Category Archives: Cinema

#Cinema | Holiday Oscar Awards Season, Part 2 | Best Picture Contenders

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With epic cinematic re-makes, like Steven Spielberg’s heartfelt and heart-breaking re-imagining of West Side Story, and ferociously inspiring biopics like King Richard in contention, Academy Awards Oscar voters have a plethora of worthy choices in a Best Picture category that has been set at full and expansive 10 slots this year.

The Academy Awards ceremony will take place on Sunday, March 27th, 2022.

In last week’s Part 1 of VanRamblings’ Oscar preview, we wrote about all of the probable Oscar contenders that are readily available to you in the comfort of your home — available on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, or Apple TV.

This week, we’ll turn our focus to the Oscar contending films that will be available exclusively as an in-cinema experience — the best way to enjoy cinema.

A fundamentally and marvelously old-fashioned cinematic entertainment, a working class sports drama that is so authentic, appealing and engaging that it simply pulls you right in, King Richard is the story of the dream of Richard Williams — father to future tennis phenoms, five time Wimbeldon champion, Venus, and her younger sister, Serena, winner of 23 Grand Slam tournaments — this crowd-pleasing, socially alert story of perseverance, and the up-by-the-bootstraps pursuit of excellence, is VanRamblings’ favourite Hollywood film of 2021.

Further, we believe King Richard will win the 2022 Oscar for Best Picture, while also boasting this year’s presumed Best Actor front-runner in Will Smith.

Aunjanue Ellis as Oracene  Williams, Demi Singleton as Serena Williams. Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures

Aunjanue Ellis’ richly layered performance as Venus and Serena’s mother, Oracene ‘Brandy’ Williams — who winds up stealthily stealing the movie despite her co-star, Will Smith’s gravitational charisma — is nothing short of a revelation, possessed of an unshakeable source of love and balance for her husband Richard and their five children, in a magnificent character portrayal that deserves a shower of raves.

Rush out to see King Richard because, quite simply, it is a revelation.

The reviews are in for Steven Spielberg’s re-imagining of the 1961 Best Picture Oscar winning classic musical, West Side Story — and they’re all raves!

The critics are simply waxing poetic about this big screen cinematic reverie …

  • Says The Globe and Mail’s Arts Editor and ‘professional’ movie critic, Barry Hertz, “I would accuse Spielberg of playing the romantic fool — of being convinced that his audience will fall in love with whatever he’s already become smitten with or blinded by himself — but West Side Story proves that he is as annoyingly, lovingly, dastardly whip-smart as ever. This film is the reason that we go out to the movies, and should continue to do so for as long as the opportunity is afforded to us.”;
  • Writes Robbie Collin, in his five-star review in The Telegraph … “West Side Story is, I believe, Spielberg’s finest film in 20 years, and a new milestone in the career of one of our greatest living directors. A little less than a month before his 75th birthday, he has delivered a relentlessly dazzling, swoonily beautiful reworking of the 1957 Manhattan-set musical by Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, which feels just as definitive and indestructible as the previous screen adaptation, directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins.”

Ariana DeBose as Anita and David Alvarez as Bernardo in a scene from Spielberg’s new West Side Story

Opening a week today, on Friday, December 10th, Steven Spielberg’s heartfelt and heart-breaking adaptation of West Side Story remains faithful to its roots, and emerges for audiences today, alive to the concerns of the modern world.

Stunningly detailed, wickedly enjoyable, with an A-list cast up and down, director Guillermo del Toro’s gorgeous and fantastically sinister moral fable about freak shows, dark and stormy nights, innocent dames, morally bankrupt schemers, and a femme fatale to die for, Nightmare Alley offers a gloomy dip into the dark side, immersive and bleak from start to finish.

You know. Just standard holiday film fare.

This sordid excavation into the hollowness of a human soul is a strange fit for a director who’s spent his career searching for magic in the dark margins of our world, but del Toro’s natural empathy for the most damnable creatures sparks life into Nightmare Alley, as it narrows towards its inevitable end. (Dec. 17)

Winner of the prestigious Audience Award at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast, his semi-autobiographical account of growing up in Belfast during ‘The Troubles’, at only 97 minutes never overreaches, and could very well end up in Oscar’s top spot.

For VanRamblings, though, Belfast’s tenderly nostalgic memoir never coheres, but rather comes across as a low-rent version of Alfonso Cuarón’s personal tour de force, 2019’s Roma, which deftly captured the emotional balance of intimacy and the poetic power of a land in turmoil and transition, a necessary feat that Belfast fails to achieve.

Belfast, with its underdeveloped central characters — most especially Jamie Dornan and Catriona Balfe — is a film given to broad strokes, without ever locking the audience into an emotional perspective.

As such, Belfast emerges as only a scattershot pleaser, rendered with too little whimsy, and blarney left to spare. Still and all, film offers viewers a reflection on their own lives, a subjective and iconoclastic experience that may prove satisfactory for some viewers — as it did in Toronto this year. But, sorry to report, not for VanRamblings in any great or moving measure.

Critics who’ve seen Paul Thomas Anderson’s freewheeling, half-forgotten memoria of growing up in the golden, shimmering  suburban San Fernando Valley of the 1970s, Licorice Pizza, have found the film to be a tender, funny ramble forged in all the hope and absurdity of adolescence, the film carried on the shoulders of first-timers Alana Haim (Anderson has directed several of her band’s videos) and Cooper Hoffman (son of frequent Anderson collaborator, the late Philip Seymour Hoffman), both actors thoroughly engaging in their début performances.

Christie Lemire writes,”Haim is just a flat-out movie star. She has that “thing”: that radiant, magnetic charisma that makes it impossible to take your eyes off her.”

Clearly, Licorice Pizza is just the sort of small, under-the-radar film that audiences find, and are wowed by. An irresistible and delectably euphoric film, Licorice Pizza emerges as more than just a film, it is a playful, sentimental reminder of what it means to be young, as well as an embodiment of what it feels like to grow up.

A beyond-dazzling re-imagining of Cyrano de Bergerac, novelist Edmond Rostand’s fictionalization of the early 17th century playwright, epistolarian, and duelist Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac, director Joe Wright’s charmingly poignant musical version of the 1897 stage play, offers vivid performances, intoxicating bravado, and a ravishing Roxanne (played by Haley Bennett, with whom Wright is besotted in real life). Cyrano took the Telluride Film Festival by storm — as may well be the case with you, and your family and friends.

Yet another true holiday film treat.

Of course, there are at least a dozen more films to sweep you off your feet this extended holiday Oscar movie season, including Joachim Trier’s revelatory The Worst Person in the World, VanRamblings’ favourite film of 2021, and a certain Oscar contender for Best International Film.

Sad to say, though, Trier’s latest film — which débuted at the Cannes Film Festival in July, winning the Best Actress prize for lead Renate Reinsve — won’t hit screens in the Metro Vancouver region until January 2022.

Dutch director Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta — a substantial, sophisticated, yet briskly paced and always highly entertaining drama, the story of a 17th-century nun in Italy who suffers from disturbing religious and erotic visions — balances quiet scenes of shrewd backroom politicking with lurid scenes of wild religious madness. A big hit at Cannes. Set to be released on December 21st.

Sean Baker’s Red Rocket features Simon Rex as an ex-Porn star returning to his small town home. Critics at Cannes loved Red Rocket, a humane comedy, a portrait of romantic douchebaggery & an America of flailing last chances.

Recommended.

Finally, for today, we’ll leave you with Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers, starring an Oscar-bound Penélope Cruz, in  a film of cascading twists and turns, of thickening complication, of high family drama.

Hearing that, you might imagine that it’s a movie of high comedy as well — a giddy and ironic Almodóvarian stew of maternal diva melodrama.

But Parallel Mothers, while it keeps us hooked on what’s happening with a showman’s finesse, is not a comedy. It’s not an over-the-top Pedro party. Rather, it’s an unabashedly serious movie, one so straightforwardly sculpted and emotionally down-to-earth that there’s no distance between the audience and what’s happening onscreen.

Parallel Mothers is as serious as any film Almodóvar has made, but in this case he hasn’t let go of his luminously light, beguiling, puckish side. Parallel Mothers draws you in and holds you. It’s Almodóvar’s disarming tribute to the shifting, ever-bending bonds of motherhood, and the inexorable pull of family.

New York Film Critics Circle Winners (announced Friday, December 3, 2021)

Best Film: Drive My Car, Ryusuke Hamaguchi (Sideshow and Janus Films)
Best Director: Jane Campion, The Power of the Dog (Netflix)
Best Actor: Benedict Cumberbatch, The Power of the Dog (Netflix)
Best Actress: Lady Gaga, House of Gucci (MGM/United Artists Releasing)
Best Supporting Actor: Kodi Smit-McPhee, The Power of the Dog (Netflix)
Best Supporting Actress: Kathryn Hunter, The Tragedy of Macbeth (Apple Original Films/A24)
Best Screenplay: Paul Thomas Anderson, Licorice Pizza (MGM/United Artists Releasing)
Best Animated Film: The Mitchells vs. The Machines (Netflix)
Best Cinematography: Janusz Kaminski, West Side Story (20th Century Studios)
Best First Film: Maggie Gyllenhaal, The Lost Daughter (Netflix)
Best Foreign Language Film: The Worst Person in the World (Norway)
Best Nonfiction Film: Flee (Neon)

#Cinema | Holiday Oscar Awards Season, Part 1 | The Streaming Oscars

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The Oscars are just around the corner and Netflix is bringing its A-game, with a collection of movies released or soon to be released that are not only eyeing the top prizes and figure in the conversation, but may come out on top.

Here are Netflix’s Oscar hopefuls for 2022.

Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog (débuts on Netflix, next Wednesday, December 1st), a neo-Western that won the Venice Best Director prize for Campion, currently tops a raft of critics’ polls in major cities across the continent.

Demonstrating her own strong, clear vision — not to mention superb control of her craft — Campion once again proves her ability to illuminate hidden truths and let the viewer see what was hiding in plain sight all along. Her first film in 9 years is a contemporary Western masterpiece imbued with the same pacing and style of westerns of lore. Campion takes her time, letting the story, based on the 1967 novel by Thomas Savage, reveal itself in languid style. Kirsten Dunst has a lock on a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nod, if not an outright win.

After sending up the financial crisis (The Big Short) and Dick Cheney (Vice), in Don’t Look Up director Adam McKay — who makes no secret of his progressive politics — turns his satirical eye to a less serious target: a global catastrophe.

A thinly veiled allegory for climate change, critics who’ve had an early look at the film praised its humourous satirical flourish — comparing it to Stanley Kubrick’s classic, Dr. Strangelove. Even for those critics who weren’t entirely won over by Don’t Look Up, there was appreciation for a film most found to be incredibly funny — perhaps too funny to find itself in the Oscar conversation.

Jennifer Lawrence plays an astronomy grad student and Leonardo DiCaprio her professor in this broadly comic film, as the two try to alert the world to an approaching comet. The cast, including Meryl Streep as the President and Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry as TV hosts, makes this Oscar contender the starriest Netflix film of them all. (December 10th in theatres, Christmas Eve on Netflix)

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s buzzed about feature directorial début, The Lost Daughter (New Year’s Eve), leads the Gotham Award nominations, and has an outstanding performance by Olivia Colman,  making her a lock for a Best Actress nod.

Playlist critic Tomris Laffly opened his review of The Lost Daughter this way …

“With The Lost Daughter, director Maggie Gyllenhaal wears melancholy like a second skin. One of her generation’s most underrated actors, she moves through her films with a flicker of otherworldly woe; an organic ability that has routinely informed the highlights of her filmography, from the erotically manic ‘Secretary’ to the gritty ‘Sherrybaby’, and more recently, the wistful thriller, ‘The Kindergarten Teacher’. In other words, Gyllenhaal has always possessed an auteurial sway over the films she was in, putting on them her signature ethereal stamp.”

Gyllenhaal’s film is a story of self-ascribed transgression and of shame buried and turned bitterly inward, and it too, is made with such alertness to the power of cinematic language — particularly that of performance — that, according to the critics, even as you feel your stomach slowly drop at the implications of what you’re watching, you cannot break its spreading sinister spell.

A masterwork in perception and all that society places upon motherhood, what makes The Lost Daughter a rewarding picture, is in how the film shatters the binary distinction between a ‘good’ mother and the bad one.

There are 2 films already streaming on Netflix that are Oscar award worthy …

While some Netflix Oscar contenders, like In the Heights, have struggled, Tick, Tick…Boom!, helmed by Lin-Manuel Miranda, emerges with a terrific lead-actor performance delivered by Andrew Garfield, his performance so outstanding and affecting, Garfield seems a lock to sing and dance his way into the hearts of Academy voters, who will thrust him into the Best Actor Oscar race, an award come Sunday, March 27th, 2022 he might very well win.

Miranda, who starred as playwright Jonathan Larson in a theatrical performance of the Broadway play, directs Tick, Tick…Boom! with a deep understanding of the passion, struggle, and ebullience of an artist committed to an art form celebrating the power and the pressure of the world both artists love most. A must-see, Tick, Tick…Boom! is a heart-filling work showcasing two musical geniuses: Larson’s musical legacy, and Miranda’s unparalleled artistry.

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And then, of course, there’s VanRamblings’ favourite indie film of the year …

In our November 5th review of Passing, British actress Rebecca Hall’s remarkable directorial début we wrote this …

“From the very first frame, Passing grabs your attention, in this piercingly sad story of characters who can’t escape the confines of their lives. The vulnerability of Irene and Clare’s smallest gestures and experiences, delicately conveyed by Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga and magnified by Eduard Grau’s judicious close-ups — a tear rolling down a cheek, the slight bow of a hatted head in the presence of a white man, a stolen glance of desire — under the genteel mask these women show to the world lies a roiling unease about their true desires, their barely hidden secrets, and their place in the world.”

Tessa Thompson is a lock for a Best Actress Oscar nod, while Rebecca Hall will likely be nominated, and perhaps win, as Best Director & is a certainty to win the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar at the 2022 Academy Awards ceremony.

Neither Apple nor Amazon have any intention of being left out of the mix …

Apple has Joel Coen’s rip-roaring The Tragedy of Macbeth (débuts Jan. 14, 2022), starring Denzel Washington, as well as CODA, the heartbreaking Sundance sensation that could catapult newcomer Emilia Jones into the Best Actress — and Marlee Matlin, into the Best Supporting Actress — awards race.

One of Amazon’s choice Academy Award Oscar contenders is The Tender Bar, the new film directed by George Clooney, and starring Tye Sheridan as an aspiring writer with an absent father, with Ben Affleck playing the young man’s bartender uncle. The script, by William Monahan (The Departed), is based on the memoir by J.R. Moehringer. (December 17th in theatres for a brief run, then come January 7th, on Amazon Prime)

Amazon’s Being The Ricardos takes a chance on recognizable actors playing beloved Hollywood icons, but as Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem may very well overcome the enduring memories of generations of TV viewers. Aaron Sorkin wrote and directed this drama about the Ball-Arnaz relationship and the making of I Love Lucy. (December 10th in theatres, December 21st, on Amazon Prime)

For those of us older folks who grew up with Lucille Ball, who was the most beloved actress on television in the 1950s and 1960s, there’s a ready-made, built-in audience for Being The Ricardos. How the film does with the younger crowd we’ve yet to see — but word out of Hollywood is that Javier Bardem is a lock for a Best Actor nod, and in all likelihood Nicole Kidman has a Best Actress Oscar nod all but wrapped up. Aaron Sorkin will be up for an Oscar, too.

C’mon back next Thursday for Part 2 of VanRamblings’ Oscar / holiday season movie preview, when we’ll write about Steven Spielberg’s much anticipated new film, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film — both of which are shoe-ins for Oscar attention. We’ll also write about a couple of under-the-radar international films that could feature in the main Academy Award categories.

#ArtsFriday | Passing | Searing, Heartbreaking, Tragic Cinema | #Netflix

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Début film by Rebecca Hall (left), Passing, stars Tessa Thompson (centre) & Ruth Negga

A complex examination of race and sexuality set against the backdrop of a 1920s-era Harlem Renaissance that celebrated Black novelist Nella Larsen captured in her seminal 1929 novel, Passing, marks British actress Rebecca Hall’s assured feature directorial début — a certain 2022 Oscar contender, having taken New York by storm last month at their annual New York Film Festival, and already up for a passel of Gotham Awards — will be available on the Netflix streaming service this coming Wednesday, November 10th. “We’re all of us passing for something or other, aren’t we?” muses Tessa Thompson’s melancholy character, Irene Redfield.

Ms. Hall’s choice of material for her début as writer-director is elevated by her evident personal investment in the story, having learned years ago that her American maternal grandfather was Black passing as white for most of his life. That intense personal connection pervades every lovingly composed shot of a work that takes a subtle, unwavering approach to the film’s subject matter, that resonates at a moment Black Lives Matter has exposed the simmering racial divides within society.

The story takes place in 1929, as Harlem resident Irene (Thompson) carefully navigates her way through a sweltering New York City summer day, tucking her face inside her hat so as to all the better, well, maybe not hide exactly, but at least obscure her face so that her black skin isn’t as evident to the privileged white locals surrounding her. Feeling self-conscious about being out of place, she’s shocked to run into Clare (Negga), a school friend with whom she had lost contact, now married to a wealthy (and avowedly racist) white man, John (Alexander Skarsgård), who has no idea that his wife is black. Clare “passes” for white, allowing her entree into an upper-crust American society that contemptuously shuns people of colour.

Inviting Irene up to her hotel room, upon returning to her home, there’s a marked visual switch from Clare and John’s suite, an airy space drenched in white light, to the more textured look inside the Harlem brownstone where Irene lives with her doctor husband Brian (André Holland) and their two boys. The action flashes forward to the autumn, when a letter from Clare, postmarked New York, indicates she has moved back to the city as she had hoped. Irene is hesitant to open it, but Brian is more curious, arching his eyebrows at Clare’s florid description of “this pale life of mine,” as she gently chides Renie for exposing her “wild desire” for another life.

Shot in luminous black-and-white by cinematographer Eduard Grau (a choice that, given the material, might sound gimmicky, and is not), Ms. Hall also opted for a boxed-in 4:3 aspect ratio, all the better to heighten the film’s constant tension and the sense that its piercingly sad characters can’t escape the confines of their lives.

From the very first frame, Passing grabs your attention with its striking aesthetics. Most notably, as mentioned above, the desaturated black-and-white cinematography and 4:3 aspect ratio that recalls both vintage photography and classic cinema. The period-appropriate costumes and production design — stylishly rendered by the production designer Nora Mendism, and the costume designer Marci Rodgers — gives a strong sense of a time and place when flappers lived their best life. To add an elegant finishing touch, the intermittent piano refrain of Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou’s Homeless Wanderer, and the gorgeous score composed by Black composer Devonté Hynes, provides a further nostalgic nod to the Jazz Age.

Passing tingles through the vulnerability of Irene and Clare’s smallest gestures and experiences, delicately conveyed by Thompson and Negga and magnified by Eduard Grau’s judicious close-ups. A tear rolling down a cheek. The slight bow of a hatted head in the presence of a white man. A stolen glance of desire. Under the genteel mask these women show to the world lies a roiling unease about their true desires, their obvious and barely hidden secrets, and their place in the world.

And it’s through this discomfort that Passing transcends its mannered trappings to resonate with us as a poignant and powerful exploration of the human condition.

#Netflix | Oscar Fare Rolling Out in November

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Although Red Notice is the blockbuster film Netflix is bringing to the streamer on Friday, November 12th — starring a Hollywood A-list cast that includes Dwayne Johnson, Gal Gadot and Ryan Reynolds —  it is the “smaller films” that will prove to be the celebrated Gotham, Indie Spirit, Oscar and critics’ awards fodder come December and into 2022, when early in the morning of Tuesday, February 8th, the 2022 Oscar nominations will be announced.

As we all return to some semblance of “normal” —  whatever that means these days? —  now that British Columbia’s Public Health Officer, Dr. Bonnie Henry, has lifted all indoor capacity limitations in movie theatres, arenas and elsewhere, in communities where full vaccination rates are on track to hit 90% or better at some point in November, and COVID infection rates are low, we can all look forward to a surfeit of serious-minded film fare to help us celebrate the coming holiday season.

On Friday, November 5th, VanRamblings will publish our full review of Passing —  already nominated for a raft of east coast film critic, ‘indie’ Gotham Awards, including Best Director, her first-time in that role, and a simply outstanding outing for British actress, Rebecca Hall, garnering, as well, a Best Screenplay nomination for her adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1920s novel; Tessa Thompson, for Outstanding Lead Performance (take our word for it, Ms. Thompson’s performance is more than well-deserving of all the accolades she will receive in the weeks and months to come); and the always luminous Ruth Negga (Loving), for Outstanding Supporting Performance, much-deserved recognition for her breathtakingly fine work here.

A complex examination of race and sexuality set against the backdrop of the same ’20s-era Harlem that Larsen was so keen to be part of, Passing will be available on the Netflix streaming service come Wednesday, November 10th.

Not to be missed!