Award Winning Movies
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Arrival
'Tis the season when it becomes increasingly hard to find any movies worth mentioning that haven't won some award or other. Denis Villeneuve's highbrow sci-fi Amy Adams vehicle has a whole separate Wikipedia page just for the List of accolades received by Arrival (film). And we're still one full award-dense month shy of the Oscars...
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Elle
Paul Verhoeven + Isabelle Huppert! Throw in a key grip or two and you've got the recipe for a psychological thriller that won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film and ranked #10 on Metacritic's tally of appearances on critics' best of the year lists. Plus there's a cat on the poster. Who doesn't love cats?
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Embrace of the Serpent
This Colombian drama was nominated for Best Foreign Language film at this year's Oscars, and took home an award at Cannes.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Manchester By the Sea
Three films into Kenneth Lonergan's directorial career and we can confidently name him as our foremost purveyor of emotionally intense character studies. Never were two actors better suited to carrying this kind of picture than Casey Affleck and Michelle Williams and the result, predictably, might be Lonergan's finest achievement to date.
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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.
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Medicine for Melancholy
Eight years(!) before Barry Jenkins' second feature Moonlight catapulted him to writer/directorial stardom and won him approximately all of the awards, his debut film netted Independent Spirit Award nominations for Best First Feature and the Someone to Watch Award.
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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.
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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."
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The Assassin
Hou Hsiao-Hsien won Best Director at Cannes for his unexpected foray into the martial arts genre. The New York Times Manohla Dargis called it "staggeringly lovely".
