Monday, December 16, 2019 at 5:56PM In today’s roundup of five regional critics awards Jennifer Lopez and Willem Dafoe emerge as the big winners with 3 Supporting wins each for their arguably leading roles. But no film is dominant in Best Picture with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Parasite, Marriage Story, 1917, and The Irishman all being cited.
Check out the latest roundup after the jump...
Saturday, December 14, 2019 at 1:00PM by Nathaniel R
Pint sized big talent Julia Butters and Quentin Tarantino both won prizes recently for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
In the latest round up of critics prizes we have critics from the SouthEastern US, Las Vegas, Boston (online) and one of the two (or is it three now?) female critics organizations called "Women's Film Critic's Circle". Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Parasite pick up several more prizes as do Portrait of a Lady on Fire and... Harriet?
Tomorrow one of the historically coolest and most discerning critics groups is naming their winners (Boston Society of Film Critics -- don't fail us!) but until that potentially exciting announcement here are the latest four associations to announce. The winners and a few comments are after the jump...
Tuesday, October 1, 2019 at 12:00PM Michael C. here. When I started this column I made a rule that anything less than two years old was too recent. So for the season finale let's go with a first round draft pic.
Sean Baker and Willem Dafoe on the set of The Florida Project
Scene: Child Predator
There’s nothing that he can do about it. That’s the guiding principle that drives Willem Dafoe’s Bobby throughout Sean Baker’s heart-rending The Florida Project. He maintains the boundaries he needs to keep up the pretense that he is operating a motel and not a lilac-colored homeless shelter, but we can intuit that he would help more if he could. It’s all in the unnecessary helping of kindness and humor around the edges when he’s laying down the law...
Saturday, September 21, 2019 at 10:30AM by Nathaniel R
Netflix would like to have 80% of the BEST ACTOR field (Driver, Murphy, Pryce, DeNiro) but that will prove impossible.
The new predictions are in. Best Actor is more exciting and competitive than Best Actress this year which is a strange and unusual development... and we don't like it! We kid. The male actors deserve their moment in the sun occassionally, even if they're not as fun to shine light on. The strangest thing about the leading actor competition is, at least at the moment, Netflix literally appears to have about 1/3rd of the entire competitive field. But since their can be only 5, we think that this shotgun approach will only result in two nominees at best. Right now we're going with Adam Driver (who feels like the ultimate winner... though let's not pretend anything's locked up yet in late September) and Eddie Murphy (who could easily not happen given Netflix's other horses in the race).
As for Supporting Actor. It isn't that much different than Best Actor this year. This year has been fairly heavy with duet films for men (The Lighthouse, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Ford v Ferrari, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The Two Popes) so naturally a few of the co-leads will definitely block out supporting players for the coveted nominations. We're mostly giving the side-eye to Willem Dafoe. He's the most egregious category frauder this year since you can't be a supporting actor in a cast of two! (There are technically a few other actors that appear in The Lighthouse but they're non-speaking cameos. It's a duet film from start to finish). It's a shame that Dafoe is competing supporting because we think he'd still be competitive for a nomination in lead despite the strong year. The only traditional-sized supporting role that we think won't be hurt by the co-leads muscling in is Alan Alda's divorce attorney in Marriage Story. In some ways he's the film's most loveable character, and Alda has been nominated for less (The Aviator). At 83 he'll have sentiment on his side, too.
UPDATED CHARTS
PICTURE | DIRECTOR | ACTOR | SUPPORTING ACTOR | INTERNATIONAL FEATURE | ALL INTERNATIONAL FEATURE SUBMISSIONS
Friday, September 6, 2019 at 6:00PM by Chris Feil
As gloopy with various bodily fluids as it is with sea foam, Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse lulls us into insanity from its first foggy frame. Diverging from the more straightforward horrors of his debut The Witch, Eggers thrusts us into the isolate hellscape that is the male mind with this Mellville-esque absurdist dark comedy. The bizarre quotient is high, both in the film’s psychosexual hysterics and crusty verbal dexterity, as the film devolves into an abstract battle of the wits and wills of two men meant to preserve the titular phallic monument. It’s genius and a complete hoot.
Set over a century ago on an offshore island, this tempestuous and physically taxing setting plays host to the two male egos of Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe’s lighthouse watchmen. Dafoe’s superstitious, more experienced Thomas immediately puts Pattinson’s Ephraim to back-breaking arduous work, dominating him further over candlelit dinnertime monologues...
