The Chilean drama Gloria is about an especially resilient 58-year-old woman. The Palestinian Omar is a heartbreaking romance inside a tense thriller; Omar is nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar.
My DVD/Stream of the Week is the flawless true story thriller Captain Phillips, my choice as the best Hollywood movie of the year. It’s now available on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.
In theaters, you can still find Oscar nominees Nebraska, American Hustle and Her, which all made my Best Movies of 2013. I also strongly recommend Best Picture nominees The Wolf of Wall Street and Philomena. Dallas Buyers Club, with its splendid performances by Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto, is formulaic but still a pretty good watch.
I saw this year’s Oscar Nominated Live Action Shorts and was disappointed. There was nothing to match recent gems like The God of Love or Curfew. I liked the British short about a particularly bored and malevolent God masquerading as a convict, but that 13 minutes didn’t justify the two hours that I had invested. A 30-minute Spanish film about child soldiers in Africa was to excruciatingly brutal to justify the trite attempt at a redemptive payoff. (I haven’t seen the Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts, but I have heard good things about that program.)
Check out my first post on Cinequest – and follow me on Twitter for my Cinequest coverage.
I love 31 Days of Oscar, Turner Classic Movies magical month of Oscar-nominated films. On March 1, TCM is showing all five Best Picture nominees from 1967: The winner was In the Heat of the Night, which I can’t imagine holds up as well today as The Graduate or the groundbreaking Bonnie and Clyde. The other nominees were Doctor Doolittle and the now embarrassingly dated Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.