"The Lost Daughter" reigns at the Gotham Awards

by Nathaniel R

Peter Sarsgaard, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Dakota Johnson at the Gotham Awards

Last night, while many film journalists were at one of the several West Side Story premieres, the Gotham Awards were held celebrating much less expensive but also captivating cinema.  Maggie Gyllenhaal's feature directorial debut, The Lost Daughter  reigned winning four of its five categories. This was bad news for Passing, another Netflix film (which we like even more though they're both fine films) which received 5 nominations but lost in all of its categories. Other multiple nominees who took home no prizes included A24 films like Red Rocket, The Green Knight, and C'mon C'mon, 

Outside of  The Lost Daughter the biggest awards season boost was definitely for CODA. The family drama about a child of deaf adults who wants to be a professional singer won prizes for both its leading lady Emilia Jones and her onscreen father Troy Kotsur. Kotsur really should be more competitive in Best Supporting Actor discussions so perhaps this will help!

THE WINNERS and more commentary are after the jump...

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Sundance Opening Night: CODA

By Abe Friedtanzer

 

It’s never the biggest movies that premiere on opening night of the Sundance Film Festival, but they’re always worth looking at carefully since they do set the tone for what comes next. I reviewed the first films I saw in 2020 and 2019 for this site, and they were both among the best films I saw each year – Summertime, director Carlos López Estrada’s follow-up to another Sundance opening night premiere, Blindspotting, coming out sometime this summer, and the Alex Gibney documentary The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, which ended up debuting on HBO.

That impressive club adds a new member this year in the form of CODA. I didn’t realize until I finished watching the film that its title is an acronym for Child of Deaf Adults...

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