Oscar Shorts Pt 3: The Live Action Nominees

Chris Reviewed the Animated Shorts. Glenn ranked the Documentary Shorts. Now here's Eric with the Live Action nominees to complete the set.

It’s my third year covering the nominees for the Live Action Short Oscar for TFE, and this batch of hopefuls presents the strongest lineup of those years.  Usually there are one or two clunkers, but this year all five films are intelligently made, run the perfect length, and linger beautifully...

Click to read more ...

A Glimpse at Oscar's Nominated Animated Shorts

by Chris Feil

Is this an off year for the Animated Short category? It’s (shamefully) my first year to catch the entire lineup, but unfortunately that seems to be the general response. If you check out the films in theatres you will also be treated to a few of the shortlisted contenders, but the package sadly doesn’t include the delightful In A Heartbeat. Even if this is also the least exciting lineup of the three Short categories this year, there are still delights to be found in this category, with animation styles the run the full spectrum from hand-drawn to computer generated to stop motion animation. Let’s look at the nominees...

Click to read more ...

What did you see this weekend?

by Nathaniel R

Weekend Box Office (Feb 9th-11th)
W I D E 800+ screens	L I M I T E D excluding prev. wide
1. 🔺 Fifty Shades Freed $38.8 NEW REVIEW	1. 🔺 La Boda de Valentina $1.1 on 331 screens NEW
2. 🔺 Peter Rabbit $25 NEW	2. 🔺 Pad Man  $760k on 152 screens NEW
3. 🔺 The 15:17 To Paris $12.6  NEW	3. 🔺 Oscar Nominated Short Films $615k on 180 screens NEW
4. Jumanji $9.8 (cum. $365.6)	4. 🔺  A Fantastic Woman $121k on 20 screens (cum. $232k) CAPSULE | REVIEW
5. The Greatest Showman $6.4 (cum. $146.5) REVIEW | ANOTHER HIT MUSICAL	5. 🔺 The Insult $109k on 50 screens (cum. $454k)

Fifty Shades Freed  continued its franchise's box office power by opening at #1 again. This weekend's bow also brought the franchise's total box office haul over the billion dollar mark. That's a lot of green for something barely blue...

Click to read more ...

Doc Corner: Ranking the documentary short nominees by 'How much politicians could learn from them'

by Glenn Dunks

Last year we had fun (well, about as much fun as could be had) ranking the Best Documentary Short Subject nominees by how depressing they were. And while this year’s collection of nominees tackle subjects like racial police brutality and the opioid crisis, the five selected titles are somewhat lighter in their touch. If this category is too often (yet not exactly unfairly) criticized for being a home to just the most miserable bunch of films imaginable, this year’s nominees should at least leave audiences with a bit more hope and inspiration.

So let's instead rank the Best Documentary Short Subject nominees in order of which we would most like to force our current political leaders to watch if given the chance. Documentaries can be extremely powerful in changing people’s perception of the world around them – and while we are politically more divided now than ever, I’d like to believe that if people with power actually watched these shorts (totalling around two and a half hours) then maybe they would think twice. Maybe. Probably not. But we’d like them to try...

Click to read more ...

Streamable doc short finalists: "Kayayo" and "Ten Meter Tower"

by Nathaniel R

TEN METER TOWER

This week the Academy announced the ten finalists for documentary short and the ten finalists for animated short.  The Oscar charts are updated. At least 5 of those 20 are available to watch online. You've probably already seen the wonderful animated coming-out short "In a Heartbeat" that was so popular online earlier this year but it won't be the only tiny Oscar-seeker with big value. That's why the short categories are wonderful, quite often you get much artistic bang for little buck.

Will get to the animated docs later but of the ten doc short Oscar options there are four you can watch online...

Click to read more ...