What We Thought of the Oscar Nominees (Mostly They Sucked)
“The whole production amounts to an ugly spectacle. By the time the far-seeing Big Shorters were literally screaming at a visually-impaired woman being portrayed as a comically pathetic pawn of the corrupt bond-rating industry, my girlfriend made her own short sale: she got up and walked out of the movie.” – Jay Gabler
“Ridley Scott’s fast-paced and jaunty adaptation of Andy Weir’s 2011 novel succeeds as entertainment in the way a morning TV talk show succeeds. There are lots of teases and quick segments that stay interesting for a few minutes but don’t outstay their welcome, and at no time does anyone on either side of the screen get too stressed about anything. Difficulties are acknowledged, somberly nodded at, and overcome. The Martian: bring him home! Like, maybe, from a Redbox.” – Jay Gabler
“As with Birdman, the technical virtuosity on display here helps distract from characters who aren’t especially compelling in and of themselves; The Revenant tries to have its cake and eat it too with a lead character who’s sympathetic but is also obsessed with revenge. Especially in this colonial context, Glass would really have worked best as an antihero, but Iñárritu and Smith instead decide to turn this into a good-guy-vs-bad-guy scenario.” – Jay Gabler
“Long stretches of entertaining chatter, punctuated by deadly violence, are Tarantino’s stock in trade, and in The Hateful Eight — the most disciplined film he’s ever made — he consistently plays to his strengths, with relatively few of the baroque stylistic flourishes that have sometimes tended to distract from the drama.” – Jay Gabler
“Amy succeeds — and does so thrillingly — because of Kapadia’s discipline and laser-like focus on his eponymous subject. Maybe his smartest choice, and one that’s surprisingly rare in documentaries like this, is to keep his latter-day informants offscreen. We hear the present-day voices of Winehouse’s family and friends, but there are no cutaways to headshots of the speakers. The result feels less like a traditional documentary than a life relived in a state that’s dream-like — which is to say, nightmarish.” – Jay Gabler
“The movie isn’t perfect. I don’t think Maz Kanata is a great character, and they could have done something cooler with Lupita Nyong’o. But is it derivative? I think it’s more that The Force Awakens is consciously taking cultural artifacts we love off the shelf, dusting them off and breathing new life into them. It’s a phoenix-from-the-ashes story in more ways than one. A franchise is coming back, a family mythology is being revived and the original factions of light vs. dark are training once again for a battle. The junkyard of Jakku is how the movie admits that the original series had died. Only after acknowledging this can what has become junk become the stuff of myth once again.” – Becky Lang
“So this is basically like Purple Rain, but without Morris Day.” – Jay Gabler
“Ex Machina is an extremely elegant film, extraordinarily disciplined in its attention to tone and pacing. Writer/director Garland drops the audience into a captivating, eerie world and never missteps in his exploration of its contents. In a manner that’s incredibly impressive for a debut director, Garland marshals his team—including cinematographer Rob Hardy and production designer Mark Digby — to create a gorgeous yet unsettling alternate universe in which it’s a pleasure to lose oneself for 108 minutes that fly by.”
“While, for many viewers, Straight Outta Compton will be only the beginning of an understanding and appreciation of this storied and controversial collective — one of the most significant groups of their time, in any genre — it’s an essential introduction, and one of the most important movies of the year.” – Jay Gabler