Things Heard & Seen: The Ghostest with the Mostest

Amanda Seyfried in Things Heard & Seen

Every horror movie is a metaphor. Things don’t just go bump in the night for no reason; they carry messages and meaning, whether about racial injustice or domestic abuse or romantic incompatibility. The genre is an amplifier, designed to imbue figurative predicaments with literal and physical force. Things Heard & Seen, the new horror-lite picture from Netflix, proffers any number of tribulations for allegorical fodder: the peril of being trapped in a loveless marriage; the trauma of suffering from an eating disorder; the fear of being dislocated from the city to the country; the questionable wisdom of hiring a hunky, piano-playing townie to do your yardwork.

As that scattered litany of problems indicates, Things Heard & Seen is not an especially trenchant or provocative work. But it’s hardly terrible, seeing as it probes its central relationship with honesty and sobriety. Still, it’s easy to wish that this vague, slippery movie were a bit scarier, and that it cared more about its leading lady. Read More

Stowaway: Unauthorized Admission to Mars

Anna Kendrick in Stowaway

The minimalist space movie seems like a contradiction, but it’s actually an elegant solution to a familiar problem. The cosmos is so incomprehensibly vast, it’s impossible for cinema to convey its full breadth on screen; that’s doubly true for films released by Netflix, where said screen is attached to a television rather than a multiplex auditorium. And so Stowaway, the streaming giant’s new sci-fi feature, conceives of interstellar travel not as the launching pad for an epic adventure, but as the vehicle for a taut and constrained thriller. It’s a horror movie without a boogeyman; the inky enormity of outer space is plenty scary enough.

This particular vintage of stargazing picture has experienced a relative boom of late; recent examples include Geore Clooney’s The Midnight Sky, Claire Denis’ High Life, and Morten Tyldum’s unduly maligned Passengers. In terms of scale, Stowaway is smaller than all of those; it only features four characters, and its unnamed vessel is unremarkable, except maybe for being so cramped (the better to underline the setting’s claustrophobia). And while its final act includes its share of perilous derring-do in zero gravity, its main preoccupations are moral and philosophical rather than dynamic or kinetic. Read More

Oscars 2020 Recap: Not Quite Out of Sight

Anthony Hopkins (not) appearing at the Oscars

Well, that was… different.

Look, I don’t envy Steven Soderbergh and the other producers tasked with running the 93rd Academy Awards. The ceremony was doomed to fall under the giant shadow cast by the COVID-19 pandemic—not just because it presented an enormous logistical challenge in the era of masks and social distancing, but because the show itself was celebrating a year’s 14 months worth of films that were released during a time when virtually nobody was going to the movies. The result was a telecast that needed to be fluid and innovative in an industry that prizes consistency and tradition.

Soderbergh’s team tried. Even with nominees spread across the globe rather than packed into the Dolby Theatre, they attempted to mount a more intimate-feeling gathering, one reliant on conversation and eye contact as opposed to engineering and bombast. As the capper to an absurdly lengthy awards season, the Oscars are typically meant to feel gigantic, but here they aimed to be small, even cozy. Read More

Oscars 2020: Prediction Roundup

Jamie Foxx in Soul

At long, long last, the 93rd Academy Awards are finally airing tonight. We’ve spent the past week running through our predictions and preferences in the 20 feature categories (sorry, I skipped the short subjects). For your handy convenience, here’s an omnibus post detailing all of our predictions, with links to more detailed analyses.

Curiously enough, even with Nomadland being the clear Best Picture frontrunner, I’m only predicting it to win three total Oscars; that’s the same number I’m predicting for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which didn’t even score a Best Picture nomination. Does this mean anything? Probably not, but we’ll see what happens!

Best Actor
Will win: Chadwick Boseman—Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (confidence: 3/5)
Should win: Chadwick Boseman—Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
Worst omission: Hugh Jackman—Bad Education Read More

Oscars 2020: Best Director and Best Picture

Frances McDormand in Nomadland

And here we are. It’s been a busy week here at MovieManifesto: We’ve already analyzed 18 feature categories at this year’s Oscars, including the lead and supporting actors, the screenplays, the big techies, and the odds and ends. Now, we get to the top two prizes. Will there be a Picture/Director split, as has happened three times in the past five years? Let’s find out!

BEST DIRECTOR

NOMINEES
Lee Isaac Chung—Minari
Emerald Fennell—Promising Young Woman
David Fincher—Mank
Thomas Vinterberg—Another Round
Chloé Zhao—Nomadland Read More