Weekend Awards Wrap-Up: Opening Pandora's Box

by Cláudio Alves

The FFI's treatment of ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT will go down as THE awards season fumble.

The awards season continues to heat up, though we're about to hit a bit of a pause or a slump as the holidays tend to mark a decrease in such activity. As if to make up for that incoming quieting, the outpour of film honors only grew stronger the past week. This included the Pandora International Film Critics, an unofficial initiative spearheaded by the Filmotomy site – they also organize the Femme Filmmakers Festival every year – that gathers writers and film buffs from all over the world. This year, they invited me to be part of the voting body, and I am delighted to share the results, even if I don't necessarily agree with all of them…

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Weekend Awards Wrap-Up: Regional Critics Groups Galore

by Cláudio Alves

Adrien Brody is on his way to his second Oscar nomination. Maybe his second victory.

When those critics honors start coming, a trickle quickly turns into a tsunami. There's so much to go over, but here's the general state of the race. Best Picture is a mess, with at least four contenders nabbing multiple top prizes this past week. Still, Anora and The Brutalist lead the pack. Adrien Brody and Mikey Madison are the critical frontrunners of their respective races, but Colman Domingo and Marianne Jean-Baptiste are trailing closely behind. Kieran Culkin is sweeping the Supporting Actor awards (even though he's a co-lead), but it's not a Da'Vine Joy Randolph-style sweep. After all, Maclin, Borisov, Pearce, and Washington have all won something. In Supporting Actress, chaos reigns…

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A nice boost for "Nickel Boys" at the Gotham Awards and NYFCC

by Nathaniel R

This year’s small Gotham juries and the recurring members of the 40+ member New York Film Critics Circles have named their “bests” of 2024 in the past couple of days. The only film that managed to get kudos from both is RaMell Ross’s cinematic adaptation of the Pulitzer winning novel “The Nickel Boys”.

Winners and a few comments after the jump…

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Category Confusion '24: LEAD or SUPPORTING – Part One

by Cláudio Alves

With the first batch of awards season honors coming in hot, questions of category fraud are bound to come up. And this year will be a doozy in that regard, with various leading actors campaigning as supporting for convenience's sake. It's a tried and true strategy that tends to block actual supporting and character actors from getting their flowers, forever living in the shadow of big stars in the wrong category. Well, if you're a regular at The Film Experience, you probably have read all this before, so let's not belabor the point. Instead, let's have some fun with polls like we did last year. This is just part one, of course, since many contenders still haven't been released beyond the festival circuit...

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"Sing Sing" Is a Moving Showcase For One of 2024's Best Ensembles

by Nick Taylor

Sing Sing, the sophomore feature by Greg Kwedar, is beginning its theatrical run in the US almost a year after it debuted at TIFF 2023. This weekend it begins a limited release rollout, culminating in a wide release on August 2nd. Based on a 2005 Esquire article by John H. Richardson entitled "The Sing Sing Follies", the film follows a group of men incarcerated in Sing Sing Correctional Facility who are members of the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program, also known as the RTA. The development of their latest production comes with the usual stresses of putting a show together along with new disruptions to their membership, their hierarchies, and their routines. If the summaries and trailers and evangelizing reviews haven’t already convinced you this is the real deal, let me add my two cents. Sing Sing is a moving, heartfelt, sometimes despairing film, one you should see with a packed theater if you get the chance . . . .

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