Sports / Entertainment

I have been watching the Academy Awards since I was nine years old – my first memory of the show being Heath Ledger’s family, flown in from Australia, accepting the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for The Dark Knight on behalf of the late star. Two years later, at age eleven, The King’s Speech had impressed me enough with its storytelling that I swore on everything, except my own deceased relatives that it would suffice for the big prizes on Oscar night. It turned out that I was correct, and

One of the more intricate and exciting films released this year was Justine Triet’s French-English crime drama Anatomy of a Fall, starring Sandra Huller and nominated for five Academy Awards. With a mistrustful protagonist, an anxious setting, and an open ending, fans of murder mysteries, character studies, or psychological dramas will eat this flick up with a side salad. The film centers around the mysterious death of writer, Samuel Maleski, who falls from the second story of his chalet in Grenoble after sabotaging an interview of his wife, author, Sandra

One of the freshest stories to come from Hollywood last year (that didn’t involve a labor strike) was Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction, starring Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, Leslie Uggams, Tracee Ellis Ross, and Issa Rae. The film, released in December and nominated for five Oscars, is an old-fashioned intelligent comedy with a mix of social satire, telling of a frustrated writer reckoning with a shifting, ever-trivial industry, and family responsibilities. Wright plays Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, an aging author and college professor in L.A. who can’t sell a new book.

Full Disclosure: I will be removing my critic’s hat in this piece and will instead write about a particular 2-day experience of working on the set of the new film Origin. Movies are still magic tricks: no matter how much the standards of visual effects, storytelling, or range of talent may expand. Likewise, the eyes of the audience are still drawn, our bodies moved to theaters even as viewing abilities try to grow more immediate and convenient. It is a deep fascination and one that is a pillar of our