Oscar Volley - Best Actor

For today's Oscar volley, Lynn Lee and Glenn Dunks discuss the Best Actor race.

LYNN: Glenn, it’s been a while since I’ve felt this strongly about the Best Actor race, so I’ll just lay my cards on the table: I really, really want both Paul Giamatti (The Holdovers) and Jeffrey Wright (American Fiction) to be nominated, would love Andrew Scott (All of Us Strangers) to join them --though I think he’s a long shot-- and really DON’T want Leonardo DiCaprio to get in for Killers of the Flower Moon.

It’s extra personal for me because I saw American Fiction, All of Us Strangers, and The Holdovers back to back at the Middleburg Film Festival earlier this year and loved all of them. More to the point, while all three films have their flaws, each one worked like gangbusters largely because of the fantastic acting --especially the outstanding male lead performance...

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Best Lead Actor - First Round Predictions

by Nathaniel R

Cillian Murphy (Oppenheimer) and Colman Domingo (Rustin) are both working the classic 'biopic' angle

As with the first round of Best Supporting Actor predictions, we're opting to pretend that the strike will be resolved in time for most of the movies that are scheduled for awards season to continue with their current plans. We use the word "pretend" because it feels increasingly likely that this awards season will be an unprecented combo of fewer than usual releases and zero celebrity campaigning. We hope the studio powers-that-be will wake from their incessant greed and learn to share the wealth with the people without whom they can't make money (actors/writers) but we're not going to hold out breath lest we asphyxiate.

On to Best Actor. This category is often heavy on biographical 'great men' roles and there's little reason to expect this year will be any different. Cillian Murphy, Colman Domingo, Bradley Cooper, Joaquin Phoenix, and Adam Driver will all potentially benefit from that tried and true awards-appeal genre...

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Familiar Faces: The Chris Nolan Players

by Nathaniel R

Christopher Nolan's "Tenet" cast has a lot of first timers, including all of its leads. So will John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, or Elizabeth Debicki come back for more?

Normally we wouldn't do one of these "familiar faces" for a director known for sequels since they automatically give you repeated thespians. Repeat appearances in the work of a franchise director don't necessarily indicate affection or a favorite performative color on their palette. They're only a sure sign of  contractual / narrative obligation. Elsewhere in Christopher Nolan's filmography, though, we see that he is a true creature of habit when it comes to actors so chances are he would have worked with some of the franchise players again even if it weren't mandatory. 

With Tenet now reasonably priced for rental more people will be seeing it. Let's look at the faces that have most frequently populated Nolan's ambitious and often very financially successful endeavors...

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Review: "Free Fire"

by Chris Feil

At first look, Ben Wheatley’s Free Fire seems like another Tarantino retread, all snarky hyper-violence with a wink that we’ve seen dozens of times - and to some degree it is. But the film isn’t so much the macho wankfest it will be shrugged off as, nor the cornucopia of gun adoration that the marketing promises. Where Free Fire delights, even charms, is by finding its thrills in the shady repartee and double crosses between criminals rather than the bloodshed. 

Guns do play the central role in the film’s “deal gone wrong”, but they aren't responsible for what makes things go south...

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Beauty vs Beast: Franchise First Class

Jason from MNPP here hoping everyone here in the States had a good holiday weekend and outside the States then just a plain good weekend, period -- I spent a good three hours (including something like half an hour of trailers) of my weekend in the theater watching the new X-Men movie, as did a few of you (not enough to make the studio happy though) and I gotta say I agree with Nat's take on it - mediocre stuff that needed to embrace its silliness more often. I'd love for just one superhero movie to be about something other than superpowers being the worst burden in all the world, ya know?

Anyway I found myself thinking a lot about Jennifer Lawrence during and after the film - god she seemed miserable, didn't she? She delivered her lines with all the passion of a smurf cadaver. That said I wouldn't be surprised if they could coerce her, with dollars, to revisit Mystique in the future... but for the time being at least she has no contractual obligations to her two big franchises. If she chose to from here on out she could make nothing but David O. Russell movies. (Imagine...) So let's look back at what was.

PREVIOUSLY It was Cillian Murphy against Rachel McAdams in a random Red Eye revisit last week, and it was Bay Breezes for everybody - McAdams' flight-bound final girl took just over 60% of the vote. Said Derreck:

"Team Lisa because she was quick and resourceful. They had the oddest chemistry going on to the point where if he wasn't all terroristy, it would have been nice if they went out for a drink at the end of the movie. But you know, murder and all tends to get in the way of that. Always the years, always the love, always the murder."