Since the Oscar nominations were announced last month, gold-derby prognosticators have referred to Philomena as “the ninth nominee” in the Best Picture field. Their implication is that among all those films up for Hollywood’s highest honor, the British dramedy is the one least likely to win and least deserving of being there. That’s insane, of […]
academy
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Get shorty
Mr. Hublot Size matters; sometimes smaller is better. At least that can often be the case at the multiplex, where movie studios confuse running time for substance. In screening a slew of short films nominated this year for Academy Awards, the Oklahoma City Museum of Art reminds cinephiles that length isn’t everything. The live-action nominees […]
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12 Years a Slave
The film’s discomforting imagery is depicted with shrewd precision and unflinching directness, both pivotal to the potency of the film. But McQueen also proves himself to be a uniquely accomplished storyteller, and the story here is extraordinary. Based on Solomon Northup’s 1853 autobiography of the same name, 12 Years follows a free black man’s sudden […]
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Blue Jasmine
Opening Friday exclusively at AMC Quail Springs Mall 24, 2501 W. Memorial, Blue Jasmine tells two stories. The first is about a rich socialite wife living more than comfortably in New York with her business-savvy husband. The second involves a distraught woman who sustains herself with alcohol, antidepressants and more alcohol. She’s always short of […]
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Amour
In other words, the guy is definitely not the lovey-dovey type. But that unblinking, cold-blooded aesthetic is largely what makes Amour, coming to home video after an Academy Award win for Best Foreign Language Film, so remarkable. In its depiction of an elderly Parisian couple coming to terms with illness and looming death, the film […]
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Happy People: A Year in the Taiga / The Gatekeepers
Happy People: A Year in the Taiga Love a good documentary? If so, you’re in luck, since two excellent, if decidedly different, ones are in town this week. Werner Herzog is easily among the most singular of documentary makers, having made such elegantly strange works as Grizzly Man and Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Still, fans […]
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The Master
Up for three Academy Awards on Sunday, all for its main performances, the inspired-by-Scientology-but-not-really drama follows Navy vet Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix, Walk the Line) as he returns home post-WWII to find he never really had a home to begin with. He doesn’t “fit” anywhere; his string of tenuous relationships — with women, with jobs […]
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Argo
It’s a testament to the skills of the filmmakers that Argo delivers a deluge of suspense even when its ending is never in doubt. Up for seven Oscars on Sunday, it was released earlier this week on Blu-ray and DVD. There’s no way the movie industry could have resisted this stranger-than-fiction yarn. The film chronicles […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Amour
In other words, the guy is definitely not the lovey-dovey type. But that unblinking, cold-blooded aesthetic is largely what makes Amour, which opens Friday at AMC Quail Springs Mall 24, so remarkable. In its depiction of an elderly Parisian couple coming to terms with illness and looming death, the film is almost brutal in its […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Searching for Sugar Man
Take, for example, Searching for Sugar Man. Currently up for the Best Documentary Feature Academy Award and new to DVD, the doc introduces us to the saga of the one-named Rodriguez, a criminally unknown singer-songwriter from the early 1970s whose career sank into obscurity in his native United States, but whose influence proved monumental in, […]