168 Documentaries to Compete for the Oscar

By Glenn Charlie Dunks

The Academy has announced the long (long, very long) list for this year’s Best Documentary Feature category. 168 titles have qualified for members of the doc branch to whittle down to a 15-wide shortlist and then a nominated five. That figure is higher than last year, which had 144 eligible titles and which culminated in a win for Daniel Roher’s Navalny. 

If you were to ask me right now what titles I expect to find on this year’s shortlist, I might say the following: Against the Tide (Sarvnik Kaur), American Symphony (Matthew Heineman), Anonymous Sister (Jamie Boyle), The Eternal Memory (Maite Alberdi), Four Daughters (Kaouther Ben Hania), Lakota Nation vs United States (Laura Tomaselli, Jesse Short Bull), Little Richard: I Am Everything (Lisa Cortés), The Mission (Jesse Moss, Amanda McBaine), Occupied City (Steve McQueen), Silver Dollar Road (Raoul Peck), Smoke Sauna Sisterhood (Anna Hints), A Still Small Voice (Luke Lorentzen), Still: A Michael J Fox Movie (Davis Guggenheim), To Kill a Tiger (Nisha Pahuja) and 20 Days in Mariupol (Mstyslav Chernov). But the whims of this branch can change on a dime, so we won’t know until the shortlists announcements later this month.

You can scroll through the entire list below beginning with After Sherman through to Your Fat Friend. I have linked to reviews of titles where we have them, but also included ten short capsules for other titles that I have seen and been unfortunately lax in actually writing about.

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Middleburg 2023: Mainstream Oscar Bait is back, baby!

by Lynn Lee

Previously in part one of the Middleburg recap we discussed Cannes triumphs The Zone of Interest and Anatomy of a Fall (now in theaters!), and Sofia Coppola's Priscilla. Now the jam-packed Oscar promise second half of the festival.

Day Three
If you’ve been wondering whether American Fiction – the audience favorite at Toronto – really has Oscar potential, I’m here to tell you yes, it absolutely does.  Cord Jefferson’s debut feature took home the audience award at Middleburg, too, and both my husband and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  It’s a rollicking satire of the literary establishment and the politics of racial representation, based on a novel that was written over 20 years ago but is, if anything, even more current today.  Jeffrey Wright stars as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a bougie buttoned-up middle-aged black writer who, appalled at the success of novels and entertainment he sees as pandering to white stereotypes of black life, writes his own gangsta/ghetto porn novel as a bitter drunken joke... only to see it meet with an effusive response far beyond his wildest imagination... 

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Cannes at Home: Days 9 & 10 – Champions of Festivals Past

by Cláudio Alves

Just as the favorites for the Palme d'Or seemed to have settled, here comes another barrage of rave reviews to muddy the waters. Not only is it impossible to predict what Östlund's jury will choose, but it seems like, every day, the critics elect a new title to champion. On the ninth day of the festivities, Trần Anh Hùng's Pot-au-Feu dazzled many with its gastronomic love affair, making comparisons to Babette's Feast. Then came Nanni Moretti's A Brighter Tomorrow, less acclaimed but blessed by enthusiast defenders. On the 10th day of Cannes, it was time for Wim Wenders' Perfect Days to ignite Best Actor speculation, while Catherine Breillat's Queen of Hearts remake became another instant frontrunner for the big prize. Will Last Summer take the Palme? 

For the Cannes at Home series, the focus shall be on these auteurs' past festival successes. The Scent of Green Papaya earned Hùng the Camera d'Or and Vietnam its only Oscar nomination. Moretti won the Best Director prize at Cannes '93 with Caro Diario, and Wim Wenders was the Palme victor of '84 with Paris, Texas. Finally, there's Breillat's hyper-controversial Fat Girl, a prizewinner from the 51st Berlinale…

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1999 with Nick: Best Documentary Feature and "realness"

This week, in advance of the Oscars, Nick Davis is looking back at the Academy races of 20 years ago, spotlighting movies he’d never seen and what they teach us about those categories, then and now.

The Blair Witch Project

When I taught my Winter 2017 seminar about the movies of 1999, to a classroom of first-year college students who were all born in the last two years of the millennium, one of the trickiest ideas to historicize was how decisively the visibility and cultural stature of documentary cinema has shifted over the last 20 years. Compared to the decades when I grew up, nonfiction cinema has reached much further outside a relatively niche audience who tracked that filmmaking tradition. The explanations are too numerous to get into here, though they include all of the following: cheaper and more numerous technologies for recording and assembling footage; proliferating platforms for distributing and watching nonfiction films, especially in the era of the internet and of exploding cable-TV offerings; and some epochal, admittedly eclectic success stories in the commercial market, from The Thin Blue Line to Hoop Dreams to Fahrenheit 9/11 to March of the Penguins, that inspired more students and artist to pursue documentary tracks and more institutions to finance, release, and program the work.

More abstractly, I would add to that list a specifically millennial, post-postmodernist erosion of all faith in objective “reality,” differently crystallized in such landmark films of 1999 as The Matrix, eXistenZ, Eyes Wide Shut, and Fight Club. That erosion produces both a resistant hunger for whatever “real” images and stories might yet survive and its dialectical opposite: a contagious discovery, dismaying but darkly energizing, that even vérité images are subjective, manipulated, and at some level “fake”...

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RIP to Two Titans of European Cinema

By Glenn Dunks

What a shock it was to hear over the last 24 hours of the deaths of both Robby Müller and Claude Lanzmann. These two icons of European cinema were 78 and 92 respectively and both gave so much to the universe and there are not enough hats to tip to their memories and their legacies.

Robby Müller was the Dutch-born cinematographer whose regular collaborations with the likes of Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch and Lars Von Trier were the stuff of legend. Who can forget those stunning tableaus of Breaking the Waves or his regular plays on black and white with Jarmusch as well as Sally Potter’s The Tango Lesson. I'm not as well versed on Jarmusch's films as others, but I gather Dead Man with Johnny Depp is the one worth gawking over the most.

And I know it’s become a little bit fashionable to roll one’s eyes at people going on about the virtues of celluloid over digital, but I guarantee you have never seen colours projected onto a screen quite like those twilight blues of Wenders’ Paris, Texas...

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