[7] Daniel Day-Lewis (My Left Foot, There Will Be Blood) won his third Oscar for his convincing portrait of America’s 16th president during the final months of the Civil War. Lincoln is a decades-long pet project for director Steven Spielberg, who chose Angels in America scribe Tony Kushner to make Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln the foundation …
[6] Everest is the true story of a deadly 1996 expedition up Mount Everest in which two climbing parties suffered casualties after a fierce blizzard engulfed the mountain with little warning. The film is more of a dramatic biopic than a sensational survival flick, and while that’s normally a good thing, I do wish Everest were a little more suspenseful or exciting. The ensemble cast …
[8] Seven months after the rape and murder of her daughter, a grieving mother challenges her local police department to find the culprit when she advertises on three incendiary billboards. Frances McDormand (Fargo) headlines Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, which is being advertised as a comedy featuring fowl-mouthed McDormand chewing the scenery and ripping characters new assholes. And to be fair, that’s definitely part of this movie. …
[6] Ridley Scott directs from a script by Steven Zaillian this true story about a New York detective (Russell Crowe) and a drug lord (Denzel Washington) whose paths cross in the 1970s to expose deep-rooted corruption in the police force. The film balances the screen time between Washington and Crowe’s characters, so we get both the plight of the humble man and the rise & fall …
[8] Jennifer Lawrence earned her first Oscar nomination playing Ree, a brave teenager raising her younger siblings in Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone, based on a novel by Daniel Woodrell. When her drug-dealing father puts the family home up for collateral on his bail, it’s up to Ree to save her family from becoming homeless. Winter’s Bone is essentially a quest for the father, whose dealings and …
[7] Writer/director Miranda July also stars in this Cannes and Sundance Film Festival winner about people trying to connect with each other in an age when culture and technology make that connection more challenging. The film seems to be saying that we are all experiencing this difficulty, but July’s characters are so quirky and awkward that Me and You and Everyone We Know is as much …
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