Category: Film Reviews by Amy

World travel through movies

A look at Oscar’s International Feature Film nominees

Seeing all of the International Feature Film nominees feels like a personal victory, sort of on par with the thrill you feel at filling a punch card to get a free coffee or cookie.

I know seeing five movies on a list of dozens doesn’t seem like a great accomplishment but it’s a task that can’t be completed every Oscar year, at least not before the ceremony. Some years the international nominees don’t hit the U.S. until weeks later. This year, however, all five of the movies are available for home viewing now. And all are worth a watch, not just for Oscar completists but for any movie fan looking for something different.

• Another Round When I checked awards prediction website Gold Derby on April 12, this Danish movie from director Thomas Vinterberg (who is also nominated in the Directing category) was the favorite to win the category; it’s available to rent (including via Red River Theatres’ virtual cinema) and on Hulu. Starring Mads Mikkelsen, it tells the frequently comic, sometimes troubling story of a group of middle-aged friends who test that Homer Simpson saying about alcohol being the cause of and solution to all of life’s problems. They decide to try an experiment wherein they are slightly buzzed all the time, drinking while at work (as teachers at what appears to be a high school) to see if it makes them happier, more relaxed people, with varying results (particularly as they start to increase their preferred level of intoxication). Mikkelsen gives a strong performance.

• Better Days This Chinese entry is based on a Chinese YA novel (according to Wikipedia) and is available for rent. It follows a young woman, Chen Nian (Zhou Dongyu), traumatized by the death of a bullied student at her high-pressure high school and dealing with bullying herself (as well as her mother’s financial and legal problems). She makes a friend and protector in Liu Beishan (Jackson Yee), a teen who gets by as a petty criminal. Though there is some anti-bullying message-iness, the performances of the leads are solid and engaging.

• Collective Also available via Red River Theatres, for rent in general and on Hulu, this Romanian documentary is also nominated in the Documentary Feature category. If I were an Oscar voter, this would likely be my pick in the International film category, especially for its focus on a newspaper and its journalists as they cover a fire at a nightclub that led to many deaths — first in the fire itself and then at hospitals. The story of those deaths uncovers problems with the safety codes at the club and then problems at the hospitals, where patients died from bacterial infections and the journalists uncovered a scandal related to inadequate disinfectant solutions. We also meet a newly appointed minister of health attempting to reform the system and constantly hitting bureaucratic walls.

• The Man Who Sold His SkinAlso available via Red River Theatres and available for rent, this movie, as end title cards and Wikipedia explain, takes its inspiration from a real-life artist, Wim Delvoye, who tattooed a work of art on a man’s back and gave the man a cut of the sale price in exchange for the obligation of showing up to display the work. Here, Belgian artist Jeffrey Godefroi (Koen De Bouw) offers money and, more importantly, a visa to Sam Ali (Yahya Mahayni), a Syrian refugee who lets the artist use his back as a canvas. The image is itself of a visa, making the work a commentary on immigration and the commodification of people — or something, so Jeffrey explains. For Sam, it’s mostly a means to get to Brussels, where Abeer (Dea Liane), the woman he loves and planned to marry before he had to flee Syria, now lives with her husband. The movie is frequently funny, with moments of sadness, tragedy and absurdity, and Mahayni makes Sam a compelling and complex character.

• Quo Vadis, Aida? Available for rent and on Hulu, this film from a Bosnian director is tense and captivating even if you also know that it is speeding toward tragedy. In 1995 Srebrenica, UN translator Aida (Jasana Đuričić) is frantically trying to protect her husband and two teen/young adult sons as the Serbian army takes over the Bosnian town. Đuričić gives Aida a mix of competence and desperation that is hard to watch but absolutely riveting.

Snack-size movies, supersized stories

Oscar season is one of the few times in a year when I find myself seeking out short films and I always end up wishing I did it more often. Shorts can be such a perfect, quick-hit story-telling mechanism and I feel like they are perfectly suited to the “what can I watch on Netflix for the next 30 minutes?” viewing experience.

This year’s short film Oscar nominees are fairly easy to find at home — and that was even before the release of the short films as a package via virtual cinemas (at places such as Red River Theatres, where you can buy a virtual ticket to see all the films in a category — documentary short subject, animated short film or live action short film).

In the documentary category, all of the films were fairly easy to track down:

• Collette This movie available via The Guardian tells the story of a French woman visiting the German concentration camp where her brother, a member of the French resistance in World War II, was killed so many decades ago.

• A Concerto is a Conversation Available via the New York Times, this film features Kris Bowers, a composer whose work includes the score for the movie Green Book, talking with his grandfather, who left the segregated South and built a dry cleaning business in Los Angeles. This is definitely the most hopeful in tone of the entries.

• Does Not Split This documentary, which I rented on Vimeo, gives us the story of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong in the months leading up to the start of the pandemic.

• Hunger Ward In war, children are always the casualties, so explain the doctors in this documentary about the starvation of children in Yemen. Available on Paramount+, this short reminded me of the documentaries about doctors in Syria and their determination to save as many lives as they can in the roughest possible conditions.

• A Love Song for Latasha This Netflix short captures the lasting trauma caused by the shooting death of a bright, ambitious girl in a convenience store in Los Angeles in 1991. Though the documentary touches on the wider social issues, it is primarily focused on Latasha as remembered by friends and family and the impact she had during her short life.

In animated short film, two are relatively easy to find on their own.

• Burrow This short on Disney+ is a sweet tale (dialogue-free, outside of cute animal chirps) of a bunny trying to build a dream home. The animation has a pretty, hand-illustrated look.

• If Anything Happens I Love You Largely black and white with a sort of fluid sketchbook appearance, this Netflix short about two people lost in grief was difficult to watch (definitely don’t watch it immediately after dropping your kids off at school) but lovely with moments of remembered joy among all the sadness.

Opera, Genius Loci and Yes-Peoplejoin those previous two movies in the Oscar Shorts presentation available via Red River Theatres virtual cinema and other theaters on shorts.tv. The animated shorts package has other films on it as well, including a short adaptation of The Snail and the Whale that recalls adaptations of other Julia Donaldson books like Room on the Broom and The Gruffalo.

• Opera made me think of a cuckoo clock — like, a cuckoo clock as designed by a children’s book author who had spent time watching Darren Arronofsky’s film mother! Life, death, marriage, religion, war and more are all contained in a pyramid-like space that houses rooms and halls and factories and landscapes that interconnect in ways that aren’t always clear until we move down the pyramid. This one definitely benefits from being able to rewind and take a closer look; it has oodles of little details.

• Genius Locihas a dreamlike quality as its central character moves through a city and through a variety of artistic styles.

• Yes-People’s characters have a charming visual style that blends newspaper comics and a more rounded, almost clay-like appearance. These animated shorts often have the feel of picture books for adults and Yes-People gives us a bouncy look at one day in the life of a group of people with the charm of that kind of story-telling. The movie is also available for rent on Vimeo.

Most of the live action short films are available a la carte now.

• Feeling Through tells the story of a young man, struggling with homelessness, who finds himself helping a man get home. The movie, which is available on YouTube, has a nice mix of uplift and humor.

• The Letter Room has some big names in its cast: Oscar Isaac plays a prison guard whose desire for advancement puts him in what first seems like a dead-end job — reading and recording the mail to inmates. But he finds himself getting mixed up in the lives of two of the inmates. Alia Shawkat (of Search Party and Arrested Development) also appears in this film, which is available for rent on Vimeo.

• The Present is one of three movies I saw via the shorts presentation but it is also available on Netflix. The movie follows a Palestinian man and his young daughter shopping for groceries and a new refrigerator while also navigating West Bank checkpoints.

• Two Distant Strangers, also on Netflix, follows a Black man in New York City who has a fatal run-in with police only to wake up back in the bed where he started his morning. The circumstances around his death can change each time he relives the day but frequently the same quick-to-violence white police officer is the one pulling the trigger. Even with its moments of Groundhog Day humor, the movie never lets the audience off the hook about what it’s saying.

• White Eyetells the story of unintended consequences. A man trying to retrieve his stolen bike finds himself conflicted as he learns more about the man who says he just bought it.

Don’t have time for all the shorts? If I had to pick two must-watches from each category, I’d recommend A Concerto is a Conversation and A Love Song for Latasha in the documentary category, Burrow and Opera in animated shorts (OK, probably Burrow and If Anything Happens I Love You, but I could barely bring myself to watch the latter short the first time and definitely won’t be watching it again, beautifully done as it is) and for live action The Letter Room and either Feeling Through or Two Distant Strangers.

Featured photo: Another Round

Thunder Force (PG-13)

Thunder Force (PG-13)

With Melissa McCarthy and Octavia Spencer playing middle-aged lady superheroes, Bobby Cannavale playing all the ego and Jason Bateman playing a half-crab man, Thunder Force really should have been a better movie than it is.

I had such hopes after Superintelligence, the Ben Falcone-directed Melissa McCarthy movie that hit HBO Max a few months back. That movie was so above average and genuinely enjoyable that I let myself get way too excited for this movie, forgetting all about my letdown at Tammy and The Boss.

As it is, I won’t even pretend I’m being completely objective about this movie; I like McCarthy and Spencer and all the other players here too much not to grade on a curve. And it helps that this movie is on Netflix, so if you already have a Netflix subscription it basically only costs your “what should we watch, I don’t know, this looks promising” time.

The comic book-like premise here is solid: Once upon a time (March 1983) a cosmic ray struck the Earth, giving superpowers to people genetically predisposed to be sociopaths. These people, called Miscreants, have basically an unchecked ability to cause mayhem, as no good-guy superpower-having people exist to stop them. After young Emily (Bria D. Singleton) loses her parents to a Miscreant attack, she vows to make it her life’s mission to find a way to stop them.

First, however, she has to make it through school, which is not easy when you’re perceived as a nerd. Luckily, Emily has a friend in Lydia (Vivian Falcone), who might not be a star student but is willing and able to stand up to anyone picking on Emily. The girls remain close friends until high school, when Emily’s single-minded studiousness and Lydia’s lack of direction pull them apart.

Still, decades later, when their high school reunion approaches, Lydia (McCarthy) is pretty excited to see Emily (Spencer), who is now a rich and famous scientist type. True to old patterns, Emily forgets all about the reunion, so Lydia goes to her science lab/office to retrieve her — which is how Lydia, a “what does this button do?” type, accidentally gets injected with Emily’s superpowers-creating serum. Emily had planned to give herself super-strength and invisibility to help her fight the Miscreants. But now Lydia has the super-strength and Emily has the invisibility and they must work together, with the help of Emily’s super-smart daughter Tracy (Taylor Mosby), to fight a Miscreant called Laser (Pom Klementieff). Because they decide they need cool names to go with their powers and supersuits, they dub themselves “Thunder Force.”

Bobby Cannavale, playing a politician trying to get people to call him “The King,” and Jason Bateman, as a sometime criminal who has crab arms and is conflicted about his Miscreant status, also show up, as does Melissa Leo as Emily’s security officer. And, just writing this, I’m sort of excited about this movie all over again — sounds great! Except, parts of the movie just don’t click, like Leo, who always feels a step off from what the movie needs her to be. Or like parts of Bateman’s whole crab-arms thing, with jokes that go on too long or seem to trail off. Elsewhere it feels like jokes and character notes are left unexamined. The whole movie has a frustrating “not exactly there” feel.

That said, while writing this review, I did go back to check this or that fact in the movie and found myself watching whole scenes. So maybe the key is expectations; go in expecting nothing more than an hour and 46 minutes of new content that you’ve already paid for and maybe you’ll be suitably amused. B- because this thing has its moments and I’m definitely going to wind up watching it again.

Featured photo: Thunder Force

Another Obama victory?

A look at the movies vying for Best Documentary Feature at this year’s Oscars

I would have thought the Best Documentary Feature category in this year’s Oscars was all sewn up.

My pick in this category would be Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution, another solid entry from Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions (which won last year’s documentary Oscar with the excellent American Factory).

Crip Camp, which hit Netflix about a year ago, is an absolute winner that is both the story of an upstate New York summer camp in the 1960s and 1970s that served campers with disabilities and the story of the civil rights activism by those campers that led eventually to the Americans with Disabilities Act and the access it granted. Many of the counselors were former Camp Jened attendees; the camp was a place where they could be themselves, enjoy the same cultural swirl of music, politics and big ideas (and teen romance) that the rest of their generation was immersed in and be free of well-meaning but often overprotective parents. One of the attendees turned counselors turned activists, Judith Huemann, eventually becomes the movie’s focal point and feels like one of those giants of American history that I was shocked to just be learning about. The movie is still available on Netflix.

A look at the various Oscar prediction websites suggests that my favorite isn’t a runaway sure thing and each of the other nominees have a fair amount of support.

Collective, which is also nominated in the International Feature Film category, would be my second-place pick and is a worthy competitor. This documentary tells the story of the aftermath of a music venue fire in Romania. Not only does the fire expose the scandal that led to unsafe conditions at the club but the subsequent deaths of people wounded in the fire helps to expose the problems in the state’s health system that makes hospitals seem like germ incubators. The documentary focuses both on the Sports Gazette, a sports-focused newspaper that helps to uncover the scandal, and on the new minister of health battling deeply rooted problems in the bureaucracy in his attempts to make amends and provide better care for the people of the country. The movie makes the case for old-school, follow-the-facts journalism. It is available for rent (including via Red River Theatres’ virtual cinema) and on Hulu.

Amazon Prime’s Time is a more intimate movie than the previous two (though it has plenty of big issues attached) but it is a solid piece of storytelling. The movie tells the story of Sybil Fox Richardson, and her children as they deal with the decades-long incarceration of her husband and their father, Rob. Rob and Fox have six sons, who Fox had to raise on her own after Rob was sent to jail for 60 years for a bank robbery (for which she also spent a few years in jail). The movie features her own home movies of those years, through which we can see her boys grow up and Fox become a force of prison reform activism while also building a career, taking care of the boys and working to bring Rob home. Fox is a compelling personality and the moments when her rage at the system breaks through her perfect composure are more insightful than a dozen think pieces on prison reform.

The Mole Agent, available on Hulu, doesn’t have the heft of those movies but this tale of elderly residents of a Chilean nursing home has moments when it transcends its sweet comedy. Here, 90-something Sergio agrees to work for a private investigator as a spy. He checks into a nursing home to find out if the client’s mother is being mistreated and stolen from and what he discovers is a community of people — mostly women — who have been sort of forgotten. The movie has funny moments — Sergio doesn’t always have a handle on the technology he’s given to make his reports but he is a huge hit among the lady residents, with one woman planning their wedding — and the charm helps to soften the blow of the vein of sadness throughout.

My Octopus Teacher, a Netflix documentary, is probably the lightest-weight of the nominees. I heard somebody on a movie podcast describe it as basically a nature documentary and I agree that its photography of life in what the narrator calls an underwater “forest” off the coast of South Africa is its strongest element. The narrative structure comes from the “friendship” between Craig Foster, a filmmaker suffering from burnout, and an octopus he encounters. He follows her, studying her progress during her roughly year of life, with bits of Foster’s life and his relationship with his son sprinkled in. Personally, I feel like an even shorter movie that was more tightly focused on just the octopus would have been even more lively, but the visuals are lovely.

Oscar movie viewing update
If you’re not quite ready to venture back to the movie theaters, you can add Judas and the Black Messiah to the list of Oscar nominees available from your house. The movie, which had a month-long run on HBO Max when first released, is now available for rent for $19.99.

For other movies, Oscar completists can turn to Red River Theatres (redrivertheatres.org) to view some of the harder to find nominees. In addition to Minari, The Father and Collective, Red River’s virtual cinema is screening the Oscar shorts ($12 per category or $30 for all three categories, 15 nominated shorts plus some extras) and, this Friday, is scheduled to start screening International Feature Film nominee The Man Who Sold His Skin.

Featured photo: Crip Camp

Godzilla vs. Kong (PG-13)

Godzilla fights King Kong in Godzilla vs. Kong — what, you wanted me to be all “visually stunning allegory about humanity’s bravado in its relationship with the natural world”?

I mean, sure, I guess that’s in there (the allegory, sorta; the visuals have their moments even if they’re never quite as awe-inspiring as, for example, that parachute jump in the 2014 Godzilla). You can find the deeper meaning if you try really hard to pick it out, like you’re digging out the mushrooms from a steak and cheese sandwich, but why bother? Either you’re watching this “monsters fight!” movie at a movie theater on one of your extremely rare trips to a theater in this past year or you’re watching it for a fun movie night at home (the movie is on HBO Max until the end of April). Why muddy either of those all-cheese-no-broccoli experiences with, like, “deeper meaning” or “multi-dimensional characters” or “consistently engaging story-telling”?

There are, to some extent, two movies with two sets of characters happening here. In the Kong movie, Hollow Earth explorer Nathan Lind (Alexander Skarsgard) gets Kong scientist Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall) and her adopted daughter Jia (Kaylee Hottle) to bring Kong from his Truman Show-like Kong habitat on Skull Island to the entrance of a tunnel that will take the explorers into the land-before-time-ish world that exists inside the Hollow Earth (which is where everyone assumes the Titans, as all the giant monsters are called, came from at some point). Apex, a bad-guy corporate entity, has hired Nathan to find the power source that serves as this inner world’s sun so they can power a Godzilla-fighting weapon, which I don’t think was spoiled in the trailers, so I won’t spoil it here except to say it turns out to be pretty fun. Nathan uses Kong as a guide to the Hollow Earth power source because homing pigeons something something and Ilene and Jia come too in part because Jia and Kong are friends and can communicate via sign language — and I feel like the “King Kong speaks sign language” element of this story isn’t developed nearly enough. I feel like being able to talk directly to a Titan and find out what it wants would be a bigger deal.

Meanwhile, teen Madison (Millie Bobby Brown), who was in the last Godzilla movie, and her buddy Josh (Julian Dennison) track down Titan-conspiracy podcaster Bernie (Brian Tyree Henry). He has been covertly reporting on Apex, and Madison agrees with him that they must be doing something shady if Godzilla attacked an Apex facility after years of peaceful coexistence with humanity. This is the quippier of the two halves of this movie.

Godzilla and Kong get two big battles against each other, Kong gets to romp through Hollow Earth and both creatures get to fight other stuff. The monsters are fun, the humans are silly and the movie seems aware of this — never requiring us to take the humans too seriously or forgetting that the only characters we really care about are the giant gorilla and the giant lizard.

I think there are two ways to approach this movie. One is to spend time wondering which characters you’re supposed to remember from previous Kong and Godzilla movies and how this fits in to the overall cinematic universe (Legendary Entertainment’s MonsterVerse, apparently, according to a Wikipedia article and I think reading the Wikipedia entry about the MonsterVerse when one of these films is released is the only time I ever read or hear any MonsterVerse discussion). I was maybe trying to do this for the first 20 or so minutes but quickly gave up. The other, more fulfilling way to view this movie is to passively enjoy the scenes that aren’t Godzilla fighting Kong and then turn up the TV and pay close attention for the scenes that are about Godzilla fighting King Kong. Or Godzilla or Kong whomping other things. Big monsters fighting, that’s what I’m here for, and on that this movie basically delivers. Think of the rest of the movie as an opportunity to get more snacks, chat with your movie-watching companions or look up stuff about the MonsterVerse. This movie is a solid B during monster fights, an indifferent C otherwise, so — let’s call it a relaxed, good-time B-.

Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of creature violence/destruction and brief language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Adam Wingard with a screenplay by Eric Pearson and Max Borenstein, Godzilla vs. Kong is an hour and 53 minutes long and distributed by Warner Bros. It is in theaters and streaming until April 30 on HBO Max.

Featured photo: Godzilla vs. Kong

The Father (PG-13)

Anthony Hopkins is heartbreaking and Olivia Colman is heartbroken in The Father, a sad but excellent movie that is nominated for six Oscars.

Anthony (Hopkins) is a retired man living in London and Anne (Colman) is his daughter — this much feels certain. But, after a fight with yet another caregiver, has Anthony gone to live with Anne or has she come to live with him? And is it just her sharing the apartment with the increasingly agitated Anthony, who feels certain she’s trying to wrest his flat from him, or is her husband (maybe Mark Gatiss or maybe Rufus Sewell) there as well? Anthony and the patient if increasingly despondent Anne frequently butt heads, leading Anthony to tell whomever’s around how much better he gets along with his other daughter Lucy — but Anne’s silence whenever Lucy is mentioned suggests that there’s more to her absence than just a busy schedule.

That Anthony is constantly losing his watch may sometimes feel a little too nail on the head for his lost grip on time — he relives moments over again and forgets who people are or how long it’s been since he’s seen them last. He is a man grasping at sand and still sinking. The movie (and Hopkins’ strong performance) lets us feel his confusion, frustration and sense of complete disorientation. The story has the build of a psychological mystery thriller and works even though we understand what the mystery is that Anthony seems unable to unwravel.

Likewise, Colman puts us inside of Anne’s grief. Her love for her father, their relationship difficulties, her frustration with his limitations, her conflicted thoughts about what is truly best for him (and for her) — we can see all of this, often just from a look on Colman’s face or the way her eyebrows raise during a smile. The very last time she’s on screen, she gives this little nod that does the work of a whole speech.

The Father is not a fun movie but it is exceptionally well-made and so well-performed that it is an engrossing watch even when it is achingly sad. A

Rated PG-13 for some strong language and thematic material, according to the MPA at filmratings.com. Directed by Florian Zeller with a screenplay by Christopher Hampton and Florian Zeller (from the play of the same name by Zeller), The Father is an hour and 37 minutes long and is distributed by Sony Pictures Classics. It is screening in theaters (including via Red River Theatres’ virtual cinema) and available for rent.

Especially special effects

The Oscar’s visual effects nominees offer some good examples of films that were able to transcend the “TV-ness” of 2020.

Because the nominees provide great answers to “what should we watch tonight?” I’m spending the pre-awards ceremony (on April 25) weeks running through this year’s nominees. I previously discussed two of the visual effects nominees — Tenet (available for purchase and coming to HBO Max on May 1) and Mulan (available on Disney+ and for purchase). Both wowed with their visuals, Mulan perhaps more for costuming (for which it’s also nominated) and set design. Tenet’s coolest element is its use of characters traveling in opposite directions through time in the same scene (and if that makes no sense, buckle up for the “time travel and stuff”-ness of this movie), which would probably make it my pick in this category.

Other visual effects nominees:

• Love and Monsters It’s so cool this sweet, sorta silly creature movie/love story got a nomination. A 20-something guy hikes through some 80 miles of a monster-infested California to see the girl he’s loved since high school in this fun, sort of optimistic movie with an “end of the world” premise. The monsters are pretty well-rendered too. The fun movie night movie is available for rent or purchase.

• The Midnight Sky I can see why this total bummer of a George Clooney movie received a nomination: It features bleakly beautiful shots of the Arctic (where Clooney’s scientist is the final remaining human — maybe) as well as a storyline that takes place on a spaceship with occasional scenes of weightlessness and space-walks. But I have a hard time recommending this downbeat end-of-the-world movie (available on Netflix, if you’re in just too good a mood).

• The One and Only Ivan This Disney+ family live action film (or, you know, “live action” since the photo-realistic animals are CGI creations, according to a New York Times story) is based on the true story of a gorilla named Ivan who made art. The Ivan here (voiced by Sam Rockwell) is the star attraction in a fading mall circus run by human Mack (Bryan Cranston) and filled with other animals (voiced by the likes of Helen Mirren, Phillipa Soo, Chaka Khan, Ron Funches and Danny DeVito). This older elementary family movie is probably adequately entertaining for family movie night (despite some moments of sadness with sick moms and poachers and the like).

I discussed where to find best picture and best animated feature nominees and the films that received acting nominations in the March 18 issue and last week (March 25) tackled most of the other “mainstream movie” categories. (Find them all at hippopress.com.) Programming updates: Red River Theatres in Concord now has multi-category nominee The Father available via its virtual cinema as well as fellow nominees Minari and Collective. Nominated short films may be available as well starting April 2.

Featured photo: The Father

Oscar viewing at home

So many nominees, so many streaming platforms

Every Oscar season is a little bit weird.

Some years, it feels like every nominee came out in the final month of the year. Some years, it feels like the winners have been known for so long there’s no real contest. Some years — my least favorite kind of years — a significant number of nominations aren’t available at all for the movie-going public until months after the award ceremony, when you’ve completely forgotten about the movies.

This year, most of the movies are fairly accessible, and not just in the “if you’re willing to drive to Boston” sense but accessible even if you aren’t completely comfortable leaving your house just to fill out your Oscar ballot (nominees were announced March 15 and the awards will be handed out April 25). In last week’s issue of the Hippo, I laid out how to find the feature films in many of the major categories. As of this Friday, March 26, when The Father will hit VOD, the only nominee in the best picture, animated feature or acting categories that you can only see in theaters is Judas and the Black Messiah (which was on HBO Max for a month). Find my full listing of those films on page 33 of last week’s paper. One update: Minari, nominee for best picture and in five other categories, is also available via Red River Theatres’ virtual cinema; see redrivertheatres.org for information.

Here are some of the “odds and ends” releases — some more of the feature films outside the best picture and acting categories that managed to snag a nomination or two.

• News of the World This Tom Hanks downbeat Western is, you know, fine. Hanks plays a Hanks character carrying a bunch of grief through post-Civil War Texas as he tries to bring an orphaned girl to her family. The movie received nominations for cinematography, original score, production design and sound and is available to purchase. It’s not the best movie night you’ll ever have but it’s also not the worst.

• GreyhoundI feel like this is a good place to mention the other Tom Hanks 2020 release that is both respectable and sorta forgettable. Hanks plays a World Ward II Navy captain who is leading a convoy of ships through the Nazi-sub-filled Atlantic Ocean. This movie, which is nominated for sound, is basically a chase movie and the only character who really matters is “Captain Tom Hanks.” It is absolutely fine while you watch it — which you can on Apple TV+— and will vanish from your mind almost as soon as it’s done.

• EmmaAnya Taylor-Joy is the titular Jane Austen heroine in this very fun adaptation that was one of my favorite pre-pandemic 2020 releases. It has a specific look to costumes and set design and it’s no surprise that it received nominations for costume design and makeup and hairstyling. It is currently available on HBO and it is available for purchase.

• Mulan Disney’s live-action Mulan is probably going to be remembered more for how the movie was released (on Disney+ for an extra fee, the first of Disney’s films to be released that way) than the movie itself, which wowed me with its visuals and underwhelmed me with its story. I totally support its nominations for costume design (the costumes are “press pause and gaze” beautiful) and visual effects.

• Pinocchio Roberto Benigni stars as Geppetto in this live-action Pinocchio adaptation (which I haven’t yet seen) that scored two nominations: one for costume design and one for makeup and hairstyling. It is available for rent or purchase and appears to have both an original Italian audio/English subtitles track and an English-dubbed audio track.

• Da 5 Bloods One of the disappointments of this year’s nominations was that this Spike Lee movie didn’t earn any acting nods (in particular for Delroy Lindo). It did get one nomination, original score for Terence Blanchard. The movie is worth seeing, even if it probably needs a big screen to capture all of what Lee was doing; it’s available on Netflix.

• Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga This (and Emma) might be my favorite of the one- or two-off nominations; this sweetly goofy Will Ferrell movie has grown on me since I first saw it, especially the mid-movie song-mash-up featuring assorted Eurovision stars. The song “Husavik,” the big climactic number sung by Elizabeth Banks’ character, Sigrit, is nominated for original song, which hopefully means someone will perform it at the Oscar ceremony. The movie is available on Netflix.

• The Life Ahead Sophia Loren stars in this Italian movie that is still on my “Oscar nominees to watch” list. It’s available on Netflix and has a song, “Lo Sí (Seen),” nominated in the original song category.

• Tenet Christopher Nolan’s timey wimey movie did have some impressive elements, most notably the fight scenes. It makes sense that this movie would garner a visual effects nomination and, sure, production design, why not, for all those sleek locales. It is currently available for rent or purchase and will be on HBO Max May 1.

• The White Tiger This year’s screenplay nods were basically all of the best picture nominees (minus Mank) plus One Night in Miami (which should have been a best picture nominee), Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (I mean, what can you say; 2020 was a year) and this movie, based on the 2008 novel by Aravind Adiga that won the Man Booker Prize. Available on Netflix, The White Tiger features a strong performance by Adarsh Gourav as a man in India attempting to break free of crushing poverty and the demands of his village. It’s an occasionally tough but definitely worthwhile watch with moments of humor.

Featured photo: Emma

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