Tag: Oscars

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2025’s intrepid cinema

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / In 2025, movies seemed to catch up with and confront the Trump era. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another – based on Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland and nimbly arraying multiple stars with Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead – is a deeply informed outcry of conscience and resistance, chiseled by satire into a grand statement. Bugonia, Yorgos Lanthimos’ creepily penetrating and funny…

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Movies of 2023: Barbenheimer and beyond

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Last summer’s Barbenheimer phenomenon – the ballyhooed simultaneous release of Oppenheimer and Barbie, two expensive and well-acted films with sophisticated political messages rendered by leading auteurs – afforded 2023 the façade of audacity. But they came out during the writers’ strike, which signaled, if somewhat below the radar trained on the films, the uneasy and uncertain relationship between streaming and Hollywood.

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Art and Film: The 2022 notables

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / This is a little late, but just in time for the Oscars. Filmmaking in the time of Covid is looking healthy, so no epochal disquisition is needed – just the usual caveat that these picks are inevitably subjective and, in some cases, perhaps eccentric. 

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Art and Film: A Belated 2021 Top Ten

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / When an arthouse revisionist western directed by an Australian woman and starring an Englishman dominates the Oscar nominations, it’s safe to say that the pandemic has not severely compromised the quality or vision of cinema, even if it has skewed the structure of the business towards streaming platforms and away from brick-and-mortar theaters.With the usual caveats about inevitable bias and subjectivity, here, in alphabetical order, is a defensible Top Ten for 2021.

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