"Pain and Glory" leads the European Film Award Nominations

by Nathaniel R

The European Film Awards will be held in Berlin in just one month (December 7th) and big names are nominated: Pedro Almodóvar, Antonio Banderas, Yorgos Lanthimos, Olivia Colman, Roman Polanski, and more. But the question is who will actually attend and who will win? The Oscar submitted titles from Spain (Pain and Glory) and Italy (The Traitor) lead the nominations along with Roman Polanski's An Officer and a Spy from France. Almodóvar is of course an old favourite of the EFAs. With the Pain & Glory nominations he's now up to 22 EFA nominations (he's won 6 times plus received a special honor). His movies have won the top prize twice (All About My Mother and Talk To Her) while Volver won an "audience" version of Best Film, too. 

A full list of nominations with more comments is after the jump...

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Musings from SAG screenings (Pt 2): Judy, Bombshell, Little Women, and Dolemite

renee's first SAG winsIf you missed part one, we've invited a longtime SAG member to share this thoughts from SAG Nominating Committee screenings of the would be contenders... 

JUDY:  This one definitely got the most lackluster response.  When the movie was over, there was only a smattering of applause—though I had the feeling that had something to do with the way it ends.  It kind of ends with a whimper. But people got on their feet for Renee Zellweger—who appeared along with Finn Wittrock. They gushed about her performance—the acting, the singing, all of it.  And she had some interesting things to say about the research she did—particularly in regard to addiction. It’s an engaging performance, I think—but is it really as much of a “transformation” as people say?  I feel like you see a lot of Renee Zellweger in there—like, it’s as much Judy Garland playing Renee Zellweger as it is Renee Zellweger playing Judy Garland. Does that make any sense? And for what it’s worth, I hated the Oz stuff.  Was Louis B. Mayer a sexual predator?  You can’t just drop that suggestion into all the other horrible stuff and move on.  It all felt very undefined.

BOMBSHELL:  With no disrespect to Ms. Zellweger, the “transformation of the year” has got to be Charlize Theron as Megyn Kelly...

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"Apollo 11" and "American Factory" are big at the Cinema Eye Honors

by Nathaniel R

Cinema Eye is the only international documentary honor that surveys the whole craft of documentary filmmaking (like the Oscars, they look at cinematography, editing, and the like). They are now in their 12th year and have announced their latest batch of nominees. The nominations are determined by "top documentary programmers" from various festivals all over the world. The awards take place over an entire weekend, January 4th-6th, 2020, which serves as the finale of what is basically a multi-city travelling festival. 

This year Apollo 11 (Neon) and American Factory (Netflix) led the nominations (5 categories each) while Homecoming: A Film By Beyonce leads the Broadcast portion of the nominations with 3 nods. This year's "Legacy Award" will go to the trippy classic Koyaanisqatsi. Unfortunately Cinema Eye is one of those awards that appears to have no consistency of the number of nominees ranging anywhere from 4 to 8 nominations depending on the category.

The nominations are after the jump...

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Review: Last Christmas

by Chris Feil

A sure signal of the coming holiday season at the movies is the arrival of unpretentious lighter fare like Last Christmas. This year’s offering falls in line with the easy charms of such previous entries as The Holiday and Almost Christmas, but also arrives with a somewhat affably strange lump of ingredients. Inspired by the Wham! song and packed with a slew of George Michael songs, the Paul Feig-directed film is co-written by Emma Thompson (with Bryony Kimmings and Greg Wise) and offers up timely context within a classic romcom structure. It’s a sugar high of a movie that remains grounded in some substance, not exactly tidy but satisfyingly more than meets the eye.

Emilia Clarke plays the disillusioned would-be singer and Yugoslavian immigrant Kate, couch-hopping between friends that she quickly burns out with carelessness and working in a Christmas-themed giftshop. She avoids her family, particularly her domineering mother (also played by Thompson), and is increasingly testing the patience of her demanding but doting boss (Michelle Yeoh). Kate’s self-destructiveness comes after a serious illness has left her not with renewed gratitude, but with a diminished sense of self she has internalized into constant misbehavior. But her main challenger in the struggle comes when a charming man on a bike named Tom (Henry Golding) wanders in and out of her life.

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Spike Lee gets the "Chaplin"

by Nathaniel R

The honors aren’t over for Spike Lee who has spent the last two awards season in high demand walking red carpets and giving speeches as an Honorary Oscar winner and then a competitive winner for the screenplay of BlacKkKlansman. Next up the Chaplin Award at Film at Lincoln Center on April 27th, 2020 . They first handed out this award in 1972 to, you guessed it, Charlie Chaplin… though it obviously wasn’t called the Chaplin Award that first year — what was it called? The official website doesn’t say!

 Though the Chaplin Award has mostly gone to movie stars since, or directors who also happened to be famous movie stars (like Chaplin himself), a fair number of behind the camera legends have also been recognized… especially in the first ten years of the award. 

We’ve highlighted the directors in the list of previous recipients after the jump...

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