Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone star in the Oscar-winning contemporary take on classic movie musicals from filmmaker Damien Chazelle.
Tag: Academy Award
Oscar-winning ‘Spotlight’
Tom McCarthy’s drama of the Boston Globe’s investigative team that revealed the Catholic Church’s cover-up of its priests who abuse children, is the kind of film that takes on the Big Subject with modesty and self-reflection.
Oscar winner ‘The Hurt Locker’ on Peacock
“Tell me something. What’s the best way to disarm one of these things?”“The way you don’t die, sir.” Set in the Iraq war after the proclamation of “Mission Accomplished” and the transformation of a battlefield army into an occupation force, The Hurt Locker (2008) follows the finals days in the rotation of a bomb disposal unit […]
Where to stream the 2021 Oscar winners
The statuettes were handed out at the 93rd Academy Awards on Sunday, April 25, capping an unprecedented year with the most unusual ceremony in my lifetime, necessitated by the times but still awkward. The Oscars traditionally have offered a springboard for films to receive a second life in theaters and that is the case this […]
Oscar-winner ‘Fences’ on Peacock
Fences (2016) – Denzel Washington and Viola Davis earned Tony Awards for their performances in the 2010 Broadway revival of August Wilson’s play “Fences,” the story of a working class African-American family in 1950s Pittsburgh. With the blessing of Wilson’s widow (the playwright passed away in 2005), Washington brought the play to the big screen, […]
Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-winning ‘Unforgiven’ on HBO Max
“I don’t deserve this, to die like this. I was building a house.” “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.” Clint Eastwood’s 1992 western Unforgiven earned the director his first Oscars, for Best Picture and Best Director. In a way, it finally made official what critics and fans had slowly come to realize over the last […]
Academy Award winner ‘Selma’ free on digital platforms
Selma (2014), directed by Ava Duvernay (who also rewrote the screenplay without credit, due to conditions of original screenwriter Paul Webb’s deal), takes on the 1965 march led by Dr. Martin Luther King through Alabama as a benchmark moment in the fight for voting rights and, more generally, civil rights for black citizens in the American […]
‘There Will be Blood’ on Amazon Prime Video and Hulu
There Will be Blood (2007) – “I built my hate bit by bit.” Daniel Day-Lewis earned his second Best Actor Academy Award for his riveting performance in Paul Thomas Anderson’s sinewy film. Loosely adapted from Sinclair Lewis’ novel “Oil!,” it reworks the American entrepreneurial success story as an elemental frontier myth, roughly hewn out of […]
Brie Larson in ‘Room’ on Netflix and free on Kanopy and Hoopla
It’s called Room (2015). Not The Room, simply Room, as if there were no others. And for Jack (Jacob Tremblay), the five-year-old son of a young mother (Brie Larson), there aren’t. It’s his entire world, his universe, and as far as he knows nothing exists outside the walls. His mother, known only as Ma in the film, […]
‘Inside Job’ – Exposing the financial crisis on Hulu
Charles Ferguson’s Academy Award-winning documentary Inside Job (2010) is a damning exposé of the story behind the 2008 financial crisis and the failures of both government and industry to put measure into place to prevent a similar abuse of the system from occurring again. Documentary filmmaking is where some of the best investigative journalism is […]