By Paul Byrnes, Sandra Hall and Jake Wilson
This year's best picture nominees cover the gambit of storytelling from World War I dramas to old Hollywood to the tragic breakdown of a marriage. If you missed them our critics have you covered. Here's their thoughts on the films the Academy decided were the cream of the crop.
1917 ★★★★½
Let's clarify a few things: 1917 is not a single-take film. Nor is it in "real time". Both descriptions are being flung around on the indiscrimi-net by people who should know better.
It may look like it was made in one take, because director Sam Mendes and cinematographer Roger Deakins designed it that way, but it's probably more like 30 or 40 long takes. Some of them last eight or nine minutes – and they are beyond remarkable, just not continuous. As for real time: the film takes place over about 10 hours – 'nuff said.
Is it an accurate rendition of the First World War in April 1917 on the Western Front?
Yeah, nah. There is a problem in the script's founding idea that some may find fatal. On the other hand, it need not obscure the film's magnificent achievement, which is to take us into the trenches in a way that no one has ever done better. The overall impact of 1917 is simply breathtaking, horrifying, appalling. It offers a compelling version of what a day in the war might have felt like for two soldiers.
Read Paul Byrnes full review here.
FORD v FERRARI ★★★★
This is certainly not a film for our times. Drawn from recent history, it’s a nostalgic celebration of gas-guzzling fast cars and the people who risked their lives racing them.
Yet it’s wholly seductive. Cars may be its focus but its underlying theme dwells on the deadening effect of corporate conformity. Its villains are company men. Their adversaries are the mavericks who see the path ahead and are canny and courageous enough to forge through the politicking blocking the way. Maybe it is a film for our times, after all.
He has a couple of first-rate examples of the breed in Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) and his friend and colleague, Ken Miles, a racing driver with a Birmingham accent, World War II experience as a tank commander in the British Army and an unshakeable sense of his own worth. Christian Bale, at his most angular and hard-bodied, seems born for the role.
Joker ★★½
Joker is not a particularly good film, much less an important one. It is, however, an interesting cultural phenomenon: the Venice prize may represent a milestone in the history of taste, implying a new conception of quality cinema.
Whatever its pretensions, this is undeniably a comic-book movie; moreover it’s directed by the brazenly low-brow Todd Phillips, known for a string of willfully tasteless comedies such as The Hangover.
Phillips says he doesn’t see Joker as a major departure, and it’s clear what he means: he has made a career out of manchild movies and here is another.
The manchild here is a mentally ill sadsack named Arthur Fleck (Phoenix), who works as a children’s entertainer, dreams of success as a stand-up comedian and is apparently destined to metamorphose into the Clown Prince of Crime.
Gotham City as envisaged here is modelled on the New York of 1970s films like Dog Day Afternoon and Taxi Driver – overpopulated, crime-ridden and grimy in a manner that has since become a shorthand for cinematic integrity.
Even more conspicuously, Joker takes many of its plot cues from Martin Scorsese’s prescient 1982 satire The King of Comedy, with Robert de Niro as a nut who idolises yet longs to supplant a talk-show host played by Jerry Lewis.
Arthur similarly looks up to a talk-show host played by De Niro himself, whose authoritative performance is the best thing in the film; a homage to the era when showbusiness as a whole aspired to a respectability it did not quite possess.
But the film pins most of its artistic hopes on Phoenix, playing yet another variant on the established Joaquin Phoenix Character: morose, potentially violent, inarticulate yet with glimmers of sensitivity.
Phoenix is the kind of actor who has to work hard to be uninteresting. But he never manages to make Arthur into a coherent person, partly because it’s hard to see this schmuck as any kind of future arch-villain and partly because the film’s thesis is kept broad and vague; sidestepping the moments where the character might forfeit our sympathy for good.
Read Jake Wilson's full review here.
ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD ★★★★
Midway through Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Sharon Tate (played by Margot Robbie) goes to the movies. Specifically, she goes to one of her own movies, Phil Karlson’s 1968 spy spoof The Wrecking Crew.
Inside the theatre, she makes herself at home, slipping off her go-go boots and putting her bare feet up on the seat in front of her, while smiling at her onscreen counterpart (the actual Tate, not Robbie) as if the pair were sharing a private joke.
She is, you might say, enjoying herself. So too is Tarantino: there seems little doubt that every detail of the tableau has been selected to give him pleasure, and we are being permitted to witness a private ritual of self-gratification, on more than one level.
There is a story, or at least the promise or semblance of one. Taken at face value the film is an old-fashioned buddy movie, built on the easy rapport between two stars, both close to their best: Leonardo DiCaprio as Rick Dalton, a faded actor in TV westerns, and Brad Pitt as Cliff Booth, Rick’s stunt double, dogsbody, and seemingly only friend.
Craftily, Tarantino allows us to be charmed by these characters while still viewing them with some ambivalence.
The encounter between fiction and fact is the crux of the film, however long we take to get there.
Read Jake Wilson's full review here.
Parasite ★★★★
"A worthy winner of the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes film festival, the inspired Parasite can’t precisely be labelled a comedy, a thriller, nor a socially conscious drama about the class divide in South Korea, although it contains elements of all three.
"At a pinch, you might call it a satiric fable, or a tall tale: it also resembles a laboratory experiment, following a given set of postulates through to the bitter end.
"The film is a companion piece to director Bong Joon-ho's 2006 smash hit The Host (host and parasite, get it?), which saw a similarly down-and-out family battling a monster from the deep. This time, however, the Kim family is the monster – a four-headed beast that operates as a single entity and shows little mercy to outsiders.
"As always, Bong’s formal choices are close to impeccable: he’s the master of making an image feel sinister by holding it a beat too long, or using lateral tracking shots to suggest how his characters are propelled by drives rather than by psychology in any usual sense.
"That he never shirks his responsibilities as an entertainer is part of what makes his work so disquieting: we are drawn into the story without being guaranteed a happy ending, or even a moderately consoling one. But while he may be a cynic, he’s no misanthrope, nor is he lacking in warmth.
"At least, there’s no doubt that he likes the Kims – which is precisely why he has so few qualms about showing them at their worst."
The Irishman ★★★★½
The Irishman is pure cinema, all three and a half hours of it – and one of Scorsese’s jazziest, most difficult films, borrowing from many sources while riffling freely though often mournfully on the themes and techniques of his previous crime epics Goodfellas and Casino.
Headlines hit the camera as in a movie by Sam Fuller; a burst of gunfire is set against a flower arrangement out of Vertigo; a scene where Frank exacts revenge on a shopkeeper is staged in a fixed master shot as it might have been in 1910. Brief flashbacks or mental visions are spliced into the main narrative – which, of course, is a flashback already.
Scorsese’s sociological side, too, is much to the fore. Charts could be made tracking what various characters like to eat and drink (Hoffa is a teetotaller, but appreciates hot dogs fried in beer). Questions of etiquette are frequently debated and there are hints of a secret history of 20th-century politics, especially in relation to JFK.
By design, much of The Irishman has the inconsequence of so-called real life: pointless conversations, random coincidences, tiny moments that stick in the mind for no good reason. Frank himself is nobody special – not even a psychopath; he's just a guy who has figured out what it takes to make headway in a violent world.
Yet the film is also a slow-burning melodrama, centred on Frank’s relationships to other men (women hardly exist for him, though he’s married with daughters). He serves both the charismatic Hoffa and the gnomelike Bufalino: he loves them both, and they love him too.
In contrast to De Niro’s restraint, Pacino gives the most Pacino of performances: the hoarse sing-song, the bellowing, the revival preacher gestures. Much of the time Hoffa seems like the central personality, the one with the tragic arc. But ultimately the story belongs to Frank: a guy not much different from the rest of us, a sinner with an outside chance at redemption.
By the end, we can see that the whole of this enormously long film has been organised around a single shocking moment, which has reverberations both before and after in the form of the violent acts Frank carries out with such diligence and expertise.
It might be that these split-second bursts of psychotic energy are where Frank, like so many Scorsese heroes, truly comes alive. Everything else is just existence – for whatever that is or isn’t worth."
Read Jake Wilson's full review here.
LITTLE WOMEN ★★★★½
This eighth film version of Louisa May Alcott's perennial story of four sisters coming of age in America in the 1860s arrives like a Christmas hamper of cinematic goodness. Its modernity is a shock – until you refer to the text, where the seeds of modernity are on every page.
Feminists have long argued about whether the book empowers young girls or enfolds them in a corset of middle-class fantasy about home-and-hearth. Director Greta Gerwig glosses over that hump with minimal fuss and admirable simplicity by allowing for both. It is both a traditional version of Little Women, in which the emotions, pain and passions of the March women are respected; it's also as fresh and contemporary as if Jo, Beth, Amy and Meg were living next door and playing netball on the weekend.
This Little Women delivers at breakneck speed and with great physicality. The dialogue is at screwball comedy pace, tumbling and babbling like a mountain stream. Ronan runs through the streets of New York at full pace, as a young lady ought not; she and her sisters wrestle on the floor of their modest cottage in Concord, Massachusetts, sloughing off their wet skirts in front of the fire. There are only women in this house, as their father is away at the civil war. Laura Dern is their mother Marmee, whose strength and character shine quietly through the ups and downs.
Some might find that this #MeToo modernism a little forced. Gerwig forestalls that reaction, through unstoppable energy and warmth. About 20 minutes in, the characters cease to be characters; they are now flesh and blood, our sisters. We feel their happiness and despond, their cold feet and warm hearts, their slights and loves. It's a masterful, passionate, all-in kind of adaptation. As the sports commentators say, Gerwig should podium in coming contests.
Read Paul Byrnes full review here.
JOJO RABBIT ★★★★
The New Zealand director Taika Waititi (Boy, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Thor: Ragnarok) has copped some flak since Jojo Rabbit premiered to great applause at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. I imagine he was expecting it.
When you put the words "Hitler" and "comedy" together in a concept, trouble will find you, and he's in good company. The British government was concerned about Charlie Chaplin making The Great Dictator in 1940; Ernst Lubitsch raised some eyebrows when he made To Be or Not to Be in 1942. Mel Brooks has twice courted trouble with The Producers and his remake of Lubitsch's film.
Depictions of Hitler as the butt of satire tend to upset some people, regardless of intent. We can assume that Waititi, the son of a Maori painter and a Russian Jewish mother, knew exactly what he was doing when he decided to write the script, adapting a book by Christine Leunens. Waititi himself plays a comedic version of the Fuhrer, who appears as a small boy's imaginary friend. The director wants Jojo Rabbit to be noticed – and it deserves to be.
It's an audacious, challenging form of comedy, the upsetting kind. It looks from the publicity like a children's film, but it is anything but.
Read Paul Byrnes full review here.
MARRIAGE STORY ★★★½
Marriage Story is thus a tale of two cities, New York and Los Angeles – like several films by Woody Allen, whose influence is all over the film and director Noah Baumbach’s work in general. But Baumbach delivers what Allen only ever promised, a realistic picture of a specific class of well-off American sophisticates. As ever he’s alert to matters of status, what it means to be a big-shot in one context and a nobody in another.
Baumbach is a filmmaker of two sides, both a humanist who understands that everyone has their reasons and a brittle satirist with a knack for lines that sound like cartoon captions (“The Japanese are doing some really interesting tequilas at the moment”). The funniest material here involves the lawyers, played by actors ideal for their roles: Ray Liotta as a heavy hitter who looks and talks like a mafioso, Laura Dern as a New-Agey but ruthless feminist, and Alan Alda as a gently seedy old-timer.
These are caricatures but nuanced ones, without the reductive sourness which can be Baumbach's weakness: he’s able to make them funny without cutting them down to size. You can feel the actors’ joy in playing these long, almost theatrical scenes – and the director’s joy in seeing them take the script to a new level.