Award Winning Movies

  • Fences

    Fences

    It seems like it'd be pretty hard to make a bad movie that pairs Denzel Washington with August Wilson. Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay suggest that they did not.

  • In Jackson Heights

    In Jackson Heights

    I'll just go ahead and pre-emptively call Frederick Wiseman's latest documentary masterpiece an "award winner" on the heels of National Gallery and At Berkeley's unanimous acclaim.

  • Land of Mine

    Land of Mine

    Nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Feature, this Danish/German co-production follows a group of German POWs used to defuse a field of mines, along with their Danish supervisors, after the end of WWII. Gripping.

  • Marguerite

    Marguerite

    Loosely based on the story of Florence Foster Jenkins, this production was nominated for 11 Cesar awards (the French Oscars), and took home four of whatever statue they give the winners, including Best Actress for Catherine Frot.

  • Moonlight

    Moonlight

    Moonlight's been an awards-season juggernaut, with a lengthy secondary Wikipedia page detailing all the accolades it's accumulated. Don't bother inviting director Barry Jenkins to any parties the weekend of the 26th, he'll be busy. Moonlight is up for eight Oscars and six Independent Spirit Awards.

  • My Life as a Zucchini

    My Life as a Zucchini

    Claude Barras' deceptively cheerful-looking My Life as a Zucchini scored an Oscar nomination in the Best Animated Feature category. Rotten Tomatoes summarizes the critical consensus that its "silly title and adorable characters belie a sober story whose colorful visuals delight the senses even as it braves dark emotional depths."

  • The Fits

    The Fits

    Anna Rose Holmer bears a nomination for Best First Feature at the upcoming Independent Spirit Awards. The Fits is a vital coming-of-age drama set in and around a Cincinnati rec center and is built around a revelatory performance by young actress Royalty Hightower. The NY Times' Manohla Dargis said, "The miracle of the movie is that, like [protagonist] Toni, it transcends blunt, reductive categorization partly because it's free of political sloganeering, finger wagging and force-fed lessons. Any uplift that you may feel won't come from having your ideas affirmed, but from something ineluctable - call it art."

  • The Salesman

    The Salesman

    The Salesman represents director Asghar Farhadi's second Oscar win, following 2011's arthouse smash A Separation.

  • World of Tomorrow

    World of Tomorrow

    Exerpted from Noel Murray's review for the AV Club:

    "Throughout this year's Sundance Film Festival, whenever I'd run into my fellow critics, we'd go through the usual ritual exchange of, "What have you liked so far?" Passing movie titles back and forth, more often than I could count, the conversation would end with one or both of us saying, "Of course, the best thing I've seen is that Don Hertzfeldt cartoon, World Of Tomorrow. I don't expect anything to top it."

    Can an animated short be the best film at a festival? Or the best of the year? Because although World Of Tomorrow is only 15 minutes long, it's as funny, imaginative, and heartbreaking as anything released so far in 2015, and I wouldn't be surprised if I could make that same claim on December 31. At Sundance, where I had a link to an online screener, I watched World Of Tomorrow nearly every night before I went to sleep, as a pre-bedtime devotional."

    World of Tomorrow is available BluRay only. It was nomintated for the Best Animated Short Oscar.