Sight & Sound's Top 20

So many lists and awards announcements this week you'd think it was... oh, yes, it is December. Sight and Sound enter the fray now with their top 20 which is a mix of expected auteur worship titles, festival films that may or may not ever actually open. It's also very now. The oldest title here is the great German continuous shot film Victoria (which premiered at festivals last year -- we nominated it for cinematography in 2015) but almost everything else just opened or hasn't opened yet! It's to be expected but also deeply frustrating that distributors never really catch up to film buzz...

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Oscar's Visual Effects Race, Round One

This just in... The Academy will narrow down the list of possibilities in Visual Effects on a couple of weeks to ten films but they've cobbled together the initial list of 20 semi-finalists. Along with all six superhero films of the year, the presumed frontrunner The Jungle Book is accounted for as is one animated picture - Kubo and the Two Strings. Kubo isn't the first animated picture to make the bakeoffs but only one has ever been nominated for the Oscar in this category (The Nightmare Before Christmas, 1993).

The complete lists of finalists, Oscar trivia, and the films that didn't make the cut are after the jump...

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Questions for the Podcast?

Tis the Season. We're feeling festive.

The whole podcast team (Katey, Nick, Joe and Nathaniel) will be recording Sunday morning (possibly the last time in 2016 due to the holiday madness coming up) discussing new films and current awards buzz.

Got any questions for us?
We'll devote some minutes to reader inquiries if you do. 

Open Thread

What movie were you thinking about right before you clicked over to TFE? And what else is on your cinematic mind? 

John Waters's Top 10 of 2016

Chris here. One of the most interesting curiosities every year in Best Of kudos is the list from trashcamp grandmaster John Waters. The provcateur always delivers a list that is surprising in its inclusions both for the purely unexpected (like last year's Cinderella) and for title or two you probably haven't heard of. Rest assured no matter how many films you have seen in a given year, Waters has seen more and his taste is more expansive. Eat your heart out, critics groups.

This year his top choice goes to a film getting lots of breakthrough love this week - Trey Edward Shults's Krisha. The film is quite a fitting choice for the filmmaker - with nonactors on a microbudget, Krisha is all taught social mores, fraught observations of family structures, and psychosis. Sounds somewhat like his own fascinations, albeit with much more inhibitions. Here's what he says of the film, with the rest of his list after the jump:

This hilariously harrowing portrait of a family reunion ruined by an alcoholic relative and too many dogs is told with verve and lunacy and features a top-notch performance by Krisha Fairchild, the director’s own aunt. Other people’s hell can sometimes be so much fun.

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