Best Picture: Part I

Dunkirk


Visionary director and innovative story-teller, Christopher Nolan tackles the tale of one of Britain's most dangerous challenges during the Second World War: the evacuation of Dunkirk. The story is told in three temporalities with three areas of battle - we spend a week on land, a day on the sea, and an hour in the sky. The stories, interwoven into one another, capture the struggle and determination of both the British public and armed forces.

Nolan is at his visceral best. Every bomb hit you, water pouring into a claustrophobic space engulfs you. This is sensory film making as it should be. Delicately balancing his timelines to maximum effect, Nolan manages to tell three powerfully engaging stories which are all as gripping and nerve wracking as one another. A master class in war films.

Phantom Thread


Daniel Day-Lewis' 'retiring' film, Phantom Thread tells the story of a man, a dress maker, though more importantly, he's a perpetual bachelor, allowing women to float through his life and inspire him on a breeze before they drift away again. But falling for one of them disrupts his whole life.

Beautifully shot and wonderfully crafted, Paul Thomas Anderson's latest struggles at times to be fully engaging. Grounded by solid performances by the whole cast, notably Day-Lewis, Phantom Thread is, in essence, a film about the consuming world of fashion and an eccentric designer but his quirks often rub the wrong way, making it difficult to support the central figure and his reluctant pursuit of romance. It works as proof that making a technically brilliant film does not necessarily make a brilliant film.

Get Out


Take a the sense of unease you get in any good horror movie. Combine it with overtones of the racial oppression that haunts suburban, southern USA. What you get is Jordan Peele's phenomenal Get Out, a striking racial satire with Daniel Kaluuya anchoring the film with a star-making leading turn.

The important social issues presented in Get Out are the reason satire exists - to hold a mirror up to society and highlight its blemishes - and Peele focuses his quiet anger on making the audience feel uncomfortable before unleashing it in loud, brutal fashion.  Get Out is bold. Get Out is brave. But most of all, Get Out is terrifying. The question that remains is whether it is the film that is scary, or the darker reality it is portraying?

Call Me by Your Name


Beautiful, relaxed, loving film-making. This is what is on display in Call Me by your Name, the unconventional and forbidden character driven love story set in the countryside of Italy. The camera floats around the leads passively, simply observing something, allowing characters and relationships to evolve in its view. 

Featuring strong performances from its leads but also from the minor characters (particularly Michael Stuhlbarg, who was robbed of a Best Supporting Actor nomination), Call Me by your Name is arguably the most rounded, well crafted film at the Oscars this year. It succeeds on every single level, not to mention Luca Guadagnino's immense control over combining all these elements. This is film making at its very best, its most powerful, its most emotive. And the the long takes are to die for. 

The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)

New York is famously home to some wacky characters and cinema has often sought to capture that 'New York spirit' in the stories it tells. Film makers build personalities around the New York ethos - the stories of the quirky, rushed, community driven but isolated individuals that inhabit the famous city.

Noah Baumbach's Meyerowitz Stories is one such story.  It's the tale of a family headed by semi-successful sculptor Harold Meyerowitz (Dustin Hoffman) that comes together and falls apart on repeat for its near two-hour runtime. After a medical incident, Harold's two sons, Danny (Adam Sandler) and Matthew (Ben Stiller), and daughter Jean (Elizabeth Marvel), rally together to support each other and their father despite their estrangement from one another. But honouring your father isn't always as easy as it appears to be, especially when they're as neurotic as Harold. 

The Meyerowitz Stories is a fascinating exploration into the minds of the all the major players in a dysfunctional family jammed with exceptional performances. The film is broken into sections - handily titled or surmised with a title plaque like those you may see in a gallery - to give us greater insight into one character or situation at a time. We start with recently separated Danny as he desperately tries to park his car in busy Manhattan with his daughter Eliza (Grace Van Patten) in a comical sequence where the viewer is rammed into the car with the pair, the camera squeezed in between them, not just seeing their relationship but feeling it. Later we join Matthew, Harold's favourite son, who has escaped to LA and returned for lunch with his father, but no restaurant lives up to Harold's standards. We then have several shorter episodes, a group episode, a short Jean episode, and so on. 

Around the place, the film is being heralded as an Adam Sandler film, and whilst this is his best performance in years, this is not strictly true. This is a true ensemble piece and each performer brings something powerful and meaningful to the story. Dustin Hoffman's Harold is a genius creation; a grumpy, mumbling, artist who never quite peaked in his career and is almost allergic to other's success, at one point physically running from a former contemporary's show. He is the glue that holds the narrative together by pushing the family apart but there's something oddly endearing about him. Sandler and Stiller, alongside each other for the first time since Happy Gilmore, are brilliant as the half-brothers Danny and Matthew respectively. Their drastically different relationships with their father bringing much of the film's entertainment and conflict and their on-screen chemistry amplifying and exaggerating the comedy in their pain. Emma Thompson is also present as Maureen, an alcoholic Professor Trelawney type and Harold's fourth wife (who lovingly refers to him as The Dad).

The genius of Mereyowitz is in its weighty screenplay. This is a puff pastry of a family narrative - it's layered. The dialogue flows but no one is listening to one another. It's almost like the audience are absorbing two conversations at once which is an extremely efficient way to build characters. We hear their life stories in a way that's completely self absorbed and yet somehow desperate for attention or affection, depending on who is speaking. It's that tension, those hidden desires, that bring the heart to the film. It's also a testament to what happens when you make funny people do something serious; you get something seriously funny. 

Whilst its final third loses its pacing somewhat, the editing of the sections becoming somewhat jarring, it more than makes up for it with its brilliant performances, witty writing, and touching dramedy. 

Black

Drugs, race, homophobia. These are all powerful topics to approach in a film separately, let alone together. Is it ambition and bravery, of stupidity and foolishness? Let’s look to Moonlight to see.

One man’s life contains many stories; far too many to easily include in a two hour screenplay. That being said, Moonlight provides the cliff notes for its protagonist's journey from childhood to adult hood, with a pit-stop at the teenage years for good measure. Chiron (Alex R. Hibbert) is a young boy, bullied and excluded by the bigger boys at school. His mother (Naomi Harris) has fallen victim to a drug habit leaving Chiron to often fend for himself. However a drug dealer Juan (Mahershala Ali) and his girlfriend Teresa (Janelle Monáe) take him in when his home is not friendly, and treat him right. As Chiron (now Ashton Sanders) grows up, the bullying gets more severe, his sexuality and friendships become more confusing, and his life seems to spiral out of control. Eventually, we get to see where all of this gets him in the third act of the film.

Structured into three acts - Little, Chiron, and Black - Moonlight cleverly manages to essentially sew three shorts together to create a modern masterpiece. It doesn't have to show immediate relationship between actions and consequences, instead allowing them to play out over a lifetime giving the film a punchy pace, with nothing feeling unexplained or out of place. It also allows the film to build to multiple climaxes, one within each act, the most striking of which is in the middle episode - everything before builds to this point, everything after is a result of it. Director Barry Jenkins bombards the audience with visual information and it is glorious; it makes the film beautiful to watch as well providing extra detail about what is happening.

With stunning performances throughout, Moonlight allows a varied cast the opportunity to shine, with its lead played by three different actors - youngster Ashton Sanders playing the teenage Chiron is the standout of the three - but the best performances are in the supporting cast. Naomi Harris is at her very best in a hugely emotive role. It’s a role full of pain, and Harris doesn’t hold back. Mahershala Ali too, as Juan, is phenomenal. Though he is only present for the first act, his performance is easily the most memorable of the two hour runtime and his impact is lasting. Here, he solidifies his name as one of the go to actors in Hollywood.

Moonlight is a brilliantly and beautifully told story. It is proof that a film’s topic doesn’t have to be big and grand or based on some incredible story; a simple story told well is more powerful than powerful story executed poorly.

Baseball

Baseball, racial tension, and garbage men; what do these things have in common? They are all heavily featured in Denzel Washington's fast talking, hard hitting, third directorial feature. This is Fences.

Life has been tough on Troy Maxson (Denzel Washington). He was once an aspiring pro baseball player but never made it due to his race, so he believes. He has a loving wife, Rose (Viola Davis) who supports him and guides him as he strives to support his family. He has a brother Gabriel (Mykelti Williamson) who has a mental disorder, an estranged son, Lyons (Russell Hornsby), who only comes by for money once a week, and a younger son, Cory (Jovan Adepo), who has the potential to be a pro football player. We see Troy juggle these relationships, but keeping up a wall, not letting anyone penetrate or get too close. But when you've seen life chew up people and spit them out, it's hard to share warmth and encouragement with your family when reality is not so kind.

There's no shortage of films about racial oppression at the Oscars this year (13th, Loving, Hidden Figures), but Fences is perhaps the most striking of them all. Its main narrative is one of family under pressure and beneath that is the undercurrent of a systematically racially bias society. This is also a film driven by powerful performances from every member of the cast. Denzel Washington is electrifying, rattling through his mini-monologues at a lightning fast pace and it is mesmerising. He is at his best here, fresh off an award winning run of Fences on Broadway with co-star Viola Davis, Washington delivers a monumental performance as Troy having been able to absorb the character during its time on stage. Davis too, in a supporting role here as the gentle housewife Rose, is on top form and this maybe her year to finally take the Oscar statuette home that she has deserved since The Help. Keeping up with her Broadway co-star and hitting every beat where he lets up his pace the film keeps moving and when those gaps in flow come, the audience notice. The leads' spectacular timing emphasise the narrative and power it forward.

This is film making. Stripped clear of unnecessary extras, Fences demonstrates what can be achieved when you combine a good screenplay with a talented director and an outstanding cast. There's no blockbuster special effects, no plethora of A-list names teaming up to fight a common evil, but what is onscreen is spell-binding. Washington's not only skilled in front the camera, but behind it too. He knows August Wilson's play like the back of his hand and his familiarity with it allows him to finely tune every element of his film adaptation to be the best that it can. Staged and blocked like a play, Washington's camera glides in and out of rooms in the small house, lingering rather than cutting, providing the feeling that we are often looking through that fourth wall. It is effective, allowing the actors to really get involved in their scene, together, without interruption or cutaway.

Washington's achievement is simply astounding. For only his third directorial feature, Fences is an accomplishment to behold. Simple and powerful with stellar performances all round. This is an intelligent piece of cinema that doesn't try to be showy. It uses its medium of film to do the basics of storytelling, but it does those basics phenomenally well.

Hollywood

Hollywood. The land of dreams is no stranger to appearing on the big screen and being presented from many different angles, but it has been a long time since it was quite so colourful and quite so musical. This is La La Land.

Seb (Ryan Gosling) and Mia (Emma Stone) are both dreamers. The former longs to own and manage his own jazz club, the latter sees her name in lights, her face on the big screen. Their paths are interwoven and they can chase their dreams together with encouragement and support but the world we live in isn't easy for dreamers. There are expectations to live up to, finances to organise, and the proverbial 'man' keeping our protagonists from their ultimate success. Also, the film teaches us that sometimes success and dreams do not come hand in hand, that one does not necessarily equate to the other. This is not just a story of Seb and Mia, of their love and dreams, this is a story of how Hollywood engulfs those who wish to chase their dreams, how it forces compromise and conflict, how small decisions can change everything. And this story is told through song and dance.

The film opens with a traffic jam - welcome to Hollywood. But one by one, the commuters begin to sing; they step out of their cars and dance down the road in a spectacularly flowing set piece. Welcome to La La Land. The tone is apparent and the stage is set; we are thrown into a two hour rush of colour, music and movement. Director Damien Chazelle glides through his narrative with confidence, the film dancing along with its stars, helped in no small part by cinematographer Linus Sandgren. Chazelle and Sandgren choreograph each scene to the beat of the film, their camera as one of the performers. It weaves in and out of cars and bars, it swings around the piano that Seb plays, it circles Mia as she sings her heart out; it captures every ounce of emotion and, more importantly, soul that the film has to offer. If Chazelle's last feature Whiplash embodied the intensity of jazz, La La Land captures its warmth.

That warmth is amplified by the charisma and chemistry of the two leads. Both Mia and Seb are instantly and overwhelmingly likeable and their pairing slowly builds, eventually blossoming into love. From the gentle touch of finger tips in a cinema to helping plan each other's visions, their relationship is electrifying and full of life. The two powerful performances from Stone and Gosling over the course of the film culminate in a riveting and emotional climax with one of the most charming sequences in the film, leaving you smiling despite being metaphorically punched in the gut. The talent of the whole cast cannot be overstated with cast members learning new instruments (for their roles, Gosling learned piano from scratch and John Legend learned guitar), as well as dancing and singing live onset. No doubt you will be leaving the cinema tapping along to the catchy songs now permanently etched into your brain.

La La Land is a musical adventure into fantasy. It's more universally appealing than Chazelle's Whiplash, it's more charming and a lot less bleak, and also harks back to the golden age of Hollywood. This is almost a guaranteed formula for critical success (see The Artist's Best Picture win in 2012), but it also makes for a wonderful piece of cinema. It lacks the depth and power of some arguably better films, but it is inoffensive and totally captivating. It is a glimpse of what happens when a skilled film-maker decides to create something joyous; La La Land does not need to be dark to be brilliant.