Call Me by Your Name
The 90th — and first post-Harvey Weinstein scandal — Academy Awards commence on March 4. And even though the Oscars are still pretty darn white, Jordan Peele’s sensational horror-comedy Get Out earned a Best Picture nomination this time around, as did Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water. Overall, the category is packed with powerful and surprising stories. Here are excerpts from Isthmus’ coverage of the crowded field. The following nominees are showing at Marcus Theatres’ 2018 Best Picture Festival (Palace in Sun Prairie and Point) on Feb. 24: The Post, Lady Bird, Phantom Thread, Get Out and Call Me by Your Name. On March 3, Marcus screens Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, Dunkirk, Darkest Hour and The Shape of Water. We’ll print excerpts from the remaining film reviews next week.
I had goosebumps on my arms watching tied-up bundles of newspapers being tossed onto trucks about to bring Truth to the world. Stephen Spielberg is a genius for bringing Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep together onscreen for the first time as Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee and publisher Katharine Graham when the paper was battling for the right to publish the “Pentagon Papers.” Spielberg has given us a grand adventure in journalism that is so essential today, when once again the president of the United States is publicly bashing journalists and attempting to smear their reporting as “fake news.” (MaryAnn Johanson)
Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird is an emotional feast about the audacity and the wonder and the horror that is female adolescence, the likes of which we rarely get to see on screen. It is a nightmare and an adventure that will resonate with all girls and women, at least in its broad strokes. Lady Bird is magnificently unique while also being universal. If this is our one shot this year, thank the gods and Gerwig that Lady Bird is the glory that it is: so smart, wise, funny, and perceptive that it left me happy-sobbing and feeling like Gerwig had seen straight through me and knows me. (MaryAnn Johanson)
Daniel Day-Lewis plays Reynolds Woodcock, a successful fashion designer in 1950s London who does the creative work while leaving the business side to his sister, Cyril (Lesley Manville). Reynolds has just moved on from his last live-in muse when he meets Alma (Vicky Krieps), a diner waitress. The two soon become lovers, whereupon Alma discovers just how particular Reynolds is about the way he wants his world organized. Krieps does phenomenal work with her eyes and body language, as Alma gradually begins to assert herself and finally understand what it is she might be able to give Reynolds that nobody else has. Phantom Thread doesn’t send Daniel Day-Lewis out by giving him A Daniel Day-Lewis Movie. It offers us a chance to see how much talent it requires to play a moment when someone’s voluntary bite of food turns into a surrender. (Scott Renshaw)
Get Out
Jordan Peele’s debut feature, Get Out, is one of the smartest, funniest and most socially astute films to come around in a while. The pernicious evil of racism lies at the crux of the movie, in which Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya), a young black man and photographer, accompanies his white girlfriend Rose Armitage (Allison Williams) on a weekend trip to meet her parents for the first time. Chris is a bit worried that Rose hasn’t informed them ahead of time that her boyfriend is black, and once he arrives at their remote country home, the unsettling demeanors of the Armitages’ black servants, Georgina (scene-stealing Betty Gabriel) and Walter (Marcus Henderson), put Chris further on edge. Ultimately, all the fears that Peele sets up in the first two acts of Get Out come home to roost in the third. (Marjorie Baumgarten)
An only child vacationing with his parents in their villa in northern Italy in 1983, 17-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) cedes his bedroom to Oliver (Armie Hammer), an American grad student who has come abroad to intern with Elio’s father (Michael Stuhlbarg), an antiquities scholar. A love affair is inevitable, but Call Me by Your Name is most potent as a coming-of-age picture, not a mere romance. Hammer physically conveys the transformation of Oliver under Elio’s influence, his body tight with restraint, then loosening to the point of a childlike giddiness. Chalamet’s face will stop your heart, especially in two prolonged close-ups set to original songs by Sufjan Stevens. As for words? The script gives Stuhlbarg — a character actor who elevates everything he’s in — the monologue of a lifetime, which he delivers sotto voce, all kindness. (Kimberley Jones)