Best Picture—Black Panther
Lead Actress—Olivia Coleman (The Favourite)
Supporting Actress—Regina King (If Beale Street Could Talk)
Supporting Actor—Sam Elliott (A Star Is Born)
Directing—Spike Lee (BlacKkKlansman)
Adapted Screenplay—Joel Coen and Ethan Coen (The Ballad of Buster Scruggs)
Original Screenplay—Paul Schrader (First Reformed)
Foreign Language Film—Cold War
Animated Feature—Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
Original Score—If Beale Street Could Talk
Original Song—"When a Cowboy Trades His Spurs for Wings" (The Ballad of Buster Scruggs)
Documentary Short—A Night at the Garden
Cinematography—Alfonso Cuarón (Roma)
Documentary Feature—Hale County This Morning, This Evening
Production Design—First Man
Sound Mixing—Roma
Costume Design—Black Panther
Film Editing—BlacKkKlansman
Sound Editing—First Man
Animated Short Film—Weekends
Visual Effects—First Man
Movies
It has all the romantic sweep of one of those classic Hollywood epics, but at half the length of something like Doctor Zhivago. Then there's the ending, which gives that bleakly spiritual, mid-century European arthouse touch, but at half the misery of, I dunno, Through a Glass Darkly. A real best of both world situation here. As with director Paweł Pawlikowski's previous movie, Ida, Cold War is kind of premised on the hypothesis that the past 50 years of filmmaking don't really matter, and as with Ida, I am very okay going along with that when the results are as engaging as this is—though I do understand if someone were to dismiss this as pastiche. Grade: A-
Borrowing Unfriended's aesthetic for a domestic thriller isn't an inherently bad idea. But taking the action off the various online/desktop settings of Unfriended and having characters' actions out in the real world drive the action was already something that the Unfriended sequel had trouble doing elegantly, and Searching, as significantly less elegant film than even that sequel, does some really dumb things in sticking with its gimmick—like, why does John Cho's character FaceTime literally everyone (including the detective assigned to his daughter's case!!) when any reasonable person would just make a regular ol' phone call? Also, rather than blocking all the various windows on the desktop in a clean way, this movie does this really irritating pan-and-scan thing, zooming in on the desktop just to make sure you don't miss any important action. All that said, it's a decently engaging thriller (until its rushed and flubbed ending), and as a new parent, I found the movie's central idea of one's child being essentially unknowable and fragile to be pretty terrifying. I'm looking at my infant kid now, and it's like—what are you hiding, dude? Grade: B-
I lot of this movie is notable for being a thematic antecedent—the phone sex/identity dynamics feel like a dry run for the call center pieces of Sorry to Bother You, while the way that both self-concept and reality fracture as they are subject to media representation anticipates things like Perfect Blue and last year's Cam. It's also just a really interesting piece of Spike Lee's filmography: his first movie he didn't write (and major phew on that, given the subject matter—Suzan-Lori Parks's screenplay is very good), his use of Prince as a musical muse (the soundtrack is basically wall-to-wall Prince, and it's great), his eclectic cinematic style (probably his most stylistically diverse movie of this era). The movie isn't perfect, and it doesn't really stick the landing in any way other than on a thematic level. But pound for pound, it's good cinema and one that's immensely stranger and more complicated than the opening minutes indicate. Grade: B+
I just want Ralph Bakshi to have an unqualified success, you know? This movie ain't it, though. It's got some supremely cool pulp imagery, and some of the craft is spectacular (probably the most technically accomplished use of rotoscoping I've seen in a Bakshi film, and a mid-film undead skeleton is my favorite character animation ever in one of the dude's movies). But this movie really leans into the sexism and problematic racial coding of its high fantasy/"barbarian" pulp genre, and the script is dreadful. Large sequences of this movie are wordless, and I can't help but feel that it would be better off just going completely pantomime. Grade: C+
Pretty tedious overall, and the plot is slapdash and momentum-free. I can appreciate the historical importance of this as an early example of a feature film musical, and there are actually some really nice sets/costumes in at least a few of the showstoppers. But for a musical, there really isn't a lot of music to work with—I really wish they'd actually included more than just, like, two songs that they just repeat over and over again. Grade: C
The movie's title promises "a story of the Ku Klux Klan," but truth be told, it's much more interested in the more subtle horror of internalized racism against oneself than the terror of the white hoods. Several prominent characters in the movie attempt to pass as white out of a sheer hatred for blackness, and especially for this era of cinema, it's a particularly complex and nuanced depiction of the corrosive power of white supremacy—not just the blunt trauma of open race terrorism (though that's here, too) but also a much more insidious psychological terrorism that goads toward a sort of suicide of identity. That said, I don't really know what to do with this film: on a philosophical level, there's a terribly racist caricature of an Indian that figures quite prominently into the film's plot, which casts a shadow over the movie's discussion of race, while on a more technical level, the movie's climax (in which the KKK gets clobbered with bricks, apparently—likely the best part of this movie) has been completely lost to history, which makes it tremendously unsatisfying as a narrative. Interesting, but (esp. sans climax) not anything really shattering. Grade: C+
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