A week Saturday marks the 20th anniversary of the tragedy that was 9/11.
Sara Colangelo, the award-winning writer and director of the 2018 film, The Kindergarten Teacher, brought her latest film, Worth, to the Sundance Film Festival in January 2020, Now, some 19 months later, Netflix makes Worth available on their service — the film starring Michael Keaton and Amy Ryan.
Following the horrific 2001 attacks on New York City’s World Trade Centre and the U.S. Pentagon, Congress appointed attorney and renowned mediator Kenneth Feinberg (Michael Keaton) to lead the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund.
Assigned to allocate financial resources to the victims of the tragedy, Feinberg and his firm’s head of operations, Camille Biros (Amy Ryan), faced the impossible task of determining the worth of a life to help the families who had suffered incalculable losses. When Feinberg locks horns with Charles Wolf (Stanley Tucci), a community organizer mourning the death of his wife, his initial cynicism turns to compassion as he begins to learn the true human costs of the tragedy.
In 2019, Netflix landed its first Oscar nomination for Best Picture with the release of Alfonso Cuarón’s critically acclaimed Roma. A year later, the streaming service was leading the field with 24 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture nods for both The Irishman and Marriage Story.
As Netflix’s impact on the world of cinema became increasingly undeniable, the younger and more diverse film academy was no longer prepared to shun the streaming service as the old Hollywood guard tried to do. Earlier this year, on April 28th, responding to the changes that COVID-19 had wrought, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences removed the stipulation that a movie must be shown in a theatre before it could become eligible for the coveted Best Picture Oscar nomination.
And thus the stage was set for an Oscar ceremony in 2021 the likes of which no one will have ever seen before, with at least seven Netflix releases eligible for a Best Picture nomination, with each of those films set for Oscar nominations, ranging from Best Actor and Actress, Supporting Actress and Actor, to Best Director, Music, Sound and technical awards.
Today on VanRamblings, the Netflix features set to dominate Oscars 2021.
For the upcoming Academy Awards — delayed due to the pandemic until Sunday, April 25th — Netflix has pulled out all the stops. Already streaming, there’s Spike Lee’s Best Picture contender Da 5 Bloods, Gina Prince-Bythewood’s well-mounted action thriller The Old Guard, and Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay contender, I’m Thinking of Ending Things.
And, available today on Netflix, there’s writer-director Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 which is, as Variety lead critic Owen Gleiberman writes, “a knockout, and the rare drama about the 1960s that’s powerful, authentic and moving enough to feel as if it were taking place today, a briskly paced and immersive film bristling with Sorkin’s distinctive verbal fusillades, a cinematic powder keg of film with a serious message that seamlessly blends a conventional yet compelling courtroom procedural with protest reenactments and documentary footage, the film offering an absorbing primer of a ruefully meaningful period in American history.”
Due to arrive on Netflix on Tuesday, November 24th — on the eve of American Thanksgiving — director Ron Howard’s big budget film adaptation of J.D. Vance’s autobiographical best-seller, Hillbilly Elegy offers a powerful account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town, that also provides broader, probing insight into the struggles of America’s white working class.
A passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis, Glenn Close and Amy Adams are at the centre of Howard’s film, and solid prospects for Best Actress and Best Supporting Oscar nods. Howard will be in the mix, as well.
Netflix will release David Fincher’s Mank in select theatres in November before the black-and-white film begins streaming on December 4th.
The Hollywood-centric period piece follows alcoholic screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz (certain Best Actor nominee Gary Oldman) as he races to finish the screenplay for Orson Welles’ 1941 masterpiece Citizen Kane. That classic picture was fraught with behind the scenes drama, as Mankiewicz and Welles argued over credit and who wrote what, which became even more important once the film won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.
The original script for Mank was written by Fincher’s father, Jack Fincher, so this project certainly means a lot to the filmmaker. Mank boasts a running time of 2 hours and 11 minutes, so it won’t be quite as long as Zodiac or The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, not that Fincher ever wastes a single frame. The film is expected to be a major awards contender for Netflix.
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. George C. Wolfe directs, Denzel Washington produces, and Oscar-winner Viola Davis (Fences) stars as Ma Rainey in Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s adaptation of the hit August Wilson Broadway play. The late Chadwick Boseman and If Beale Street Could Talk star Colman Domingo play members of Rainey’s ’20s jazz band.
Awards prospects: Ambitious trumpeter Levee was 43-year-old Boseman’s final role before succumbing to his private battle with colon cancer in August; he looks rail thin in film stills. Posthumous Oscars went to Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight) and Peter Finch (Network) among others. In this case, with the beloved Black Panther star also in the running for his supporting role as a U.S. Army soldier in Vietnam in the Spike Lee joint, Da 5 Bloods, many believe that it’s likely Boseman will wind up in the Best Actor category for Ma Rainey, with Davis as Best Actress. Like Mank, the elaborate period setting should be attractive to Academy craft branches.
Release date: In theatres early December, streams on Netflix December 18.
Oscar-winner and Hollywood icon George Clooney directs The Midnight Sky, a sci-fi thriller with a script by Mark L. Smith (The Revenant) based on the Lily Brooks-Dalton novel about an Arctic scientist (Clooney) attempting to warn a NASA spaceship astronaut (Felicity Jones) not to return to doomed planet Earth. Awards prospects: Netflix took advantage of the London Film Festival this month (October 2 – 18) with a tribute to Clooney, complete with clips. Critical reaction will determine whether The Midnight Sky will figure in the Oscar sweepstakes, but Clooney (Syriana) has delivered in the past, as has Oscar-nominated Jones (Theory of Everything).
Release date: In theatres early December, Netflix début to be announced.
In the coming weeks, VanRamblings will publish a list of our top 20 films of 2019, from Teen Spirit (now available on Amazon Prime) back in February through all the films yet to screen in Vancouver — from Clint Eastwood’s new film, Richard Jewell (December 13) to director Jay Roach’s story of the takedown of Fox News’ Roger Ailes, Bombshell (December 20), plus Greta Gerwig’s all-star cast adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, and Sam Mendes’ epic WW1 blockbuster, 1917, both set to open Christmas Day.
Now, two of VanRamblings’ top 20 films of 2019 that demand to be seen … Best Propulsive Good Time Hollywood Popcorn Flick of 2019
The first Hollywood film of 2019 that offers movie patrons a guaranteed good time inside a darkened movie theatre, a film for the whole family, the last film made by 20th Century Fox before they sold the company to Disney, a glorious barn burner of a film redolent with heart-in-mouth and tug-at-the-heart emotion, not only one of the greatest racing movies ever made, but an infectious, engrossing true life drama that features some of the finest onscreen performances of the year, Matt Damon as you’ve never seen him before and Christian Bale sympathetic and at top of form, with a supporting cast who will pull you into this audience-pleasing story like mad.
In other words, a must-see film at the multiplex. And it opens today! Ford v Ferrari is expected to win the weekend box office handily with as much as $31 million at 3,528 venues across the continent (and, likely, another $20+ million in foreign markets over the first weekend, with China and the rest of Asia set to screen Ford v Ferrari in the weeks to come — all of which oughta make the film a solid 2019 Oscar contender). The Disney-Fox film follows an eccentric team of American engineers and designers, led by automotive visionary Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) and his British driver, Ken Miles (Christian Bale), who are dispatched by Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts) and Lee Iacocca (Jon Bernthal) to build a new vehicle to defeat the dominant Ferrari at the 1966 Le Mans world championship in France.
Click on the graphic above to access reviews for Ford v Ferrari on Rotten Tomatoes
The Probable Best Picture Academy Award Winner for 2019
Opening today for two weeks only in exclusive engagement at the Vancouver International Film Festival’s Vancity Theatre on Seymour Street — where advance tickets for the three screenings each day this weekend are already sold old — Martin Scorsese’s gangster opus, the capper of a directorial career that spans fifty years, the film that opened the New York Film Festival to rave reviews, a film that clocks in at 209 minutes that will seem like half that time the film is so enthralling, one of the five films that will garner the most Oscar nominations — a probable Best Picture Academy Award winner come Sunday evening, February 9th — The Irishman is, as Boston Globe critic Ty Burr enthuses, “a masterpiece”, a film Richard Roeper in the Chicago Sun-Times says is “the best film of the year and one of the best films of the decade,” and as other critics have written …
… a genuinely new, deeply satisfying, serenely confident film presented with subtlety, wit and resonance, a sumptuous film that tells an epic, extraordinary tale of organized crime’s grip on American life as seen through the eyes of one outwardly ordinary man, a film that is a revelation throughout, intoxicating, history-making cinema, a melancholy eulogy for growing old and losing your humanity, a film to be savoured in every one of its 209 minutes, a knockout story that is surprisingly, surpassingly delicate, told by a master filmmaker with heart and sombre introspection, a film that takes a deep dive into the darkest of souls but manages to remain engaging, lively, funny, full of grace, tender, reflective, mournful, a film of grandeur and bloody memories, a heartbreaking film that presents Joe Pesci as you’ve never seen him before, with superb performances from Al Pacino and Robert De Niro — together for the first time in a Scorsese film — and an absolute must-see at the cinema.”
So, that’s it: two of the best films of 2019, both deserving of your time and scarce dollars, both films (in their own way) epic and unforgettable cinema.
In 1989 five young black men were wrongfully convicted of raping a woman jogging in New York City. Leading the charge against them was a real estate mogul whose divisive rhetoric can be found in his Presidency today.
Nearly three decades before the sociopathic pseudo-billionaire began his run for Presidency of the United States — before Donald Trump called for a ban on Muslims entering the U.S., for the expulsion of all undocumented migrants, before he branded Mexicans as “rapists” and mocked the disabled — Trump called for the reinstatement of the death penalty in New York following a rape case in which the five teenagers were wrongfully convicted.
The miscarriage of justice is widely remembered as a definitive moment in New York’s fractured race relations.
But Trump’s intervention — he signed full-page newspaper advertisements implicitly calling for the boys to die — has been gradually overlooked. Now those involved in the case of the so-called Central Park Five and its aftermath say Trump’s rhetoric served as an unlikely precursor to a unique brand of divisive populism that powered his rise to political prominence.
Donald Trump ‘was the firestarter’ when he called for the death penalty in the 1989 Central Park jogger case, says Yusef Salaam, one of the wrongfully convicted Central Park Five: “To see that he has not changed his position of being a hateful person … what has become of the country with a person like Donald Trump as President?”
Why is this raising of the case of the Central Park Five relevant now?
Jharrel Jerome, in Ava Duvernay’s new Netflix mini-series, When They See Us.
Today on Netflix, acclaimed director Ava DuVernay sets about to restore the good names of the five Harlem teens who were arrested, convicted and imprisoned in the 1989 rape of a jogger, only to have those convictions vacated in 2002. They’re more commonly known as the Central Park Five, but that’s a pejorative creator DuVernay excludes almost entirely from her riveting four-episode documentary dramatization, When They See Us.
Here’s a brief survey of critical reviews of Duvernay’s narrative drama …
It is unsettling to realize that many people looking for something new to watch on Netflix this week will actually be unfamiliar with what happened in Central Park, New York, on an April night in 1989. What happened was the rape and attempted murder of a young woman who was jogging there, Trisha Meili. The 28-year-old Meili was doing her usual evening run after a long day at work on Wall Street.
And while there are many unsettling scenes in the first hour of When They See Us (streams today on Netflix), nothing is more disconcerting than the realization, an hour into the drama, that we know very little about Trisha Meili. She is not the focus of the story. The five boys charged with the attack on her are the point. The way in which they were coerced into confessions, threatened and intimidated, is the point.
When They See Us is superbly made and startling in its invective. That invective is aimed with blistering intensity, not just at a justice system that allowed a miscarriage of justice, but at all of American society. The point of the title is that nobody actually saw the boys, who became known as the Central Park Five, as who they were. They saw black youths and wanted to convict them.
Donald Trump took out ads in New York newspapers calling for the restoration of the death penalty so that the boys would be executed. Now, he runs the country. And the state of the country is the real point of When They See Us. As such, it’s a heightened, fraught series, the most unsettling drama so far in 2019, and meant to be.
John Doyle, The Globe and Mail
A searing portrait of injustice and innocence lost Matthew Gilbert, Boston Globe
Ava Duvernay’s mini-series will break any heart, except, perhaps, that of our president, who maintains their guilt despite the confession and DNA evidence that exonerated them in 2002 and led to a $41 million legal settlement from New York City. Knowing with certainty that the boys are innocent makes watching each step of their descent into hell — from the manipulated false confessions that open the miniseries and the damning group-think media coverage that follows, to the way their young promise is squashed by prison and the stigma that trails them once they’re released — into an unnervingly doom-ridden tragedy.
The Vindication of the Central Park Five Judy Berman, Time magazine
Nearly an hour into the premiere episode of Ava DuVernay’s Netflix miniseries When They See Us, four of the boys who will soon be known as the Central Park Five are left alone together in a holding cell. (The fifth, Korey Wise, is locked in with adults because he’s all of 16 years old.) They’ve just spent hours being interrogated — and intimidated — by police seeking confessions to support the theory that they gang-raped a woman in the park and left her for dead. In fact, most of them don’t even know each other. There’s a long silence before they start talking. The camera alternates between closeups of these scared, exhausted, beaten-up kids’ faces. They see each other. Hopefully, we see them, too.
As the title suggests, the idea of seeing is crucial to this elegant, wrenching four-part reenactment of the Central Park Five saga. DuVernay, who wrote, directed and (along with collaborators including Oprah and Robert De Niro) executive produced the miniseries, has a gift for framing a familiar historical moment so that you can really see it for the first time. In this case, the Selma director’s simplest but most profound decision is to portray these five black and Latino boys, ages 14 to 16, as the scared children they are, rather than as the gangsters or delinquents they were made out to be.
All four episodes of When They See Us are now available on Netflix.
