By Brent Furdyk/June 15, 2021 9:40 am EST
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One Night in Miami won acclaim for first-time director Regina King
King’s directorial debut earned three Oscar nominations and widespread critical acclaim. As Empire’s review detailed, King’s deft touch as a director “allows actors space to do their best work, even within the confined proportions of a hotel room.” Writing for The New York Times, reviewer A.O. Scott likewise praised “One Night in Miami,” calling it “one of the most exciting movies I’ve seen in quite some time.”
Sound of Metal brought star Riz Ahmed his first Oscar nomination
The film rests on the taut performance of Ahmed, who earned a well-deserved Best Actor Oscar nomination (making history as the first Muslim to ever receive a nomination in that category). Reviewing the movie for RogerEbert.com, Brian Tallerico praised Ahmed’s acting in the movie as “a model of restraint,” making “effective low-key choices instead of the broad emotional ones” to craft a “more genuine” performance. In The Guardian, reviewer Mark Kermode shared his appreciation for the “astonishing verisimilitude” of first-time director Darius Marder, who “conjures a world in which every detail rings true.”
One of the film’s Oscar wins was for Best Sound, appropriate for a film that uses audio to place the viewer within Ruben’s aural perspective, simulating what he’s hearing — and not — as deafness encroaches.
Before Joker, Joaquin Phoenix won raves for You Were Never Really Here
Writing for RogerEbert.com, Sheila O’Malley’s review declared the film to be a “taut and almost unbearably intense 90-minutes, without an ounce of fat on it.” Nylon’s Jesse Hassenger described the film as an art-house version of Liam Neeson’s “Taken,” as director Lynne Ramsay “melds physical and psychological pain with such acuity that her bloody righteous-rescue movie sometimes appears to be deconstructing itself, piece by piece, before our eyes.”
The Hollywood Reporter’s Leslie Felperin, on the other hand, offered a backhanded compliment, noting that Ramsay’s “intoxicatingly stylish work is all over the place, a hot mess at times so ravishing it sends shivers down to the toes.”
Shia LaBeouf delved into his painful childhood for Honey Boy
In fact, it’s difficult to separate LaBeouf’s well-documented controversies from his semi-autobiographical film, which marks his debut as screenwriter. The movie dramatizes his early years as a successful child actor, with LaBeouf playing his own father. “Honey Boy” is the nickname that the quasi-fictionalized father, professional clown James Lort, gives his son, Otis, as he resentfully watches his son achieve a level of success he never could. Viewers see the trauma inflicted on the child (Noah Jupe) by his father’s jealous rage, and how it manifests in later life when Otis, now a rising young Hollywood star (Lucas Hedges), is seen being ordered into rehab by a judge after his umpteenth DUI.
In his review for The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw declared “Honey Boy” to be something of a “LaBeoufaissance.” As he wrote, what could have easily been dismissed as “a self-aggrandizing vanity project” was actually “very well directed and performed.”
Late Night delivered a multigenerational, feminist comedy about comedy
According to A.O. Scott’s review in The New York Times, Kaling’s writing is both “sharp” and “cruelty-free” as she takes on television’s old boy’s club in the midst of the #MeToo era. Critic Peter Travers shared similar sentiments in Rolling Stone, noting the film’s thematic similarities to “The Devil Wears Prada.” As he wrote, “there’s no mistaking the heat in [Kaling’s] subversive wit” within a film that delivers “just the pointed fun we need.”
Paterson is a poetic meditation on the mundane
“Paterson” is far from splashy; as Peter Travers noted in his Rolling Stone review, the movie “takes its good, sweet time working its way into your mind and heart. But when it does, you’re a goner.” Travers also lauded Driver’s understated performance, so low-key it hardly even seems like he’s acting. Writing for The Atlantic, critic David Sims described the film as “a quiet, considered masterpiece.” From his perspective, “in the last year of cinema, there’s been almost nothing made with such a beautifully defined perspective.”
Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot tells a true story of personal triumph
In his review for Chicago Reader, J.R. Jones praised the actors’ work in the film, particularly Phoenix’s “rollicking performance,” while marveling that Hill, as Callahan’s AA sponsor, “disappears into his role.” As Rolling Stone movie critic Peter Travers wrote, Van Sant masterfully walked a fine line in handling a subject that could have easily veered into triteness, yet instead “approaches the cliff of sentiment without going over the edge.”
Brittany Runs a Marathon is as relatable as it gets
Writing for Entertainment Weekly, Leah Greenblatt honed in on Bell’s performance, declaring that it “truly makes the movie.” Bell, Greenblatt added, brought “a real, messy humanity to Brittany that comedies hardly ever allow a lead character — let alone a non-impossibly-bodied female — to have.” While very funny, “Brittany Runs a Marathon” also conceals a somewhat darker undercurrent. According to Vox’s Alissa Wilkinson, the film “is a heartfelt and sometimes uncomfortable drama about the ways we try to save ourselves, how we sometimes hurt others, and why we need other people in order to grow.”
Cold War follows a love story behind the Iron Curtain
Set in Eastern Europe in 1950, just five years after the end of World War II, “Cold War” follows the love affair of a Polish musician named Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) and his businesslike government minder Irena (Agata Kuleza), placed together by circumstance. Directed by Pawel Pawlikowski and filmed in atmospheric black and white, “Cold War” paints a grim picture of post-war Europe and two mismatched lovers behind the Iron Curtain who find themselves inexplicably drawn to each other as decades pass and geopolitical winds shift.
The New York Times’ Manhola Dargis lauded the “ordinary and surprising beauty” of the film’s cinematography while praising the performances of Tot and Kuleza, who provide the film with “its heat, its flesh and its heartbreak.” As Emily Yoshida wrote in Vulture, Pawlikowski has a deeply personal connection to the plot, which is loosely based on his parents’ love story. Coming in at a lean 84 minutes, “Cold War” won’t place the kind of demands on viewing time as many films; investing that time, however, rewards the viewer with an emotional journey that was nominated for three Oscars in 2019, including Best Director, Best Cinematography, and Best Foreign Language Film.
The New York Times’ Manhola Dargis lauded the “ordinary and surprising beauty” of the film’s cinematography while praising the performances of Tot and Kuleza, who provide the film with “its heat, its flesh and its heartbreak.” As Emily Yoshida wrote in Vulture, Pawlikowski has a deeply personal connection to the plot, which is loosely based on his parents’ love story.
Coming in at a lean 84 minutes, “Cold War” won’t place the kind of demands on viewing time as many films; investing that time, however, rewards the viewer with an emotional journey that was nominated for three Oscars in 2019, including Best Director, Best Cinematography, and Best Foreign Language Film.
Everyone’s favorite Kazakh journalist returned in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
The film won critical raves and two Oscar nominations, as Borat shacked up with conspiracy theorists, invaded a militia rally to sing a country song about the “Wuhan flu,” and in one news-making segment, captured former NYC mayor and Trump legal adviser Rudy Giuliani apparently preparing for a “sexytime” encounter with Tutar.
Empire movie critic John Nugent summed it up when he wrote, “As shocking as it is hilarious, as ridiculous as it is insightful, ‘Borat Subsequent Moviefilm’ is the comedy we both need and deserve right now.”
Dave Grohl’s What Drives Us is a love letter to a rock ’n’ roll rite of passage
Along with sharing his own tour-in-a-van experiences (with both Nirvana and the Foos), Grohl speaks with a diverse swath of his fellow rockers about their van experiences, ranging from Flea of The Red Hot Chili Peppers to Metallica’s Lars Ulrich to U2 guitar wizard The Edge. Even Ringo Starr has some Beatles van stories to share (spoiler alert: flatulence is involved). “What happens in the van is the foundation of who we become,” Grohl explains at the film’s outset, via Rolling Stone. “If it weren’t for that old van, I don’t know where I’d be.”
A teenage girl comes to understand a family secret in Uncle Frank
In his review for Variety, Dennis Harvey wrote that “Uncle Frank” succeeds in striking the right “balance between ensemble seriocomedy, Big Issues and a somewhat pressure-cooked plot.” Despite the latter, Harvey conceded that “even at its most manipulative, ‘Uncle Frank’ remains polished and engaging.”
Gimme Danger is a raw portrait of a punk rock trailblazer
As a result, viewers take a deep dive into the story of the Stooges, which could have been a whole lot deeper. “There was one point where I thought, ‘Why don’t we make this into 10 one-hour episodes?’” Jarmusch said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. Ultimately, he decided that “the best way to make a delivery system out of our celebration of the Stooges was an hour-and-a-half, two-hour kind of film.”
One way Jarmusch was able to keep the film from sprawling into a docuseries, noted Jeff Albertson’s review for the The Seattle Times, was by eschewing interviews with the many, many bands influenced by the Stooges. Instead, he wrote, the director “allows Pop and the music of the Stooges to be the focus of the film.”
The Aeronauts tells a sky-high true story of courage and ingenuity
Set in the 1860s, “The Aeronauts” tells the true-ish story of how trailblazing meteorologist James Glaisher (Eddie Redmayne) enlisted daredevil balloon pilot Amelia Wren (Felicity Jones) to fly a hot air balloon to heights never before achieved in order to increase humanity’s scientific knowledge of weather patterns. As the The Washington Post explained, the film is “inspired” by an actual historical event, when Glaisher and a “professional aeronaut” named Henry Coxwell piloted a balloon to almost 30,000 feet, nearly perishing in the process (the film takes some creative license by switching the pilot’s gender).
As Olly Richards pointed out in his review for NME, on paper the film’s premise “seems quite tedious.” Once the movie gets rolling, however, the critic found himself becoming engaged in “a snipey, quite funny buddy comedy and, occasionally, knuckle-clenching action thriller.” Empire critic Ian Freer concurred, writing that stars Redmayne and Jones (reuniting after their work in the Oscar-winning “The Theory of Everything”) bring “charm and charisma” to the proceedings. “The Aeronauts,” wrote Freer, “soars with an old-school spirit of adventure and possibility, topped off with grandstanding filmmaking from [director] Tom Harper.
As Olly Richards pointed out in his review for NME, on paper the film’s premise “seems quite tedious.” Once the movie gets rolling, however, the critic found himself becoming engaged in “a snipey, quite funny buddy comedy and, occasionally, knuckle-clenching action thriller.”
Empire critic Ian Freer concurred, writing that stars Redmayne and Jones (reuniting after their work in the Oscar-winning “The Theory of Everything”) bring “charm and charisma” to the proceedings. “The Aeronauts,” wrote Freer, “soars with an old-school spirit of adventure and possibility, topped off with grandstanding filmmaking from [director] Tom Harper.
