Innholdsfortegnelse for Award Special 37B, December 15, 2022 i The Hollywood Reporter

Some of this year’s best supporting performances in film didn’t arise from your classic scenery-chewing powerhouse monologues or even a de rigueur prolonged cameo by a stalwart veteran — the kinds of smaller dramatic roles that net major industry awards. For every heartrending speech in Women Talking, The Whale and The Fabelmans, there are still dozens of biting one-liners and sidesplitting visual gags in a handful of 2022’s strongest comedies that should not go ignored. Comedies are often honored for their screenplays, but it takes distinctive talent to bring those vibrant pages to life. At the top of my personal ballot are the performances I was not expecting when I settled in to watch their films. Thanks to the marketing materials for movies like Triangle of Sadness, Everything Everywhere All…

Three-quarters of the way through Till, Mamie Till, played by Danielle Deadwyler, takes the stand in a Mississippi courtroom where two men are being tried for the brutal murder of her 14-year-old son, Emmett, a Black boy from Chicago who’d been visiting relatives in the South when his life was mercilessly cut short. Photographed first in profile, then in close-up, she describes how she was able to identify her son’s mangled body and then recounts the warnings she’d given him about the necessity of acting deferential toward white Southerners. We hear the voices of the prosecutor and a defense attorney offscreen as they question her, but the focus remains steadily focused on Mamie for more than six excruciating minutes as the camera slowly pans around her, capturing every moment of…

The current awards season marks a decade since Anne Hathaway, a contender this year for her role in James Gray’s Armageddon Time, took home a wealth of supporting actress awards — including the BAFTA, Golden Globe, SAG Award and Oscar — for her turn as Fantine in Les Misérables. The actress had already established herself as a movie star in such films as The Princess Diaries, The Devil Wears Prada and Brokeback Mountain, and she scored her first Oscar nomination, for best actress, with 2008’s Rachel Getting Married. Oscar gold would arrive five years later, with Tom Hooper’s big screen adaptation of the stage musical, in which Hathaway, as a starving sex worker, erodes onscreen, losing her hair and teeth, croaking out the heartbreaking “I Dreamed a Dream” before dying.…

It’s been a notable year for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw. She earned her first Emmy nomination with her debut Marvel project, the Disney+ series Loki, then was praised for her work on the studio’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, which will wrap the season as one of the highest-grossing films of the year. At press time, it had passed the $400 million mark at the domestic box office and earned $767.8 million worldwide. She landed the gig when director Ryan Coogler’s frequent collaborator and her friend, DP Rachel Morrison, had a scheduling conflict and was unavailable to work on the sequel to the 2018 hit. “When Rachel found out that she was unable to shoot Panther 2, she brought my name up,” explains Durald Arkapaw, who like…

In Sarah Polley’s Women Talking, Jessie Buckley and Sheila McCarthy play a daughter and mother who have both been raped by the men of their Mennonite community. Buckley’s character, Mariche, is obstinate. As the women of her enclave are debating their future, she is tied to the past, frustrated with the potential for change. McCarthy’s Greta is comparatively serene. She finds metaphors in her beloved horses, Ruth and Cheryl, who might know a way forward. It’s heavy material, but when Buckley and McCarthy get on a Zoom call one Saturday evening, they are giggly and joyful. It’s a reflection of the experience of making the film, balancing the upsetting circumstances of what they were portraying with a jovial camaraderie. “None of us went back to our trailers,” McCarthy says. “We…

For writer-director Lena Dunham, Karen Cushman’s 1994 Newbery Honor-winning YA novel Catherine, Called Birdy is almost a sacred text. Following the comic exploits of a young girl in 13th century England, Cushman’s book is an irreverent take on being a teenage girl at a time when such an identity left young women powerless and beholden to the men in their lives — first their fathers, then their husbands. Bella Ramsey (pictured above, with costar Joe Alwyn) stars as the 14-year-old title character who rebels against the patriarchy as best as she can when her father (Andrew Scott) announces that she is to be married to a wealthy husband in order to save the family from financial ruin. As she fends off potential suitors to her parents’ dismay, she finds her…

In Universal’s She Said, Andre Braugher plays real-life journalist Dean Baquet, the former executive editor of The New York Times who helped spearhead the paper’s investigation into Harvey Weinstein. While this is the first time the actor has played a historical figure who is still alive (he previously portrayed Jackie Robinson and labor unionist A. Philip Randolph, for example), Braugher didn’t feel he had to meet Baquet to capture the spirit of the editor. “Sometimes when you’re playing real people, there’s a tendency to get stuck on their real mannerisms, and what you imagine their real attitudes are as opposed to the script, and I think my highest loyalty goes to the playwright [Rebecca Lenkiewicz, who penned the screenplay] in collaboration with the director to find out what it is…

When Gabrielle Union realized she could take on a role like she does in A24’s The Inspection, playing the homophobic mother of a gay Marine, she felt “cheated,” she says. “I spent so much of my career thinking that I could do only one or two things.” Over Zoom, she refers to an axiom she used to hear about herself in the industry, which valued her for Black romcoms, some action, television dramas and not much else. “They used to say, ‘If it doesn’t have a bikini and a gun, Gab’s not interested,’ ” she notes. “You go with it because my bills are paid.” Ever since Elegance Bratton’s The Inspection premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, earning Union acclaim, the box she had felt put in for most of…

In Lila Neugebauer’s feature film debut Causeway, Jennifer Lawrence plays Lynsey, a veteran returning to her hometown from time served in Afghanistan after suffering a traumatic brain injury. While home, she meets James (Brian Tyree Henry), an amputee car mechanic facing his own journey through grief, and the two strike up a friendship. Shooting commenced in New Orleans in the summer of 2019, but was put on pause due to inclement weather, and again because of COVID. A second phase of filmmaking began in 2021, after Lawrence, Henry, Neugebauer, and the film’s writers and producers had a chance to reassess where they wanted to center their story, cutting out all the already-shot Afghanistan flashback scenes and instead expanding the James character greatly, focusing on the budding relationship between the pair.…