Beauty Break: Here's to Cinematic Eye Candy!

The visual categories for the 2018 Film Bitch Awards are now fully announced. Click on over to peruse the nominations for Costume Design, Cinematography, and Production Design aka the best cinematic eye candy of the year. Cinematic eye candy is more than just delicious for the eyes. These crafts also strengthen characterization, theme, mood, storytelling, and emotional impact when the artisans are really inspired. After the jump, because five little poster doesn't feel like enough images from the 12 most beautifully shot movies this year that we called out in Cinematography (though only five can be nominees).

A BAKER'S DOZEN OF THE MOST BEAUTIFULLY SHOT MOVIES OF 2018. 
Presented in alpha order after the jump...

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Final Predictions: All Visual Categories

We're almost to the nominations, can you believe it? So we're furiously trying to wrap up our predictions. Let's do Costume Design and the rest of the eye candy categories.

COSTUME DESIGN
My favourite tech category should give three-time winner Sandy Powell a historic THIRD double-nomination in a single category with both Mary Poppins Returns and The Favourite feeling secure for nominations. It also feels like there's little chance that Black Panther could miss, and we expect voters will want to take this opportunity to finally hand Ruth E Carter her Oscar (this will be her third Oscar nomination, tying her with Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer for most Oscar nominations for a black woman). Those are the locks...

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Guild Nominations En Masse!

by Nathaniel R

Today is a big day. It's Globe fallout day but also the day when  the guilds start announcing en masse. Today we heard from the writers, the editors, and the art directors guilds to give us more clues as to which films the industry is gaga for. The only films that scored at all three guilds were A Star is Born and Roma, which NOT COINCIDENTALLY feel like the two most likely films to win Best Picture on Oscar night, give or take Black Panther.

The nominations are all after the jump...

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Blueprints: "A Simple Favor"

This week Jorge dives into martinis and missing persons, to examine the mythos of a perfect woman in the fall's most delightful surprise.

First impressions are important, and writers usually either build upon or subvert the first thing we see about a character: the clothes that they’re wearing, the setting that they appear in, the way they carry themselves, and the adjectives they use. All of these elements can tell us who a character is before they even say a word. 

A Simple Favor is all about image and perception. The image we present to the world, and the part of ourselves that we keep hidden. The way we are versus the way we are perceived. In particular, the film is about Emily’s image. Not only her physical looks (which are hugely important), but the aura and lore that she has created around her. The idea of Emily...

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Two Visual Triumphs Seeking Distribution: "The River" and "Shadow"

Since we're already deep into NYFF - thanks to Murtada and Jason for this excellent reviews (I'll join them shortly) --  I must accept that all the full reviews I had planned for things without release dates I saw at TIFF just aren't going to happen. But several films we caught are hitting theaters soon so they will get reviews: A Star is Born (10/5), Beautiful Boy (10/12), Border (10/26), and Boy Erased (11/2). In the meantime here are the final two TIFF films I must pinpoint because they don't have distribution yet but they totally deserve it.

Shadow
I'm calling this one 'camp without color,' because we always think of "camp" as something innately colorful, don't we? Director Zhang Yimou (House of the Flying Daggers) gifts for visual spectacle remain undimmed and this time he organizes his mise en scene around the duality of the yin yang symbols as well as inkwash paintings...

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