In a few days, we’ll have Oscar nominations to talk about, and that’s all we’ll talk about for six weeks. My relationship with the Oscars, and with awards season in general, is definitively love/hate. The ceremony can be fun, although it’s not always. Moreover, we need the Oscars as an institution because the chance of winning one is a huge part of what gets movies like The Fabelmans and Armagedddon Time and The Banshees of Inisherin made. I like those movies, and I don’t want them to go away.
But I hate the way the Oscars dominate the industry and control the calendar. I hate the way all the serious movies (some of which are also quite funny) get bunched up at the end of the year. It’s tough for critics to see them all before voting in our little groups and releasing our little lists, but I’d guess it’s even worse for non-professionals to wade through them all and determine which are worth watching. I feel the worst for the filmmakers whose work gets unfairly overlooked due to the crunch.
It happens every year to at least one great film, and often a few good ones. The pattern is predictable. Too many critics get locked into the awards-season mindset, and if a film does something new or different, they don’t know how to process it. So they react with ambivalence or worse. Audiences pass it over in favor of buzzier titles. And then it gets lost forever. The legacy of any movie is hard to predict, but getting passed over for nominations—when the entire distribution plan rests on just—doesn’t set up a film to have much of a shelf life.
Consider this a rescue mission. Here’s a list of films that Oscar forgot. I’ve ranked them because that’s what I do, but they’re all worth seeing and certainly deserving of more attention than they received.
13. Top Five (U.S. release date December 12, 2014)
When writer-director-star Chris Rock dropped this film at the 2014 Toronto Film Festival, it was immediately draped in Oscar buzz, which turned out to be too heavy a burden for it to carry. The story of a Rock-like actor who spends a day visiting old haunts and falling in love with a comely journalist (Rosario Dawson), Top Five was dinged for its chauvinism—it engages in the tired trope of a woman journalist who sleeps with her subject—but there are some huge laughs here, and it finds a sweet spot for Rock as an actor that he hasn’t approached before or since.
12. Motherless Brooklyn (November 1, 2019)
A passion project of Edward Norton, who wrote, produced, and starred in this 2019 detective noir adapted from a Jonathan Lethem novel, Motherless Brooklyn sags in a few places, but Norton displays a keen sense of noir conventions, and the film offers a rich, insightful portrayal of how power operates in America.
11. The Aeronauts (December 6, 2019)
I can barely believe this movie existed. It’s based on the true story of two scientists who in 1862 set the flight altitude record in a hot air balloon. Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones play the scientists, and most of the film takes place in the damn balloon. It was an expensive spectacle that flopped horrendously, but there’s stuff to admire here. The visual affects are arresting, and there are some genuinely thrilling moments. If memory serves, the scientists are frequently at risk of freezing to death (it gets cold up there), and at one point they have to climb on the side of the balloon to stop the thing from crashing and killing them. I saw it in an IMAX theater, which is probably ideal. No idea how it will play on your TV.
10. Ben is Back (December 7, 2018)
An earnest, heartfelt addiction drama that features standout performances from Lucas Hedges, as an opioid addict home from rehab for Christmas, and Julia Roberts, as his worried mother, Ben is Back nails the complex family dynamic that springs up around addicts and their enablers. Where it suffers is in its racial myopia. There’s a scene in which Roberts screams at a brown-skinned pharmacist through a window because they don’t carry the thing she’ll need to revive her son if he overdoses. We never see the pharmacist again, she’s barely granted the dignity of an onscreen reaction. I’m not sure the movie knows how messed up this is, which is the thing holding Ben is Back from greatness.
9. Hostiles (December 22, 2017)
We don’t appreciate Christian Bale enough. If he was nominated for an Oscar every year, I wouldn’t complain. He’s never bad and frequently great. He’s particularly great in this Scott Cooper western about a racist Army captain forced to accompany a dying Cheyenne war chief (Wes Studi, also always great) to his ancestral lands as a token of peace between the tribe and U.S. military forces. Bale is supported by a terrific cast, including Jesse Plemons, Ben Foster, Rory Cochrane, and Rosamund Pike, and while the film dabbles in white saviorism, it’s earnest and well-acted enough to overcome it.
8. The Report (November 15, 2019)
I recently tweeted that Adam Driver is in too many movies and needs to take a vacation, which would be great because it would create space for everyone to catch up on this forgotten 2019 film, in which Driver plays the lead investigator of a Senate Intelligence Committee report on the U.S.’s use of torture in the wake of 9/11. It’s a masterful performance from Driver, who is charged with turning make pages and pages of exposition into good drama. He pulls it off handsomely, and the public benefits. The Report is a gripping narrative and a necessary refresher on an issue that has receded from the headlines.
7. Downsizing (December 22, 2017)
I still remember the terrible reaction this film received on the festival circuit, which doomed it immediately. I loved it from the start. What starts out as a goofy comedy set in a near-future in which people miniaturize themselves to save money slowly morphs into a profound meditation on the difficult moral choices brought on by a dying world. Matt Damon is our sturdy guide, and Hong Chau, in an Oscar-worthy role, is a Vietnamese refugee and Damon’s love interest, but the real winner here is the twisty, comedic script by Alexander Payne (who also directed) and Jim Taylor. I love films like this that start out broad and coalesce into something tender and beautiful. Maybe you will, too.
6. A Late Quartet (November 2, 2012)
On the day Philip Seymour Hoffman died, I went to Amazon.com and bought DVDs of five of his lesser-known films. I wanted to have them nearby. A Late Quartet was one of them. Hoffman plays a violinist in a classical quarter that has played together for years, but when one of them announces his retirement, it causes Hoffman’s character to reassess his role in the group, causing a brutal, slow-moving disintegration of their chemistry. Supported by Catherine Keener and Christopher Walken, giving one of his most tender performances, Hoffman shines as a middle-aged artist willing to make one last play for greatness, no matter the cost. It’s better than Tár.
5. Cyrano (December 17, 2021)
A gorgeous reimagining of the classic tale and the role of a lifetime for Peter Dinklage, Cyrano features several breathtaking songs by The National (“Wherever I Fall” is the one) and bold, expressionistic filmmaking by Joe Wright, who previously adapted Atonement and Anna Karenina with no timidity at messing with the classics. Cyrano received just a single Oscar nomination (for its costumes), which is a crime against art, humanity, and all things holy.
4. Waves (November 15, 2019)
I revisited this last week and was floored by it. I think it’s one of the best films about modern masculinity, especially in young people, to be released in this century. Rage, porn, pills – it’s all in there. It even motivated me to ask around on Twitter for other recent films that say something meaningful about masculinity. It produced a good list, which I posted on my Letterboxd account. To my mind, none of them are as thoughtful and empathetic as Waves, which crafts a bifurcated narrative—a tragedy interrupts the life of a high school wrestling star, and the film follows his sister and her new boyfriend through the final hour—around the power of emotional communication to heal broken relationships.
3. Petite Maman (technically released in May 2022, but I think it had a qualifying run in 2021)
Back to Letterboxd for this one, and in fact I’m gonna outsource it to my mother, who wrote an exquisite one-paragraph review on her account. It’s a blessing to be the second-best film critic in my family.
2. Brad’s Status (September 15, 2017)
I’ve long had a theory that the only difference between a very good film and a great one is how much you personally connect to its themes. Brad’s Status was written and directed by Mike White (recently seen crushing it on the awards circuit) about a middle-aged white man who works at a non-profit and spends too much time thinking about his wealthy friends—a condition likely brought on by extreme use of social media—and wondering if he made the right decisions in life. I’ll tell ya: It’s not always nice to be seen.
Still, I reckon Brad’s Status resonates beyond the Country Day set due to the eloquence of its storytelling and the sheer honesty about human pettiness. Brad, as played by Ben Stiller, is a likeable sort, a little too neurotic maybe, but not more than the protagonist of a Woody Allen film. Over the course of a weekend visiting colleges in Boston with his son, he ends up confronting the sickest corners of his soul, revealing narcissism, depression, and a real emotional neglect of his loved ones. It’s a fantastic performance by Stiller, but White deserves the most credit for this expertly-calibrated narrative that hews close enough to Brad’s perspective to keep him sympathetic, while occasionally and very carefully dipping outside to show him as others see him: as a narcissistic monster on the verge of ruining his beautiful life. Throw in a bleak ending that would make Bergman blush, and you’ve got one of the great films of the 2010s.
1. Wildlife (October 19, 2019)
Before Paul Dano starred in The Fabelmans, he directed his first film, which also happened to be about a father who moves his family around too much, a mother who lashes out through adultery, and a child who copes with all through a new passion for the visual arts. Did Spielberg steal his life from Dano’s film…retroactively? Unlikely. Wildlife is based on a 1990 novel by Richard Ford, and it chronicles the fallout in a family of three when the father (Jake Gyllenhaal) loses his job and, in a pathetic effort to reassert his manhood, leaves to go fight a blazing forest fire.
His wife (Carey Mulligan) cracks wide open. She starts dressing like a much younger person and begins a flirtation with a lascivious widow (Bill Camp). Mulligan has never been better. When she finally wins her Oscar, I’ll consider it a make-up for Wildlife, but the film’s anchor is young Ed Oxenbould, through whose eyes we see his parents flail. Dano captures their interiors with great insight; he’s one of the only filmmakers working today who understand the value of the close-up. Overall, he paints a haunting portrait of not just one family’s dissolution but the shadows lurking behind American domesticity. It’s an old subject, but Dano makes it new. Banal and terrifying, with a touch of David Lynch but a vision all its own.
Love this list!
I saw Aeronauts at The Elgin Theater at TIFF and really enjoyed it. My favourite part was the opening scenes of Felicity all dolled up in costume and makeup. My least favourite part was Eddie, phoning it in as usual...
You are absolutely right about Hostiles - I thought it was an Oscar sure-bet. Cooper is an interesting film maker. I loved The Pale Blue Eye. Christian Bale is always excellent.
I also saw Waves at TIFF. I disliked it so much I've forgotten what it was about. I just remember it being very noisy.