional in a small cameo as Maryanne Trump.

Armageddon Time is certainly an aspirational awards contender that doesn’t fully come together cohesively as a narrative but taken in small scene by scene moments would be worthy of an at-home viewing experience later this fall.