AFI Fest: “Ray Gunn” misfires while “Queen at Sea” reigns supreme

by Brian Rector

Late in the festival season, AFI Fest often brings an opportunity for Los Angelinos to catch up on titles that received buzz earlier in the year while bringing a few new films to the forefront. For instance, Brad Bird’s new animated movie Ray Gunn had its west coast red carpet premiere on the final day of the festival. On the otheer hand, Lance Hammer's Queen at Sea followed from its Berlin Film Festival debut, where it won a cadre of Silver Bears, including for its director and the Best Supporting Acting trophy for two of its performers, Tom Courtenay and Anna Calder-Marshall...

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Gotham Nominations Spread the Wealth / Kick Off Awards Season

by Nathaniel R

THE INVITE nabs four nominations at the Gotham Awards

Hi strangers! I know I’ve been absent but I will now be inching back into the site. It's that time of year again! The Gotham Award nominations are in, unofficially kicking off “awards season”. Awards season continues to always be both shape-shifting and staying exactly the same. Each year is familiar in terms of narrative tropes, genre "slots" and more, but also brand new with a new set of films and constant awards show tinkering with rules and categories! Usually with awards shows one or two films get the headlines as “leaders” but the Gothams have so few categories (just 10 really) that no film can truly claim to be "leading" the pack this time around. Japan’s Oscar submission All of a Sudden, the Nigerian “Mrs Dalloway” adaptation Clarissa, Olivia Wilde’s open marriage dramedy The Invite, Mike Leigh’s possible swan song Tender Loving Care, and the festival darling La Gradiva share the “lead” status with four nods apiece.  If you look at it by distributors the “leaders” are more glaringly obvious; A24 and NEON, distributors who have carved out recognizable identities and developed their own loyal fanbases, lead with 15 and 14 nominations respectively. Let's talk about each category...

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Review: “Wildwood” is the stop-motion fantasy epic LAIKA has been working toward all along

by Cláudio Alves

The history of Laika is one of classic nepotism by way of Maecenas-like patronage to the arts. It’s the story of how Nike’s owner, Phil Knight, took the Will Vinton Studios from their namesake and presented it to his son, Travis, who was originally one of Vinton’s animators. Some see this as a coup, others as the way studios are always formed in good ol’ Tinsel Town. Not that Laika has its headquarters anywhere near Hollywood. Instead, they’re up in Oregon, in the Portland metropolitan area, pushing out some of the most mind-boggling works of stop-motion feature animation the world has seen for the best part of the last twenty years. There’s a lot of creative freedom and technical innovation when profit isn’t a chief concern for the studio head.

It started with Selick’s Coraline, an early magnum opus, and then came the terrific ParaNorman by Fell and Butler. Annable and Stacchi’s The Boxtrolls felt, in some ways, like a step back, but, looking back, it was more like the studio taking a deep breath before releasing their most ambitious project yet into the world. With Kubo and the Two Strings, Travis Knight became a feature director in his own right, delivering a Japanese folklore-inspired fantasy adventure whose ideas on storytelling are still some of the studio’s most complex conceptual gambits. Missing Link saw Butler return and a more modest play, because, once more, a greater epic was on the horizon, more than a decade in the making. In some ways, it has all led to this, to Wildwood…

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Are you ready to go back to LA LA LAND? | 10th Anniversary

by Juan Carlos Ojano

Ten years later and LA LA LAND's opening sequence still astounds.LA LA LAND, Damien Chazelle's Oscar-winning Technicolor ode to cinema, jazz, and dreamers, returns to cinemas this year to celebrate its tenth anniversary. Many Oscar fans will remember this film as the film that almost won Best Picture, only to be leapfrogged by the queer coming-of-age film Moonlight, resulting in an Oscar snafu to end all award snafus. However, its legacy goes beyond awards talk. With how the cinematic landscape and viewership has vastly changed since its release, the film is a powerful reminder that cinema is still best experienced in the film theaters...

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Best Actress in the Post-War: An Alternative Oscar History

by Cláudio Alves

Olivia de Havilland won Best Actress twice in the late 40s. First, for Mitchell Leisen's TO EACH, HIS OWN in 1946, and, then, for William Wyler's THE HEIRESS in 1949.

At long last, after a month of endless TIFF and NYFF reviews, the Alternative Best Actress series makes its grand return. For now, let's ease back into pre-fall festival season rhythms with a write-up that considers only four Oscar years, 1946-49. 

They were those of the immediate post-war, when the Best Actress queens of the decade's first half - Garson, Davis, Hepburn - seemed to lose the Academy's favor, while new favorites emerged. In one of Old Hollywood's most infamous and contested family feuds, Fontaine won the Oscar before de Havilland, but Olivia finished the 40s with two little golden men to her sister's one. Rosalind Russell thought it was finally her time to win gold, but the Academy had other ideas, like a newfound fondness for preposterous Scandinavian accents and Loretta Young. Jane Wyman won for a mute performance, while Susan Hayward shouted and wallowed her way to multiple nominations. Finally, having grown tired of one red-headed English Rose, AMPAS turned their eyes to another, with Kerr closing the decade with the beginning of her "always the bridesmaid, never the bride" run of Best Actress nominations.

But that's reality, actual Academy Award history. What about my own version? If I had a ballot, some things would've gone differently, to say the least...

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