It’s that most wonderful time of the year: the season when blockbuster holiday movies and Oscar contenders collide.
Do you like to take yourself too seriously and lecture people on the pitfalls of British period pieces? No worries: VanRamblings has your back.
No matter what you’re looking for, November probably has it in store for you. Today on VanRamblings, the best movies — Oscar contenders, and just plain, flat out good fun inside a darkened movie theatre, plus a probable Best Picture Oscar winner opening next month that is a must-see — but mostly, films currently playing at your local multiplex (and at the Vancouver International Film Festival’s Vancity Theatre) that you should keep an eye out for during the early part of the 2018 holiday season.
Holiday Movies & Oscar Contenders Currently Playing in Vancouver
A Star is Born
Whaddya mean you haven’t seen Bradley Cooper’s smashing directorial début? This multiple Oscar contender, since it’s October 5th opening weekend, has (as of Wednesday) already grossed a record $330,259,035 on a puny $36 million production budget. You don’t care about that stuff? Fine. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t see the single most entertaining film on offer this holiday season, worth every penny you’ll pay at the box office.
Transit. Opens today. Vancity Theatre.
Christian Petzold’s masterful new film, Transit, opens today at the Vancity Theatre for a limited, seven screening run. A refugee portrait that lands at a place of piercing emotional acuity, Petzold’s adaptation of Anna Seghers’ 1942 novel takes a brazen, bounding risk right off the bat by stripping its story — about a German concentration camp survivor seeking passage to North America in Nazi-occupied France — of any external period trappings, relocating it to a kind of liminal, sunburned present day. As Variety critic Guy Lodge writes, “there’s a method to the madness of Petzold’s modern-dress Holocaust drama: Transit invites viewers to trace their own speculative connections between Seghers’ narrative and the contemporary rise in neo-Nazism and anti-refugee sentiment, all while its principal story remains achingly moving.” Startling and gut-wrenching. Recommended.
Say it with me, “Melissa McCarthy. Best Actress Oscar winner.” I knew you could. Currently screening exclusively at Vancouver’s Fifth Avenue Cinema.
77,000 women and men are currently being held in conversion therapy across North America. Arising from a motion moved by retired Vancouver City Councillor Tim Stevenson, gay conversion therapy is now banned in the city of Vancouver. Boy Erased oughta provide some insight into why that is.
The most compelling reason to see A Private War is Rosamund Pike’s stunning, sure-to-be Oscar nominated performance as Marie Colvin, the American war correspondent who died in a bombardment while covering the Syrian government’s 2012 siege of Homs. Absorbing & transformative.
Academy Award winner Damien Chazelle’s First Man has emerged as the most compelling, Oscar contending movie of the holiday season, a film that demands to be seen, a lock Best Supporting Actress contender in Claire Foy, with a raft of other Oscar nominations sure to follow. A must-see film.
Widows. Opens today. Cineplex International Village + more.
Tour-de-force filmmaking from Academy Award-winning director Steve McQueen & the breakout surprise of the holiday season that has catapulted Viola Davis into the Best Actress Oscar race, Widows is gracefully written, soulful, smart and darkly exhilarating, weaving statements on race, gender, crime and grief into a tick-tock heist plot, a sinewy treat of a film that seamlessly intertwines close-up character studies & big picture politics into a mournful, brilliantly tense and strikingly relevant entertainment that will have you gripping your seat throughout its taut 140-minute running time.
Alfonso Cuarón’s Golden Lion winner (that’s Best Film to the uninitiated) at this year’s Venice Film Festival will win the Best Picture Oscar at the 91st Academy Awards on Sunday, February 24th, 2019. You read it here first.
And we don’t mean Best Foreign Language Film — we mean, the Academy Award for Best Picture. Period. Funded by Netflix, and due to début on the streaming service in mid-December, Roma demands to be seen on the big screen. But where? Yep, Vancity Theatre programmer Tom Charity has managed to secure the exclusive rights to screen Alfonso Cuarón’s new film next month, as the film is meant to be seen: in a darkened theatre, in comfy seats, in the respectful, hushed confines of the Vancity Theatre.
From Friday, December 14th at 3pm (when I’ll see the film), through Thursday, December 20th at 8:20pm, this year’s certain Best Picture Academy Award winner will screen an unprecedented three times a day (except for Sunday, December 16th, when Roma will screen only twice).
Update: Due to demand, more screenings of Roma have been added, daily through December 31st (not Christmas Day). See Roma as you are able.
Think of it as a very special post-Chanukah / early Christmas present from the good and fine and tremendous folks at the Vancouver International Film Festival, and the esteemed and erudite (and cinema-loving) Tom Charity — the best darned gift any cinema lover could wish for this holiday season.
Click here to book your screening of Cuarón’s Golden Lion winner, and treat yourself to great cinema. You’ll be mighty glad you did — we promise.
