The Oscars Are Upon Us

This weekend, after another year of movies, the Oscars have arrived. At The Nation, we’ve reviewed a lot of the award contenders and while your guess is as good as ours on the night’s winners, we think our critics—Beatrice Loayza, Kate Wagner, Sam Adler-Bell, Jorge Cotte, Stephen Kearse, Andre Pagliarini, David Klion, Ahmed Moor, and Kelli Weston—will help you better understand the last year in film. Here are a list of some of our favorites.

Kate Wagner: “The Brutalist provides its audience with a window onto a side of architecture that is always lurking in the shadows: who makes it, and for whom.”

Beatrice Loayza: “[Sean] Baker’s characters may be condemned to their contexts, yet they are also treated like mythic heroes, simultaneously realistic and larger-than-life.”

Sam Adler-Bell: “The film, which stars Hollywood wonder waif Timothée Chalamet, is suffused with unspecific nostalgia. It reminds you of everything, and yet its ingredients are still a bit of puzzle.”

Jorge Cotte: “[Denis] Villeneuve streamlines the vast scope of Herbert’s story into a series of sweeping set pieces, more plentiful in this installment and meticulously executed.”

Stephen Kearse: “The contradiction of [RaMell] Ross’s approach is that these deep investments in subjectivity don’t actually yield much interiority.”

Andre Pagliarini: “Through the dire experience of one privileged, well-connected family, [Walter] Salles presents a chilling portrait of what happens when a government declares war on its citizens.”

David Klion: “The filmmakers, and especially the cast, have managed to take seriously a fundamentally unserious man and to draw a portrait that is all the more unsettling for being fair-minded.”

Ahmed Moor: “The Nakba continues; No Other Land makes this very clear.”

Kelli Weston: “Perhaps no contemporary filmmaker is better suited for this lofty revival than [Robert] Eggers, already inclined to trace the lineage of the Gothic project and, invariably, the ongoing anxieties this mode is uniquely disposed to express.”