Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri
The March 4 broadcast of the 90th annual Academy Awards is bound to be a memorable one. Jimmy Kimmel is hosting for the second year in a row, and the field is crowded with exceptional and groundbreaking films. Last week, we printed excerpts of reviews of some of the Best Picture nominees: The Post, Lady Bird, Get Out, Phantom Thread and Call Me by Your Name. The remaining nominees (review excerpts below) are screening March 3 at Marcus Palace in Sun Prairie and Point.
Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri
The second stage of grief is anger. Grieving mother Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand) has zero fucks to give about the remaining three. Mildred takes matters into her own hands when the police in small-town Ebbing have made no arrests in the rape and murder of her daughter. She rents three highway billboards near the murder site, publicly calling out Chief Bill Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) for his lack of action. Officer Jason Dixon (Sam Rockwell), known for violently abusing his authority (particularly with African American suspects), regards the billboards as an affront, and plots for their removal. Mildred is not always a sympathetic character, and tensions quickly explode into violence beyond what most of us would find defensible. But the film delivers a genuine catharsis as you watch the toxic contradictions within gender, class and race relations in America play themselves out. (James Kreul)
Darkest Hour
In Darkest Hour, Gary Oldman vividly evokes the pluck and unpredictability of Winston Churchill during his first weeks as prime minister of Great Britain in May 1940. When Churchill acquiesces to his wife Clementine (Kristin Scott Thomas) or spars with political rival Viscount Halifax (Stephen Dillane), we see the drama underpinning decisions that changed modern history. But too often director Joe Wright chooses abstraction and metonymy over that concrete drama, with overhead shots that quickly become a labored motif. The Churchill-ordered suicide mission at Calais, which enabled the evacuation of British troops at Dunkirk, here has the emotional resonance of a video game cutscene. (James Kreul)
Dunkirk is primal. It feels urgent and contemporary even though it is set 77 years ago. Writer-director Christopher Nolan creates an immediacy to the film by dropping us right into chaos with British soldier Tommy (Fionn Whitehead waiting on the beach with hundreds of thousands of other men. The Germans have pushed the English troops right up to the water’s edge on the northern French coast. They are stranded, and none of them have any idea what is going to happen, their desperation conveyed by little more than the haunted glare in their eyes. Nolan’s ingenious narrative structure spreads the dread and tension throughout the film in a way that a more straightforward narrative could not. (MaryAnn Johanson)
The Shape of Water
The Shape of Water
At a high-security government laboratory in 1960s Baltimore, mute custodial worker Elisa (Sally Hawkins) develops strong feelings for a humanoid amphibian creature undergoing tests at the hands of sadistic Colonel Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon). Once you identify the genres at play in Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, the film offers few surprises in terms of plot. Instead, it delivers the sheer delight of how the genres — monster fantasy, fairy tale romance, Cold War suspense and musical melodrama — seamlessly play off of each other to create something new out of the very familiar. That mix provokes a rich emotional response as your rational self, who knows very well what will happen, tries and fails to hold back the tears. (James Kreul)