Beale Street<\/em> is much less formally ambitious, but still darts nimbly around the timeline as it fleshes out the seemingly slight story (from James Baldwin\u2019s novel) of pregnant Tish, boyfriend Fonny and their two families. If their predicament is a prosaic and familiar one, that\u2019s by-and-large the point \u2013 that this or something like it is happening to millions of Americans every day. But an amazingly strong cast give it real texture, depth and warmth, and Jenkins\u2019 fluid and confident direction knits it all together powerfully. Using lenses, cuts, sound and music to extraordinary effect, Jenkins is a real talent. He even finds a new way to film a birth scene and manages not to make it seem like showboating. It\u2019s a real crime that this wonderful film is not nominated for Best Picture and utterly confounding that Jenkins was overlooked as Best Director. It is nominated for its screenplay, its score and Regina King has a good shot at picking up Best Supporting Actress.<\/p>\nSpider-man: Into the Spider-Verse<\/strong>. Geniuses of animation (and beyond) Lord and Miller have done it again, with this incredibly ambitious, eye-poppingly rendered and genuinely exciting slab of comic book mayhem. With vocal performances from such as Nicholas Cage, John Mulaney, Lily Tomlin and Chris Pine, this is a real treat and will no doubt walk off with Best Animated Feature (its only nomination).<\/p>\nStan & Ollie<\/strong>. Showbiz biopic done right, focusing in on a manageable period of time, with just a few glimpses of happier times. Coogan and Reilly are exemplary, delineating the men and the characters they played and never straying into parody. Equally good \u2013 and well served by Jeff Pope\u2019s witty script \u2013 are Shirley Henderson and Nina Arianda as Lucille Hardy and Ida Laurel respectively; and Rufus Jones is having the time of his life as Bernard Delfont. Ultimately, this paints an affecting and affectionate portrait of two men who have spent a lifetime as professional buffoons, attempting to end their career with a little dignity. It doesn\u2019t have any ambitions beyond that, but it achieves that goal admirably. No Oscar nominations, though, not even for Best Make-up.<\/p>\nThe Wife<\/strong>. This is a conundrum, and a full review would have to include significant spoilers which even this paragraph won\u2019t entirely spare you from. What\u2019s really going on in this literary marriage only becomes truly clear in the last third, which makes some of the early material a bit so-what and prevents us from getting inside the head of our ostensible lead, Glenn Close\u2019s Joan Castleman. In the final act, when the film stops being a detective story and commits to being a family melodrama it works better, and it\u2019s the details in the script (by Jane Anderson, from Meg Wolitzer\u2019s novel) that generally make it work, although there are some clunky lines here and there. Jonathan Pryce, Max Irons, Christian Slater (yes really!) and especially Glenn Close grab the material with both hands and give it tremendous passion and sincerity, but it\u2019s rather an odd, broken-backed experience as a whole. Glenn Closes\u2019 nomination for Best Actress is its only mention.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Okay, here are some capsule reviews of a bunch of other movies I\u2019ve seen this awards season. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. The Coen Brothers go to Netflix where we find them on rather frustrating form. The opening story of this anthology includes some marvellous effective moments, but judders to a half with one of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[25,11],"tags":[521],"class_list":["post-2261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-the-cinema","category-culture","tag-oscars-2019"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5JY5l-At","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2261"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2261\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2296,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2261\/revisions\/2296"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}