Podcast: Top Ten Lists

Nick and Nathaniel and Joe compare their top ten lists for the year -- only two movies are on all three lists.

Index (42 minutes)
00:01 Nick & Nathaniel talk Fire at Sea, The Lobster, Right Now Wrong Then, La La Land, allergies to directors and "delight" at the movies
14:00 Joe joins in for The Witch, Little Men, Ixcanul, and Francophonia  
23:00 Annette Bening's miracle performance and the bliss of watching 20th Century Women
28:30 More divisive films: The Handmaiden and American Honey
38:00 Things to Come and wrap-up

You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes. Continue the conversations in the comments, won't you? 

Our Top Ten Lists

"American Honey" & "Moonlight" lead the Spirit Award Nominations

Nominations have been announced for the 20th annual Film Independent Spirit Awards, which we generally abbreviate as "Indie Spirits" or "Spirits". American Honey and Moonlight, two idiosyncratic visions, lead with six nominations each. Moonlight, which takes the ensemble prize (but wasn't nominated for individual performances) will also presumably be hot with Oscars. The two other Oscar Best Picture contenders that did very well at the Spirits today were Jackie and Manchester by the Sea. Other People, the cancer dramedy loosely based on the directors own life, can also be very happy about its nomination showing. Other buzzy titles like Hell or High Water, 20th Century Women, and Loving had mixed success, picking up some key nods but not others despite their high profiles.

Moonlight receives six Spirit nominations... and seems likely to win a few of them.

 And here are two big reasons to celebrate -- Viggo Mortensen (Captain Fantastic) and Isabelle Huppert (Elle) were both nominated. Oscar nominations are hardly done deals for either of those exquisite performances so any attention that can be drawn is worth celebrating. The full list with commentary after the jump (titles links go to our reviews)...

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FYC: Critics Choice Best Young Performer of 2016

Each year one of our awards traditions is to help fellow BFCA members choose more wisely when it comes to the "Young Performer" category by sharing an eligibility list. The lazy nominations each year prove that help is needed. Here's the thing: it can be difficult to even think of who is eligible when you're filling out a ballot because you don't get a list of choices and it's not a category people campaign for or one that the internet talks about. So we solve that problem right here. Our other belief, which is why we do this, is that if you actually pay attention there are enough worthy performances each year to divvy this category up into male and female as the other acting categories are divvied up. But, yes, you have to be paying attention beyond 5 or 6 movies and leading roles to notice the truly special work. 

Ballots go out to the BFCA soon so here's a cheat sheet to help them vote. The category is UNDER 21... (it should obviously be adjusted to 17 and under but that's a fight for another day). Please FYC your favorites in the comments!

ELIGIBLE "YOUNG PERFORMERS" IN 2016 FILMS

GIRLS
Ella Anderson (11) as "Rachel" in The Boss
Ruby Barnhill (12) as "Sophie" in The BFG DEBUT
Annalise Basso (18) as "Vespyr" in Captain Fantastic
Elle Fanning (18) as "Julie" in 20th Century Women  OR as "Jesse" in Neon Demon (3 previous nods in this category)
Royalty Hightower (11) as "Toni" in The Fits  DEBUT
Samantha Isler (18) as "Keilyr" in Captain Fantastic
Avin Manshadi (?) as "Dorsa" in Under the Shadow DEBUT
Madina Nalwanga (?) as "Phiona" in Queen of Katwe DEBUT
Alexis Nebblet (11) as "Beezy" in The Fits  DEBUT
Eva Peterson (18?) as "Crystal" in The Boss  DEBUT
Ella Purnell (20) as "Emma Bloom" in Miss Peregrine's Home...
Angourie Rice (15) as "Holly March" in The Nice Guys
Hailee Steinfeld (19) as "Nadine" in Edge of Seventeen (previous winner of this category)
Anya Taylor-Joy (20) as "Thomasin" in The Witch DEBUT
Madison Wolfe (14) as "Janet" in The Conjuring 2 

BOYS 
Michael Barbieri (14) as "Tony Calvelli" in Little Men DEBUT
Asa Butterfield (19) as "Jake" in Miss Peregrine's Home... (two previous nods in this category)
Markees Christmas (17) as "Morris" in Morris From America DEBUT
Julian Dennison (14) as "Ricky" in Hunt for the Wilderpeople
Devin Druid (?) as "Conrad" in Louder than Bombs
Oakes Fegley (11?) as "Pete" in Pete's Dragon
Nicholas Hamilton (16) as "Rellian" in Captain Fantastic
Alex R Hibbert (?) as "Little" in Moonlight DEBUT
Lucas Hedges (20) as "Patrick" in Manchester by the Sea
Tom Holland (20) as "Peter Parker" in Captain America: Civil War (previous nominee in this category)
Jharrel Jerome (19) as "Kevin (16)" in Moonlight DEBUT
Jaeden Lieberher (13) as "Alton" in Midnight Special (previous nominee in this category)
Lewis MacDougall (14) as "Conor" in A Monster Calls
Sunny Pawar (?) as "Young Saroo" in Lion DEBUT
Ashton Sanders (20) as "Chiron" in Moonlight 
Harvey Scrimshaw (14) as "Caleb" in The Witch
Neel Sethi (12) as "Mowgli" in The Jungle Book DEBUT
Theo Taplitz (13) as "Jake Jardine" in Little Men DEBUT
Ferdia Walsh-Peelo (17) as "Cosmo" in Sing Street DEBUT
Lucas Jade Zumann (15) as "Jamie" in 20th Century Women

Who would you vote for?

Interview: Paulina García on Her Favorite Actresses and the Political Relevance of 'Little Men'

by Jose Solis

Audiences fell in love with Paulina García as the romantic heroine in Gloria, the Chilean sensation that won her the Best Actress award at the 2013 Berlin Film Festival and other honors along the way (including a nomination here). In that film she gave a delightful performance as a woman ready to find purpose in a life that others thought had lost all meaning. Where in Gloria she exuded a sincere need of approval and warmth, Leonor, her character in Ira Sachs’ Little Men is just the opposite. She’s a woman in full control of her emotions and moods, she seems a little bit too calculating to Brian (Greg Kinnear) who has just inherited a house from his late father Max, from whom Leonor rented a commercial space, and finds himself in the position of having to raise her rent. She’s also intimidating to her son Tony (Michael Barbieri) who lowers his head when asking her for permission to go hang out with his new friend Jake (Theo Taplitz) who happens to be Brian’s son.

But in García’s richly layered performance we see a woman on the edge, she’s about to lose everything she’s worked her entire life for and she refuses to go down without a battle. García is the kind of actor who is eloquent even when she’s not speaking, one of her glances can be more devastating than a Shakespearean soliloquy, a simple “no” from Leonor can contain an entire life history. I had the opportunity to speak to her from her home in Chile, to discuss her work with Sachs, actresses she loves, and why Leonor is such an important character for 2016...

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Review: Ira Sach's "Little Men"

This review was originally published in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad

Feeling fatigued by summer movie season's emphasis on loud and flashy but ultimately empty spectacles? You're in luck. Little Men, now playing in limited release, is the perfect antidote: quiet but insightful, memorable and substantive. It's not a spectacle by any means but you should still see it inside the movie theater because it's the kind of careful storytelling that benefits from being fully inside of it. Getting lost in a story is much easier to accomplish in the pages of a great novel or the dark of a movie theater than if you wait around to Netflix and chill. The movie comes to us from one of our best LGBT directors, Ira Sachs. The New York based writer/director made his feature debut 20 years ago with The Delta (1996) but recently he's been on quite a roll.

Little Men is not an adaptation of the Louisa May Alcott sequel to Little Women, but it does feel like a rich unexpected sequel to a more contemporary future classic. Ira Sach's last film was the moving gay seniors drama Love is Strange starring John Lithgow and Alfred Molina whose marriage at the beginning of the film sets off a surprising chain of events which leaves them homeless and at the mercy of friends and relatives. That beautiful movie ended, rather intuitively, with a wordless and narratively inconsequential scene in which we followed their young nephew on his skateboard down the streets of the city at magic hour. The image was rapturous and watery... or rather just rapturous; I was watching it through cascading tears was all. [More...]

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