Cold War Follows In The Footsteps of Au Hasard Balthazar and Silence In Being A Compelling Story of Human Anguish

It used to be common for a movie to manage to score a Best Director nomination without managing to capture a Best Picture nomination, but ever since the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences re-expanded the amount of Best Picture nominees from five to anywhere from five to ten in 2009, only two movies have managed to achieve this feat. The first of this duo emerged four years ago with Foxcatcher, which managed to score a Best Director nod and two acting nominations but got snubbed from Best Picture. The other movie was Cold War, director Pawil Pawlikowski's first directorial effort since his acclaimed 2014 feature Ida, and it actually got nominated for Best Director without scoring a simultaneous Best Picture nod just a month ago.

Mermaids! Monstrous Murder! Musical Numbers! It's All Here In The Lure!

Remember that brief period in the early 2010's when we had gritty reimaginings of fairy tales? It didn't last long, mostly because more classical retellings of those fairy tales proved to be far more financially lucrative, but for a moment, we got just enough of these titles to qualify as a mini-trend in American cinema. Jack The Giant Slayer, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters and Snow White & The Huntsman all emerged as attempts to rework children's fairy tales into dark PG-13 or R-rated cinema. In the end though, most of these attempts to be "adult" just ended up feeling derivative of other movies or tv shows and resulted in lackluster motion pictures (I do remember Giant Slayer being decent, to be fair).

Loving Vincent Paints An Intriguing Portrait of An Iconic Painter

 

Hand-drawn animations woefully low presence on the American film scene has seen a mild form of a reprieve this year thanks to The Red Turtle, Your Name. and now the Vincent Van Gogh tribute Loving Vincent, which is brought to life entirely by watercolor paintings that have been created by around 115 painters. Yep, the entire film is rendered through the distinctive art style that Van Gogh was famous for. Interestingly, Vincent Van Gogh is already dead when Loving Vincent gets its story started which takes place shortly after the iconic painters demise and has Van Gogh's mailman, Postman Roulin (Chris O'Dowd) entrusting his son Armand Roulin (Douglas Booth) to return the letter to Vincent's brother.