Award Winning Movies

Good Time

Robert Pattinson has drawn raves for his performance in the whirling neon-and-concrete New-York-at-night small-time-crime thriller Good Time. Oneohtrix Point Never's pulsating synth score won Best Soundtrack at Cannes.

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.

Jane

The new Jane Goodall documentary garnered critical acclaim and numerous festival awards.

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.

Loving Vincent

Let's not bury the lede: "Each of the film's 65,000 frames," to quote Wikipedia, "is an oil painting on canvas, using the same technique as Van Gogh, created by a team of 125 painters." Loving Vincent, a biographical portrait of Van Gogh, was nominated for Best Animated Feature at 2017's Golden Globes.

Lucky

According to Wikipedia, "The first feature length multi-reel film in the world was the 1906 Australian production called The Story of the Kelly Gang". With a filmography that spans from 1957 right up to his passing in 2017 and includes more than 120 titles (including such wildly disparate classics as Cool Hand Luke, Repo Man, Pretty in Pink and Alien), Harry Dean Stanton was a fixture of the world of feature films for literally more than half of it's entire existence. Though he will rightly be remembered as one of Hollywood's all-time great character actors, he was also an underrated, under-utilized leading man, as Lucky and 1984's heart-breaking Paris, Texas amply demonstrate. (And while we're remembering, why not go back and revisit 2014's excellent documentary portrait Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction).

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

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."

Step

Winner of a "Special Jury Award for Inspirational Filmmaking" at Sundance, this socially-conscious-but-joyful documentary tells of the trials and triumphs of a Baltimore step dance team as they navigate their senior year of high school. Even the reviews that didn't like it all seemed to build their complaints around the phrase "crowd-pleasing".

The Breadwinner

Nominated for Best Animated Feature at these most recent Oscars, The Breadwinner... well, here, I'll just quote from the back of the box, "Parvana is an eleven-year-old girl growing up under the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001. When her father is wrongfully arrested, Parvana cuts off her hair and dresses like a boy in order to support her family. Working alongside her friend Shauzia, Parvana discovers a new world of freedom, and danger. With undaunted courage, Parvana draws strength from the fantastical stories she invents, as she embarks on a quest to find her father and reunite her family." It's good! Watch it!

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."