Critics Choice nominees for this year's films

 

Everything Everywhere All At Once leads this year's Critics Choice Awards nominations with a total of 14 nods. The Awards ceremony will be held on Jan. 15 and will be broadcast on the CW network. Check local listings for times.

The Critics Choice Association has a pretty good track record when it comes to serving as a bellwether for Oscar, perhaps because CCA casts a wide net and diverse net. The organization represents more than 600 media critics and entertainment journalists. I'm one of them.

So if you're addicted to Oscar pools or just an interested bystander, the list of the 28th Annual Critics Choice Award nominees offer a good way to gear up for another awards season.

Best Picture

Avatar: The Way of Water

Babylon

The Banshees of Inisherin

Elvis

Everything Everywhere All at Once

The Fabelmans

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

RRR

Tar

Top Gun: Maverick

Women Talking

Best Actor

Austin Butler, Elvis

Tom Cruise, Top Gun: Maverick

Colin Farrell, The Banshees of Inisherin

Brendan Fraser, The Whale

Paul Mescal, Aftersun

Bill Nighy, Living

Best Actress

Cate Blanchett, Tar

Viola Davis, The Woman King

Danielle Deadwyler, Till

Margot Robbie, Babylon

Michelle Williams, The Fabelemans

Michelle Yeoh, Everything Everywhere All at Once

Best Supporting Actor

Paul Dano, The Fablemans

Brendan Gleeson, The Banshees of Inisherin

Judd Hirsch, The Fabelmans

Barry Keoghan, The Banshees of Inisherin

Ke Huy Quan, Everything Everywhere All at Once

Brain Tyree Henry, Causeway

Best Supporting Actress

Angela Bassett, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Jessie Buckley, Women Talking

Kerry Condon, The Banshees of Inisherin

Jamie Lee Curtis, Everything Everywhere All at Once

Stephanie Hsu, Everything Everywhere All at Once

Janelle Monte, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

Best Young Actor/Actress

Frankie Corio, Aftersun

Jalyn Hall, Till

Gabriel LaBelle, The Fabelmans

Bell Ramsey, Catherine Called Birdy

Banks Repeta, Armageddon Time

Sadie Sink, The Whale

Best Acting Ensemble

The Banshees of Inisherin

Everything Everywhere All at Once

The Fabelmans

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

The Woman King

Women Talking

Best Director

James Cameron, Avatar: The Way of Water

Damien Chazelle, Babylon

Todd Field, Tar

Baz Luhrmann, Elvis

Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert, Everything Everywhere All at Once

Martin McDonagh, The Banshees of Inisherin

Sarah Polley, Women Talking

Gina Prince-Bythewood, The Woman King

S. S. Rajamouli, RRR

Steven Spielberg, The Fabelmans

Best Original Screenplay

Todd Field, Tar

Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert, Everything Everywhere All at Once

Martin McDonagh, The Banshees of Inisherin

Steven Spielberg, Tony Kushner, The Fabelmans

Charlotte Wells, Aftersun

Best Adapted Screenplay

Samuel D. Hunter, The Whale

Kazuo Ishiguro, Living

Rian Johnson, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

Rebecca Lenkiewicz, She Said

Sarah Polley, Women Talking

Best Cinematography

Russell Carpenter, Avatar: The Way of Water

Roger Deakins, Empire of Light

Florian Hoffmeister, Tar

Jausz Kaminski, The Fabelmans

Claudio Miranda, Top Gun: Maverick

Linus Sandgren, Babylon

Best Production Design

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

The Fabelmans

Avatar: The Way of Water

Everything Everywhere All at Once

Elvis

Babylon

Best Editing

Babylon

Top Gun Maverick

Avatar: The Way of Water

Everything Everywhere All at Once

Elvis

Tar

Best Costume Design

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

Everything Everywhere All at Once

Elvis

The Woman King

Babylon

Best Hair and Makeup

Babylon

The Batman

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Elvis

Everything Everywhere All at Once

The Whale

Best Visual Effects

Avatar: The Way of Water

The Batman

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Everything Everywhere All at Once

RRR

Top Gun: Maverick

Best Comedy

The Banshees of Inisherin

Bros

Everything Everywhere All at Once

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

Triangle of Sadness

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

Best Animated Feature

Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish

Turning Red

Wendell & Wild

Best Foreign Language Film

All Quiet on the Western Front

Argentina, 1985

Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths

Close

Decision to Leave

RRR

Best Song

Carolina, Where the Crawdads Sing

Ciao Papa, Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio

Hold My Hand, Top Gun: Maverick

Lift Me Up, Black Panther, Wakanda Forever

Naatu Naatu, RRR

New Body Rhumba, White Noise

Best Score

Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio

The Batman

Tar

Women Talking

Babylon

The Fabelmans

Sights and sounds dominate new 'Avatar'

 

  You almost can write a review of Avatar: The Way of Water without seeing the movie. In the hands of director James Cameron, you can be sure the movie will boast an abundance of visuals that dazzle and delight.

  In this case, kudos to Cameron for underwater footage that features beautifully imagined sea creatures and flora. If you see the movie in 3D, you may feel as if you can touch what you're watching.

   When it comes to the technical aspects of imaginative expression, Cameron excels, and his mixture of live and digital imagery unfolds seamlessly.

   You also know that, in broad terms, the movie, like the first installment, will pit environmentally oriented tribal creatures of the planet Pandora (good) against the military/industrial forces of people from the dying planet of Earth (bad). 

    You also know that Cameron will freshen the story, in this case focusing on the children of Jake (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), a trio of kids who are also befriended by Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), a girl whose mother Grace (also Weaver) appeared in the last installment. 

    I’m not going to get into the genetic history of these characters because ... well ... beats me.

    Not surprisingly, the movie's third act offers a tremendous jolt of action, and, unlike what you'll find in the work of some of his contemporaries, Cameron's combat proves legible. You can tell what’s happening. Really.

    In full awed-by-nature mode, Cameron also pays homage to whale-like creatures — here called tulkuns —- giant sea mammals who are intelligent and helpful. 

    The tulkun are linked to a newly introduced tribe, the Metakayina, Pandora island folks who can swim underwater for long periods and who have developed an ethos based on their relationship to the sea and its creatures. 

    The plot begins moving when Sully and his family take refuge among the Metakayina, who are ruled by Ronal (Kate Winslet) and Tonowari (Cliff Curtis). The children of this royal pair interact with Jake and Neytiri's kids, giving Cameron an opportunity to explain Metakayina culture while offering some fairly typical teen conflict.

   You also know that Sky People (Earthlings) will be greedy and brutal. The Sky People have devised a way to use the memories of the previous military characters to create clones that appear to be Na’vi. So Quaritch (Stephen Lang), the last movie's villain, has a tail and a narrow Na’vi physique.

    Of course, he's still a jerk.

    Motivated by something akin to revenge, Quaritch wants to destroy Jake, ostensibly because Jake has become the leader of the rebels. 

   Every time, Quaritch opens his mouth, the movie sounds as if it's channeling a Vietnam war movie, complete with episodes in which soldiers attempt to brutalize the local population of Pandora's islands.

    All this means that The Way if Water has been engineered to generate big-time box office returns by filling the screen with  better realized visuals than can be found in the first edition — and those were pretty impressive, too.

   Shifting the focus to teenagers and turning Jake into a stern but worried dad adds a more juvenile flavor, but most adults probably won’t mind. 

    Look, if you’re searching for a sophisticated story, eloquent dialog, and revelatory thinking, Avatar probably is not the place to start. 

     Cameron aims for immersive experience, so much so that when you visit a new environment, you may feel like you’re entering another terrifically designed attraction in the Cameron collection of theme parks.

    I don’t mean that as a criticism but as a way of suggesting how it feels like to watch a spectacle-oriented movie, which has an ending (several actually) in which Cameron keeps trying to top himself and often succeeds. 

   In the idyllic world of my imagination, The Way of Water wouldn't  be an event movie that's poised to break records for popcorn sales. But in the real world governed by spinning turnstiles, we probably should be grateful that The Way of Water comes from Cameron, a filmmaker who gives audiences what they pay for — richly realized journeys to other worlds.

    The Way of Water, if you haven't heard, is three hours long, but I wasn't much bothered by its length. It did, however, give me time to think. During an underwater battle involving a sinking vessel, for example, I couldn't help asking myself, "What? Cameron didn't get enough of this with Titanic?"

'Pinocchio' told in a darker register

 

   If you appreciate stop-motion animation, you'll no doubt be enthralled by Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio, an animated work co-directed by del Toro and Mark Gustafson. 

   I've read that del Toro has better served the familiar story's source material, a tale first told in 1883 by Carlo Collodi. Never having read the original, I'll take the word of others, notably because del Toro has made a darker version than we might expect, considering the story 's Disneyfied past.

   Note, however, that del Toro includes a lengthy World War II segment, which, if memory serves, never made it into Collodi's 19th-century work. Neither did Benito Mussolini, the pompous dictator who shows up here.

   Ostensibly a musical, the movie is more notable for its often gloomy tones than for any soaring musical work. 

   Ever obsessed with the horrors of fascism and the dread of death, Del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth and more recently Nightmare Alley) works his favorite themes into this overlong movie while also acknowledging religion, albeit in somewhat ambiguous fashion. 

   Early on, Pinocchio's dad (David Bradley 's Geppetto) is seen restoring an altarpiece of Jesus on the cross. In this version, Gepetto isn't a Santa's workshop kind of craftsman. 

   The outline of the familiar story remains. When Geppetto's beloved son (Gregory Mann as both the real-life son and Pinocchio) is killed by a bomb, Geppetto drowns his sorrows in alcohol. Once a noble craftsman and loving father, Geppetto becomes an inconsolable drunk. 

   A Wood Sprite (Tilda Swinton) brings the wooden Pinocchio to life. Although death is very much on the movie's mind, Pinocchio himself has more lives than a cat. He can be killed and brought back to life. In one adventure after another, he tries to win his father's love.

   Ewan McGregor gives voice to Sebastian Cricket, who also serves as the movie's narrator. Christoph Waltz turns up as the voice of Count Volpe, the exploitative entrepreneur who tries to turn Pinocchio into a sideshow attraction. 

   Del Toro has done his best to keep Pinocchio from looking like a lovable puppet, making no attempt to conceal Pinocchio's wooden origins. He's not exactly kindling but he's no cute make-believe boy, either.

   I'm not sure how kids will respond to this version of Pinocchio. I wouldn't want to deny the creativity and care of del Toro's filmmaking but too often I found the movie more impressive than enjoyable. 

'Emancipation': History as horror

    In  1863, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. The Civil War was still raging and the news of liberation couldn't reach all those who were enslaved in the South.

   Compelling and often horrific, Emancipation begins when one enslaved man is separated from his family and sent to a Confederate work camp. 

   Known as Peter, the man learns of Lincoln's proclamation from an overheard conversation. When he finds an opportunity to flee, he takes it.

   Will Smith stars as Peter, a runaway who has two goals: to reach freedom and to reunite with the wife (Charmaine Bigwa) and the children from whom he has been separated.

   In the hands of director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day), Emancipation blends a variety of genres, often to striking effect: Historical horror and action movie tropes revolve around the barebones character Smith creates.

    Peter is a man of faith, determination, and grit. Unbroken by  the brutalities of enslavement, Peter always manages to suggest stature, which, unfortunately underscores Smith's star power. Peter's clearly a cut above his contemporaries.

    Fuqua and cinematographer Robert Richardson present the movie's images in near black-and-white with touches of color occasionally peeking through, greenery and such. Emancipation has a sustained starkness that matches the barbaric treatment inflicted on the movie's Black characters.

   If you're in the market for an actor to play a quietly mean white man, you definitely want to consider Ben Foster. Foster plays Jim Fassel, the relentless hunter who tracks Peter. The pursuers are on horseback; Peter often must run barefoot.

    Fuqua overdoes the adventure elements, notably in a scene in which Peter battles a swam gator. And at times, the movie's chase elements can't help but seem too conventional.

    Emancipation includes a lengthy epilogue involving a grisly battle that Peter joins. Fuqua strips Civil War combat of anything resembling glory, turning it into a wanton, chaotic bloodbath.

    The movie was inspired by a real photograph that was distributed during the war years. It was titled Whipped Peter. Abolitionists used it to persuade the world that there was nothing noble or genteel about the foundations on which Southern life was built.

   Fuqua stages a reenactment of the taking of the photograph toward the movie's end.

    Emancipation may suffer from an odd problem: By stylizing the movie so completely, Fuqua creates something that can feel disassociated from anything real, a super-vivid world full of desaturated color, ominous images, stark moods, gliding cameras, sneering brutalities, and venomous characters. 

      I found myself conflicted about this. It's difficult to argue against portraying the institution of slavery as worthy of blood-curdling treatment. It may not totally work but can we blame Fuqua for wanting to stamp the word "horror" on a shameful bit of American history? He does so at every chance he gets.

Too much polish, not enough nerve

  Few 2022 movies are as impeccably crafted as director Sam Mendes's Empire of Light. Set during the Thatcher years of the 1980s, the movie focuses on the Empire Theater.

 Once a proud movie palace, the aptly named Empire stands for a time when both movies and Great Britain had a more exalted profile than they did in the 1980s, not exactly a high point for either reality or fantasy.

   It should be stated at the outset that the movie offers another bravura performance from Olivia Colman. Colman excels as a mentally disturbed woman who manages The Empire, joylessly submits to the sexual advances of her sleazy boss (Colin Firth), and develops a relationship with a young black man (Michael Ward) who lands a job at the theater.

    Empire of Light wants to pay tribute to the powers of cinema  while telling telling the stories of the people who work at a place where the downtrodden masses once sought glamor and escape.

     So given all this polish and craft, why does Empire of Light fail to get where it might have gotten?

     The most obvious reason involves Mendes's issue-laden screenplay, which sketches its way through racism, the rise of right-wing street punks, as well as sexual abuse and mental illness. 

      Colman's Hilary has a troubled past that's reflected in the uneasiness of Colman's demeanor. A solitary figure who has been stabilized by lithium, Hilary develops a relationship with Ward's Stephen, who's acutely aware of the racial climate in the surrounding town. 

       At one point, Hilary shows Stephen the upper stories of the Empire building, which once housed a ballroom but has become a refuge for pigeons. It's as if she's sharing a forbidden secret with him: It cements their connection.

      Hillary will invest more in the relationship than Stephen, but he's kind and genuinely concerned about a woman who's much older than he is.

      Nicely calibrated performances, including from Hannah Onslow as one of the theater's employees, Tom Brooke, as junior manager, and Toby Jones, as the movie's projectionist, have a strange consequence. They add to a feeling that Empire has been over-groomed, notably by cinematographer Roger Deakins' wondrous images and production designer Mark Tidesley carefully appointed sets. (A real theater in the seaside town of Margate was used for filming.)

      It would be unfair to say that any sense of urgency suffocates under the weight of production design, but only Colman shatters the movie's often decorous surfaces, most notably in a scene in which Hilary (sans lithium) crashes a gala opening of Chariots of Fire, a premiere that Firth's character regards as pivotal in the re-establishment of the theater's cultural and social primacy. 

        Hilary becomes an uninvited intruder on the stage, where she recites Auden and generally makes a large crowd feel ill at ease. Something real and disturbing overtakes the palace of fantasy and, in the case of Chariots of Fire, any feeling of reassurance that picture might have offered.

       It may be inadvertent, but Empire of Light works less as a  tribute to the transporting power of cinema, an old-hat subject anyway, than as testimony to the power of an actor to unleash something volcanic, nervy and difficult to categorize.

     Even in a movie that can't leap over the high bar it sets, Colman continues to amaze.

        

       

A mother/daughter relationship explored

 

Tilda Swinton plays dual roles of daughter and mother in The Eternal Daughter, director Joanna Hogg’s intensely focused examination of the complexities and nuances of a mother/daughter relationship. Swinton’s Julie has brought her mother Rosalind to a Welsh hotel to celebrate her mother’s birthday. Julie, a filmmaker, plans to begin a screenplay based on her mother’s life. Hogg fills the soundtrack with eerie suggestions, cluing us to the idea that there’s more here than meets the eye. It’s no surprise that Swinton, with modest help from make-up, meticulously details the tics and behaviors of both Julie and Rosalind. The movie quietly (very) builds toward a big reveal, which will make you want to replay much of the story in your mind before you reach a verdict about Hogg’s achievement. Hogg (The Souvenir, The Souvenir: Part II) works at her own pace, resisting the temptation to be hurried, which  means that the movie can feel a trifle dull at times. Still, the affections and tensions of a mother/daughter relationship prove intriguing and Hogg winds up with a carefully realized exploration of a psychologically rich subject made more vivid by Swinton's capable work. I don’t want to give away more, but Hogg leaves us with a provocative question: Are ghosts real, and if so, what are they made of?

More than a simple shoemaker

   

  Director Luca Guadagnino (Bones and All, Call Me By Your Name) has made a laudatory documentary about Salvatore Ferragamo, the shoemaker who became a fashion icon. 

     Ferragamo's life-long determination to make shoes took him to Hollywood, turned him into a shoemaker to the stars, and led to the establishment of an innovative global brand. 

   Largely based on Ferragamo's 1957 autobiography, Shoemaker of Dreams, the move -- entitled Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams --  includes recordings made by Ferragamo, interviews with designers such as Manolo Blahnik, archival footage, and a narration provided by Michael Stuhlbarg. 

   It's difficult not to fall under the glamorous sway of the stars who wore Ferragamo's shoes: Gloria Swanson, Greta Garbo, Mary Pickford, Joan Crawford, Marilyn Monroe, and Audrey Hepburn among them.

   As director Martin Scorsese points out, Ferragamo's arrival in California coincided with the rise of the movie business. Ferragamo must have understood that putting shoes on famous feet would enhance his reputation. 

   Eventually, Ferragamo returned to Italy where he established himself in Florence, went through a bankruptcy, and -- of course -- re-emerged. 

   Guadagnino's film talks about the way World War II forced Ferragamo to utilize new materials but has little to say about how he felt about the rise of Mussolini. Ferragamo lived through tumultuous times but his attention seems to have remained on his work.

   Mostly an outline of a life that began when Ferragamo left home at the age of 12, the movie pays tribute to a man who thought his greatest contribution was to combine design and comfort -- maybe too much tribute because the film is overly long and sometimes digressive.

   Still, Guadagnino chronicles the career of a man who seemed to leave little to chance, fashioning his life with one calculation after another. He became an apprentice in Naples. He went to the U.S. to learn whether US manufacturing techniques could be married to an artisan's ethos. He returned to Italy to add a "made-in-Europe" cache to his wares. He was obsessed with feet, so he studied anatomy. He married when he decided it was time to marry. 

     Ferragamo seemed to be making focused decisions from the age of nine, when he made his first pair of shoes for a sister's first communion. He died in 1960 at the age of 62. The business is still family owned.*

*If you're ever in Florence, make a point of visiting  The Ferragamo Museum, where you'll find many interesting exhibits and learn a bit more about Ferragamo's connection to the artists of his day.

The struggles of a gay Marine recruit

 When it comes to depicting the way the Marine Corps trains recruits, Hollywood has tended to go hard. Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket set the brutal standard for the fervor with which drill instructors try to break down their charges before allowing them to become Marines. The Inspection is another basic-training movie but with a difference. It focuses on a gay recruit who joins the Marines after spending 10 homeless years on the streets of Trenton, N.J. Based on his own life, writer/director Elegance Bratton focuses his movie on Ellis French (a terrific Jeremy Pope), a disheveled young man whose religious mother (Gabriel Union) threw him out for being gay before he had learned to stand on his own two feet. Scenes between French and his mother have bite, mostly because Union conveys the unmitigated loathing French's mother has for her son's gayness. Most of the movie focuses on French's training days, which includes a moment in which he inadvertently reveals his gayness. A tough drill instructor (Bokeem Woodbine) makes it his business to weed French out of the Corps. Another non-commissioned officer (Raul Castillo) extends some understanding, assuring French that others like him have made it to the end. Bullied by trainers and his fellow recruits, it takes all of French's resolve to continue. He develops a tie with another "outcast" recruit (Eman Esfandi), a Muslim, but mostly he's on his own. Although the movie can feel limited, it stands as a revealing look at a young man who's trying to understand whether he can fit into a world that wasn’t designed to acknowledge his existence. It's not only the Marine Corps that's making decisions here. 

'White Noise' never seems to find its footing

   In adapting Don DeLillo's 1985 novel, White Noise, for the screen, director Noah Baumbach has made a wildly uneven movie that soars and sinks until it arrives at a brilliant end-credit musical number set to LCD Soundsystem's New Body Rhumba. 

      Some of White Noise struck me as abrasively funny, although it's easy to make fun of academic pretension, one of the movie's early preoccupations. Otherwise, Baumbach sends his movie here, there, and everywhere, spewing cleverness but never finding its footing. 

      Looking as if he hasn't made a trip to the gym in months, a pot-bellied Adam Driver plays Jack Gladney, a college professor specializing in Hitler studies, a field he pioneered. 

    Jack's wife Babette (Greta Gerwig)  works with the elderly and is addicted to pills known as Dylar. (What these pills do remains a mystery until near the movie’s end.)

   A fourth marriage for both Jack and Babette, the couple lives in a college town with the kids from their combined households, four in all.

   Don Cheadle turns up as Murray, one of Jack's colleagues, a professor who lectures on pop culture. Murray hopes to do for Elvis what Jack has done for Hitler, turn the King into an academic rage.

   At one point, Jack and Murray give dueling lectures that Jack treats as a clash of egos and which Baumbach deftly stages with each professor trying to out-dramatize the other.

    Baumbach soon introduces a disaster-movie element that’s foreshowed by an early-picture lecture Murray gives on the deeper meaning of car crashes in movies.

     When a truck and a train collide, the little college town that Jack and Babette call home is threatened by an "airborne toxic event." Toxic clouds pollute the air.

     Fearing contamination and heeding an evacuation order, the family piles into a station wagon and flees the advancing cloud. The movie suddenly becomes a cockeyed disaster pic full of roads glutted with traffic, impromptu shelters, and escalating fear.

    Baumbach keeps many of DeLillo's ironic jokes. Jack, for example, bills himself as an expert on Hitler but he doesn't speak German. Supermarkets become meccas of personal fulfillment. Consumerism attains the status of a new religion.

     All of this in the service of obliterating any consciousness of mortality in a culture that can't bear to face the prospect of death, a fear that haunts both Jack and Babette.

     A late picture development brings Jack face-to-face with unpleasant truths, including a confession of infidelity by Babette that leads to ... oh well ... it doesn't exactly matter because it feels as if Baumbach has deposited us in another movie, one in which Jack tries to unravel the mysteries of Dylar.

   Baumbach sets the story in the 1980s, just as DeLillo did. That means White Noise can feel dated. Amusing in spurts and obviously ambitious, White Noise never becomes a self-sufficient romp through a fractured culture.

    Instead, Baumbach's White Noise feels like a collection of the accumulated absurdities that once fired DeLillo’s imagination in a novel that many considered unfilmable. Pehraps they were right. Some things should be left on the page.