Innholdsfortegnelse for Ultimate Awards Guide 2017 i The Hollywood Reporter

• MAY 24 (CANNES) The Beguiled is a respectable but pallid redo of a hothouse Civil War melodrama made with much more flair and power by Don Siegel, and starring Clint Eastwood, 46 years ago. Other than to place slightly more emphasis on the female empowerment angle of a group of Southern women turning the tables on an injured but scheming Yankee soldier whom they’ve taken into their isolated household, it’s hard to detect a strong raison d’etre behind Sofia Coppola’s slow-to-develop adaptation. Rendered in soft, sometimes indistinct images illuminated only by candlelight or other natural sources, the tale consists of an emotional chess match among women of various ages (including Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst and Elle Fanning) who are trying to survive the war in a beautiful mansion that…

• SEPT. 11 (TIFF) A true story of enduring love and survival against impossible odds, Breathe is chiefly noteworthy as the feature-directing debut of Lord of the Rings and Planet of the Apes star Andy Serkis. But the main authorial force behind this personal passion project is producer Jonathan Cavendish, who conceived Breathe as a tribute to his parents, Robin and Diana, and the “swashbuckling band of eccentrics” that surrounded them during their long and extraordinary marriage. Despite being paralyzed from the neck down at 28, Robin defied medical science by living a full, productive, positive life as a devoted family man and trailblazing disability rights campaigner. But Breathe’s noble intentions are constrained by a trite script, flat characters and a relentlessly saccharine tone that eventually starts to grate. Breathe…

• JULY 23 Shot docudrama style with an emphasis on visceral force, Detroit marks the third collaboration between director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal (The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty). Their latest is a based-onreal- events drama determined to pummel the viewer with an unvarnished perspective on a violent episode in American racial annals. The match that lit the fire on July 23, 1967, was a police raid on a Detroit after-hours bar in a black neighborhood. Things got out of hand, more cops were sent in, and after three days of rioting, Detroit began to be compared to Vietnam. Meanwhile, Larry Reed (Algee Smith), a smoothly appealing singer, is scheduled to perform right after Martha and the Vandellas at a big downtown theater, and when the tumult outside…

• JULY 17 DID YOU KNOW? Nolan screened several films for his crew as inspiration, including Saving Private Ryan and The Battle of Algiers. Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk is an impressionist masterpiece — a war movie that employs an expensive canvas but draws power as much through isolated, private moments as through sheer spectacle. Using a risky narrative structure that splits the storytelling into three intercut chronologies, Dunkirk dramatizes the ordeal of some 400,000 mostly British soldiers fleeing Hitler’s army and stranded on the beaches of Dunkirk, in northern France, desperate for a way to make it across the English Channel. Nolan, who wrote the script, presents the brutal truth of the situation with pitiless directness. The first scene has several English soldiers being cut down, establishing the arbitrariness of who lives and dies.…

• JAN. 24 (SUNDANCE) One of the most satisfying thrillers in several years, Get Out proves that its first-time director, Key & Peele co-star Jordan Peele, has plenty of career options if he should grow tired of doing comedy in front of the camera. British actor Daniel Kaluuya plays Chris, a photographer going with girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams) to meet her parents. He’s concerned they may be shocked to learn their daughter is dating a black man; Rose, like any upper-class liberal, assures him he has no reason to worry. Once the pair have settled in at the family’s estate, Rose’s parents, Dean (Bradley Whitford) and Missy (Catherine Keener), are eager to befriend the young man, and all of their white neighbors are equally overfriendly to Chris. Is he wrong…

• SEPT. 8 (TIFF) Managing to both revel in its subject’s trashiness and convince us she’s far more innocent than America believed, Craig Gillespie’s I, Tonya reintroduces us to the most infamous athlete-villain of the first half of 1994 and lets her, for once, have the last say. Proving, after many a stolen scene, that she’s capable of carrying a picture in the lead role — even when makeup and hairstylists treat her character’s famous looks cruelly — Margot Robbie takes obvious pleasure in playing figure skater Tonya Harding, from her vulnerable teens to her presenttense, take-it-or-leave-it retirement. Despite its title, the pic (written by Steven Rogers) is deliberate in spreading its narrative focus around. Based, per the opening title cards, on frank interviews with the participants that are re-created…

• MAY 21 (CANNES) Neuroses flow thicker than blood through the veins of the clan under analysis in Noah Baumbach’s rambling, often stingingly amusing look at messy accounts being settled within a disorderly family. Baumbach’s film for Netflix is more conventionally conceived than some of his best work but benefits from sterling turns from a wonderful cast, most notably Dustin Hoffman and, no kidding, Adam Sandler. The early stretch is dominated by the piece’s most compelling character, Harold Meyerowitz (Hoffman), a cranky, quick-witted, thickly gray-bearded sculptor with a permanent chip on his shoulder over not being viewed as the towering genius he firmly believes himself to be. Oldest son Danny (Sandler) comes down to his dad’s apartment in the Village to see his daughter off to college at Bard, from…

• DEC. 6 An unofficial prequel to All the President’s Men some 41 years after the fact, The Post stirringly dramatizes the tale of how The Washington Post and its equivocating owner, Katharine Graham (played by Meryl Streep), rose to the occasion by publishing the Pentagon Papers in June 1971. Punchy and quick-pulsed, the Steven Spielberg-helmed film is a fine example of that now-rare species: the big-city newspaper melodrama. It’s a dramatic tale loaded with all manner of dynamics, political and personal. Written by first-timer Liz Hannah, with emendations by Josh Singer (Spotlight), the sharply detailed script deftly balances the public and private aspects of the story, especially the vacillations of the Post leadership — specifically publisher Graham and editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) — over whether to publish the…

• SEPT. 8 (TIFF) Perhaps the most striking thing about David Gordon Green’s Stronger is how it refuses to turn its subject into a hero or even a small-time symbol of courage, as one might legitimately expect of a survivor story, even while the world is clamoring to put him on a pedestal. Jake Gyllenhaal portrays Jeff Bauman, the young man who became a national rallying point of resistance to terrorism after losing his legs in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. The film is a simple, straightforward re-creation of how he rebuilt his life after the trauma, learned to walk on prosthetic legs and matured enough to accept responsibility for a wife and child. Based on the memoir by Bauman and Bret Witter, Stronger devotes very little time to the…

• MAY 18 (CANNES) Alive with the magic of pictures and the mysteries of silence, Todd Haynes’ retelling of authorillustrator Brian Selznick’s 2011 epic fable Wonderstruck is an uncommonly grown-up film about children, communication, connection and memory. Haynes always has been a ravishing visual storyteller, and his seventh feature is as seductively crafted as anything he’s made, with exquisite contributions from frequent collaborators including cinematographer Ed Lachman, production designer Mark Friedberg and costumer Sandy Powell. Perhaps even more notable is the work of composer Carter Burwell, who has created distinct moods for the narrative’s parallel threads, following the adventures of two runaway deaf kids 50 years apart, with the sounds subtly folded together as their stories intersect. The usual on-camera heavy hitters, Julianne Moore and in particular Michelle Williams, are…

The Boss Baby (FOX) RELEASE DATE March 31 BOX OFFICE TO DATE $499M DIRECTOR Tom McGrath CAST Alec Baldwin, Steve Buscemi, Jimmy Kimmel, Lisa Kudrow TOP AWARDS AND NOMS Globe and Annie feature noms Featuring the voice of Alec Baldwin as a onesie suit-wearing, corporate-minded blessed arrival, this DreamWorks Animation effort is a delightful blend of clever and tender. Onlychild Tim Templeton’s (Miles Bakshi) ideal family life is ruined when Mom and Dad bring home a little brother, dispatched by Babycorp headquarters to prevent an adorable puppy product launch. The movie delivers the entertaining goods while addressing universal truths about family bonds and the limitless boundaries of a child’s imagination. — MICHAEL RECHTSHAFFEN The Breadwinner (GKIDS) RELEASE DATE Nov. 17 BOX OFFICE TO DATE $154K DIRECTOR Nora Twomey CAST Saara…

2017 has been a year of female empowerment in the real world and also on the big screen, where female-centered awards hopefuls — meaning films primarily about a woman or women and not equally about a man or men — include Lady Bird, Wonder Woman, Molly’s Game, Girls Trip, The Shape of Water, The Florida Project, mother!, First They Killed My Father, Wonder Wheel, The Beguiled and I, Tonya. But how many of these films will wind up with a best picture Oscar nomination? And can any of them actually win? History suggests that they will face an uphill climb. One or two female-centered films get nominated for best picture nearly every year. This century’s examples include Arrival, Hidden Figures, Brooklyn, Room, Zero Dark Thirty, The Help, Black Swan, Winter’s…

• JAN. 20 (SUNDANCE) DID YOU KNOW? Bollywood star Anupam Kher was cast to play Kumail’s father at the request of the star-writer’s real-life dad, who is a fan. Silicon Valley’s Kumail Nanjiani breaks out as a romantic lead in The Big Sick — a fictionalized account of how his girlfriend’s grave illness jolted him into making a commitment. Realworld wife Emily V. Gordon co-wrote the script, handing off her role to Zoe Kazan, while producer Judd Apatow continues his streak shepherding young talent. Nanjiani plays Kumail, a Pakistani immigrant trying to break into comedy while ignoring his tradition-minded parents’ suggestions that he take the LSAT and consent to an arranged marriage. That’s a fact he hides from Emily (Kazan), who meets him at a stand-up show. They fall for…

• JAN. 23 (SUNDANCE) There is a scene toward the end of Call Me by Your Name, Luca Guadagnino’s piercingly honest adaptation of Andre Aciman’s novel, in which a professor in Italy sits down with his 17-year-old son for a talk. Dad quotes Montaigne’s famous phrase about his special friendship with Etienne de La Boetie, and his son understands that his father is referring to his offspring’s “special friendship” with the handsome 24-year-old intern who stayed with them for the summer. In someone else’s hands, the exchange might have been pretentious, but Guadagnino finds the right tone: understated and filled with paternal affection. It is this kind of attention to detail — much of it lifted from the book, adapted by Guadagnino with James Ivory and editor Walter Fasano —…

• SEPT. 1 (TELLURIDE) Few people today may remember Gloria Grahame, the Oscarwinning actress who had been pretty much forgotten by the time of her death in 1981. But in 1952, she was at the peak of her success, appearing in three movies, including the year’s best picture Oscar winner, The Greatest Show on Earth, and Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful, for which she won the Oscar for best supporting actress. By the time Grahame met Peter Turner (Jamie Bell), a young British actor, in 1979, her stardom was long behind her, and she was trying to regain her footing by acting on the stage in England. There was a 28-year difference between them. In Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, Annette Bening does not make an effort…

• SEPT. 5 (TELLURIDE) Snappy, spirited and shot through with the pangs and pleasures of leaving childhood behind, Lady Bird is a sharp-witted solo first feature by actress and now writerdirector Greta Gerwig. The film abounds with pinpoint insights into its mildly rebellious heroine’s hunger to shed the restraints of home and Catholic school and bust into an independent life and does so with a wealth of keenly observed detail. Modestly scaled but creatively ambitious, it succeeds on its own terms as a piquant audience-pleaser. Set in 2002-03, the central character’s final year in high school, the film makes plenty of little jokes about the stultifying limitations of the mostly middle- to upper-middle-class neighborhoods of Sacramento, not to mention the rules imposed by the Catholic school Lady Bird (Saoirse Ronan)…

• SEPT. 8 (TIFF) DID YOU KNOW? Bloom had to get a special 48-hour pass to attend the film’s TIFF premiere because of a Canadian law prohibiting felons from entering the country. Quite aside from its considerable merit as a singular story neatly told, it’s a good bet that Molly’s Game packs more voiceover narration than any Hollywood feature ever made, which is to say that it’s practically papered with it wallto- wall. Fortunately, the words have been written by the ever-eloquent Aaron Sorkin and are spoken with skill and speed by Jessica Chastain as a way of telling, in as much detail as a mainstream film could allow, the dense and complicated story of Hollywood and Wall Street high-stakes poker den mother Molly Bloom. In his overdue directorial debut,…

• SEPT. 10 (TIFF) Dan Gilroy’s directorial debut, Nightcrawler, set a high bar, one that his follow-up, legal drama Roman J. Israel, Esq., struggles to surpass. As written, the character of Roman J. Israel, Esq. (Denzel Washington) is a bundle of semi-endearing contradictions: offthe- charts smarts with a savant’s ability to remember facts, dates and names, but unable to obey the niceties of social interaction, characteristics that clearly signal he’s on the autism spectrum. One of the finer things about the film is that it makes no big deal out of this; the fact that Roman is not neurotypical is represented as no more remarkable than the fact that he’s black. For a living, Roman works as the silent partner in a downtown law firm that specializes in criminal cases…

• SEPT. 4 (VENICE) After the entertainingly larkish but lowcaloric carnage of Seven Psychopaths, writer-director Martin McDonagh returns to the peak form of his debut feature, In Bruges, and of his best work for the stage. A stupendous showcase for the formidable gifts of Frances McDormand that also provides plum roles for Woody Harrelson and Sam Rockwell, this is a corrosively humorous drama of festering injustice, Shakespearean rage, grave reckoning and imperfect redemption, which unfolds with the epic dimensions of a classic Western showdown. It’s been months since Mildred Hayes (McDormand) heard a word from cops about the investigation of her teen daughter’s horrific rape and murder, so she takes radical steps to light a flame under the ass of local law enforcement: She has three signs put up, their…

• OCT. 13 (NYFF) Kate Winslet’s boldly unfettered performance in Woody Allen’s visually luscious, 1950s-set melodrama keeps you watching, even if underlying sourness, tonal uncertainty and a key casting misstep diminish the effectiveness of this Amazon Studios release. The latest recruit to play Allen’s onscreen alter ego — and the film’s most glaring weakness — is Justin Timberlake starring as Mickey Rubin, who’s working a summer job as a Coney Island lifeguard. Timberlake looks right at home in the period swim trunks, but he struggles to convince in the role of the aspiring artist, hungry to explore the human condition and willing to dive into a relationship because it “fits into the romantic narrative of the writer’s life.” Winslet stars as an unhappily married Coney Island waitress who hurls herself…

One of the best scenes in Lady Bird arrives when an exasperated mother can’t bring herself to lie to her sensitive teenage daughter, even if it’s something the high school senior needs to hear. “Do you like me?” asks Saoirse Ronan’s Lady Bird (nee Christine) while the two are ensnared in an already fraught situation: shopping for a prom dress with limited funds. “Of course I love you,” replies Laurie Metcalf’s Marion, sidestepping her daughter’s request for validation. “But do you like me?” Lady Bird presses. Each half-second that passes without an answer is agony for the teen, but we also understand Marion’s frustration at being asked to give once again by a child who mostly takes. Finally, the mother responds, with diplomatic honesty, “I want you to be the…

• SEPT. 2 (TELLURIDE) “It’s a historical event, it happened in 1973, and now we’re here 44 years later and the depressingly relevant facts of the film are very tough to look at.” STONE It’s game, set and match for Battle of the Sexes, a massively entertaining account of the momentous 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs that also deftly deals with the numerous social issues inherent in the carnival- like contest. Emma Stone comes out swinging with a terrific turn as a star player going through significant personal turmoil, while co-directors Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton top their 2006 smash Little Miss Sunshine with a finely tuned piece that skillfully shoots the drama through with grand human comedy. This buoyant film successfully captures a moment in…

• SEPT. 29 For committed fans who have patiently waited 35 years for a sequel to Ridley Scott’s sci-fi landmark Blade Runner, the good news is that helmer Denis Villeneuve achieves something very close to the same narcotic effect, with a voluptuous mood bath that’s impressively sustained from beginning to end. The problem is that 164 minutes occupy the distance between that beginning and end. The story centers on LAPD Officer “K” (Ryan Gosling), who is on the hunt for renegade old-style Nexus 8 replicants, which have been “retired” and replaced by the more docile and controllable Nexus 9 series. K has a Nexus 9 companion/ girlfriend/geisha, the aptly named Joi (Ana de Armas), but she brings little joy into K’s grim life; he’s a man of few words in…

• SEPT. 1 (TELLURIDE) Director Joe Wright has made a snappy and straightforward crowd-pleaser that focuses on new Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s mighty efforts to rise to the occasion of rescuing his country from the appeasers and defeatists in Parliament and stirring the public to defiance of Adolf Hitler as Britain’s armed forces are on the verge of being wiped out in May 1940. Gary Oldman is certainly not the first person one would think of to cast in the role of Churchill, but he throws himself into the part with vigor and enthusiasm, and you have to hand it to an actor who can convincingly play both Sid Vicious and, with the assistance of some pretty wondrous prosthetic makeup, Churchill in the course of his career. The screenplay by…

• AUG. 30 (VENICE) Alexander Payne’s latest Stars Matt Damon and Kristen Wiig as a husband and wife who shrink themselves to simplify their lives — a conceit heretofore used for gag-oriented sci-fi and comedy, here breathtakingly transformed into a way of addressing the planet’s overriding long-term overpopulation issue. The setup: At an international sustainability conference, Dr. Jorgen Asbjornsen (Rolf Lassgard) stuns the crowd by announcing that his project of shrinking human beings is now a reality and proving it by appearing in his new guise as a 5-inch-tall man. Ten years on, the film’s focus settles on middle-class occupational therapist Paul Safranek (Damon) and his wife, Audrey (Wiig). Fortyish and childless, the couple can see their future pretty clearly, and it’s not a glorious sight. Seduced by the lure…

• MAY 23 (CANNES) Aside from having an exceptional gift for finding beauty in disenfranchised outsider existences, director Sean Baker also has a special feeling for female friendships — tracing the unlikely connection that develops between a porn actress and a lonely octogenarian widow in Starlet; the scrappy loyalty of two transgender prostitutes in Tangerine; and now in The Florida Project, the infectious joy and shared summer adventures of a pair of 6-year-old girls living in neighboring budget motels, who create their own magic kingdom across the poverty line from Walt Disney World in Orlando. The two sparkling recruits playing those roles, Brooklynn Prince and Valeria Cotto, are effortless scene-stealers. Never mind that the relationship between their characters, Moonee and Jancey, respectively, is less central than that of Moonee and…

• SEPT. 3 (TELLURIDE) The specter of sudden and brutal death hangs over everyone all the time in Hostiles, a mournful, sorrowful, persistently powerful Western set in a world of beauty, tears and blood. There’s little new that writer-director Scott Cooper, in his fourth and best feature, can add to what other films have said about the terrible inevitabilities embedded in the epic story of the settling of America’s frontier. But potent dramatic dynamics and the filmmaker’s self-evident deep immersion and investment in his material enrich this vivid account of the final resistance of the Native American revolt during the 1890s. The Indian Wars have reached their last gasps, although there is one mission left: to escort ailing longtime prisoner Chief Yellowhawk (Wes Studi) to his Montana homeland to die.…

• SEPT. 28 (NYFF) The healing balm of conversation has been a constant in the films of Richard Linklater, along with a recurring motif exploring the rewards of masculine companionship that stretches from Dazed and Confused through Everybody Wants Some!! Both themes are key elements in Last Flag Flying, an amiable, intermittently moving blend of buddy road movie and homefront war drama. But despite poignant moments, particularly in the performances of Steve Carell and Laurence Fishburne, the weave of somber introspection, rueful reminiscence, irreverent comedy and sociopolitical commentary feels effortful, placing the movie among the less memorable entries in Linklater’s canon. While the 2005 source novel by co-screenwriter Darryl Ponicsan was a sequel to the author’s debut, The Last Detail (also made into a film in 1973), names of characters…

• SEPT. 5 (VENICE) Writer-director Darren Aronofsky wants to have his commercial cake and chomp down on some vexing personal issues, too, in mother!, a very Rosemary’s Baby-like intimate horror tale that grabs your attention and eventually soars well over the top to make the bold concluding statement that, for some creators, art is more important than life. This is a tale that, like any number of fanciful genre outings, pulls you in with its intriguing central dramatic situation and pushes you out with some mightily far-fetched plot contrivances. A big, isolated country house, occupied by a childless couple (Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem), establishes the physical and psychological setting for a tale predicated on the presumption that these are two people who want to live apart from the tumult…

• DEC. 7 Paul Thomas Anderson’s exquisitely idiosyncratic Phantom Thread extends an invitation into an exclusive cocoon occupied by card-carrying eccentrics who demonstrate that all is fair in love and the world of haute couture. Clothing designer Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis, in what he has announced will be his final film appearance) is an elegant perfectionist whose clients seem to be mostly dowagers of a certain age willing and able to pay for elegant new garments. If the phrase “genius at work” had not already existed, he would have had to invent it. Alma (Luxembourgian actress Vicky Krieps) is a waitress, polite and proper but with a ready smile and fair-game disposition. After Woodcock has brought Alma home, the designer takes precise measurements of every possible angle and contour of…

• AUG. 31 (VENICE) Stepping away from his big-budget studio work on Pacific Rim and Crimson Peak to return to the more artisanal territory of his memorable early Spanish-language films The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro delivers pure enchantment with The Shape of Water. A darkedged fairy tale as lovingly steeped in vintage movie magic as it is in hypnotic water imagery, this captivating creature feature marries a portrait of morally corrupt early 1960s America with an outsider tale of love and friendship molded by a master storyteller. Centered on an exquisite performance from Sally Hawkins — playing Elisa, a mute woman who falls for a marine monster (Doug Jones) and helps free him from captivity — that conveys both delicacy and strength, this is a visually…

• SEPT. 3 (VENICE) Stephen Frears is in no doubt about his prime asset in Victoria & Abdul. Following a brief prologue in India, the action moves briskly to late 19th century England, where a series of scenes at Windsor Castle teases us with partial glimpses of the aged Queen Victoria being hoisted out of bed, dressed and briefed for the day’s royal duties. It’s some time before a sweeping reveal ushers in Judi Dench dressed in magnificent widow’s weeds, her countenance terminally sour as she sits down to a luncheon marked by customary pomp. The star entrance could hardly be more celebratory if it were for an actual reigning sovereign, but of course the redoubtable Dench really is the queen of this type of role, bringing both stern authority…

MAY 29 As the world’s most well-adjusted superhero, Wonder Woman breaks the genre mold. She’s openhearted, not angsty — an anomaly within the DC Universe, “extended” or otherwise. So, too, is her long-awaited foray into the live-action bigscreen spotlight: That openheartedness makes the movie something of an outlier. The Patty Jenkins-directed Wonder Woman, starring Gal Gadot, doesn’t quite transcend the traits of franchise product as it checks off the list of actionfantasy requisites. But this origin story, with its direct and relatively uncluttered trajectory, offers a welcome change of pace from a superhero realm that’s often overloaded with interconnections and cross-references. Had it really broken the mold and come in below the twohour mark, Wonder Woman could have been a thoroughly transporting film. As it stands, it’s intermittently spot-on, particularly…