"An Officer and a Spy" and "Les Miserables" battle it out for the César

by Nathaniel R

France's Oscar parallel competition, the Césars, have finally announced their nominations for the film year. Roman Polanski's adaptation of Robert Harris's novel An Officer and a Spy leads the nominations. It's based on the Dreyfus affair and Emile Zola's "J'Accuse!" letter, both of which are also the topic of one of Oscar's earliest Best Picture winners The Life of Emile Zola (1937).  The drama leads the Césars with 12 nominations while the Oscar-nominated Les Miserables and the riveting queer romantic drama Portrait of a Lady on Fire were right behind with 10 nominations each. After the jump all the nominations and a few notes...

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"Ema" at Sundance

by Abe Fried-Tanzer

Chilean director Pablo Larraín was last at the Sundance Film Festival with frequent collaborator Gael García Bernal in 2013 for the Oscar-nominated No. Since then, he’s earned two additional bids from the Golden Globes in the foreign language category for The Club and Neruda. He even made his first film in English: Jackie. Now, Larraín is back with another Bernal film, showing in the Spotlight section after its premiere at the Venice International Film Festival.

Though Bernal plays a substantial role, this film is all about actress Mariana Di Girolamo. She stars as the title character, who is married to Bernal’s choreographer character...

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Sundance Review: Nine Days

by Murtada Elfadl

There’s a very fine between profound and superficial, what is genuinely revelatory and what is obvious. It’s a line that writer / director Edson Oda straddles in his sweeping drama about the meaning of life (yep, I know), Nine Days. Unfortunately to these eyes he ultimately falls on obvious and unearned, while asking the audience to believe it’s profound.  

Oda pulls us into a world wholly conceived by him. A man named Will (Winston Duke) who used to be alive now watches VHS tapes of people going on about their lives. When someone dies he gets nine days to interview unliving souls for the vacant position of a new life on earth...

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Yes No Maybe So: Swallow

by Jason Adams

Swallow, the first feature film from director Carlo Mirabella-Davis and starring a transfixing Haley Bennett as a real housewife whose solitude gets the best of her, has been bouncing around all of the film festivals for the past year or so. And you knew it every time it hit a new one because you'd see that oh look, Haley Bennett won another acting award. Another trophy for the heap! I got to see the film at Tribeca last May where I reviewed it here, calling her "RIVETING." No really I did...

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Doc Corner: Ranking the Documentary Short Nominees from Least to Most Depressing

By Glenn Dunks

We have done this very particular ranking twice before now. Does that make it a tradition? We have only had to skip one year (2017) of Best Documentary (Short Subject) nominees because that year’s batch were a happy lot for a change.

This year’s nominees for what is often the most dour of categories could have certainly been darker – trust me, I’ve seen the other films that were shortlisted. They didn't nominate the one about murderous street gangs or the one about the humanitarian crisis following Hurricane Maria! Still, there are big themes among this year’s strong selection of titles (although it must be said, the feature category is far superior): we are taken from a warzone in Afghanistan to a man-made tragedy in South Korea, refugee stories from Vietnam to Sweden, and back to the streets of Missouri.

The nominees are:

In the Absence
Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You’re a Girl)
Life Overtakes Me
St. Louis Superman
Walk Run Cha-Cha

Let’s take a deeper look…

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