You have two more weeks to binge the Oscar-nominated movies. ( I’ve also written If I Picked the Oscars – before the nominations were announced.) These first two movies are, deservedly, the Oscar favorites:
- The Shape of Water, Guillermo del Toro’s imaginative, operatic inter-species romance may become the most-remembered film of 2017.
- Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri a powerful combination of raw emotion and dark hilarity with an acting tour de force from Frances McDormand and a slew of great actors.
- Steven Spielberg’s docudrama on the Pentagon Papers, The Post, is both a riveting thriller and an astonishingly insightful portrait of Katharine Graham by Meryl Streep. It’s one of the best movies of the year – and one of the most important. Also see my notes on historical figures in The Post.
- Pixar’s Coco is a moving and authentic dive into Mexican culture, and it’s visually spectacular.
- Lady Bird , an entirely fresh coming of age comedy that explores the mother-daughter relationship – an impressive debut for Greta Gerwig as a writer and director.
- I, Tonya is a marvelously entertaining movie, filled with wicked wit and sympathetic social comment.
Here’s the rest of my Best Movies of 2017 – So Far. Most of the ones from earlier this year are available on video. Here’s aniother current choice:
- Call Me By Your Name is an extraordinarily beautiful story of sexual awakening set in a luscious Italian summer, but I didn’t buy the impossibly cool parents or the two pop ballad musical interludes.
My DVD/Stream of the Week is the funny and sentimental Canadian dramedy Cloudburst, pairing Oscar-winning actresses Olympia Dukakis (Moonstruck) and Brenda Fricker (My Left Foot) as lesbian life partners of many decades. Cloudburst was an indie hit in Canadian theaters, but was purchased by Lifetime and didn’t get a theatrical release in the US. Happily, it’s available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Netflix, Amazon Instant Video , iTunes, Vudu and Xbox Video.
There are plenty of good movie choices on TV this week because Turner Classic Movies is in the midst of its 31 Days of Oscars. I’m suggesting that, on February 18, you DVR Henry Fonda at his most appealing in the subversive WW II comedy Mister Roberts. (Yes, I’m using “DVR” as a verb.) Fonda gets to play off of James Cagney, William Powell and Jack Lemmon.
