LA WeeklyThe red carpets are being rolled out in Hollywood for this weekend's annual, self-congratulatory cavalcade of movie stars and the paparazzi who love them. The 89th Academy Awards are being held this Sunday, so if you need some talking points for an impending Oscar party, here is a complete list of our reviews of this year's nominated films.
The Sensuous Moonlight Dares to Let Black Men Love
A question is posed to the main character of Barry Jenkins’ wondrous, superbly acted new film, Moonlight: “Who is you, man?” The beauty of Jenkins’ second feature, which follows his San Francisco–set, black-boho romance Medicine for Melancholy (2008), radiates from the way that query is explored and answered: with specifics and expansiveness, not with foregone conclusions.
Nominations:
Best Picture
Best Adapted Screenplay
Best Director, Barry Jenkins
Best Supporting Actress, Naomie Harris
Best Supporting Actor, Mahershala Ali
Best Cinematography, James Laxton
Best Original Score, Nicholas Brittle
Best Editing, Nat Sanders and Joi McMillon
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
Hell or High Water; Credit: Courtesy of Paramount Pictures
Sci-Fi Epic Arrival Is Best When It Looks Within
Arrival, about the mysterious appearance of 12 floating extraterrestrial vessels in different corners of the world, is the best film the director has made so far: Its atmosphere is its story.
Nominations:
Best Picture
Cinematography
Directing
Film Editing
Production Design
Sound Editing
Sound Mixing
Writing (Adapted Screenplay)
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
Fences; Credit: Courtesy of Paramount Pictures
Denzel Washington Brings August Wilson's Masterwork to the People
We shouldn’t have to explain why Fences, the August Wilson play set in the 1950s and now adapted for the screen, is important.
Nominations:
Best Picture
Actor in a Leading Role, Denzel Washington
Actress in a Supporting Role, Viola Davis
Writing (Adapted Screenplay)
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
Hacksaw Ridge; Credit: Courtesy of Lionsgate
Mel Gibson Celebrates Pacifism With the Most Mel Gibson of Bloodbaths
Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge is a film at war with itself. Which makes perfect sense, because it’s about a man at war with himself, and I’m pretty sure it was also made by a man at war with himself.
Nominations:
Best Picture
Actor in a Leading Role, Andrew Garfield
Directing
Film Editing
Sound Editing
Sound Mixing
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
Credit: Courtesy of CBS Films
Hell or High Water Finds Serenity in Two Brothers’ Desperate Bank-Robbing Spree
Hell or High Water sees a Scottish director making a down-home, West Texas–set movie about cars, guns, brothers, banks and twist-off beers.
Nominations:
Best Picture
Actor in a Supporting Role, Jeff Bridges
Film Editing
Writing (Original Screenplay)
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
Credit: Courtesy of 20th Century Fox
Hidden Figures Couldn't Be More Timely in Its Celebration of Ascendant Women
The film's leads, a trio of African-American mathematicians employed at NASA to perform advanced calculations in the early days of the space program, have just turned around a shakedown traffic stop from a cracker cop.
Nominations:
Best Picture
Actress in a Supporting Role, Octavia Spencer
Writing (Adapted Screenplay)
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
Credit: Courtesy of Lionsgate
Damien Chazelle's Glittering Throwback Can't Measure up – but That's Its Charm
The cussedness of La La Land is almost enough to recommend it. Damien Chazelle's sumptuous tribute to romantics trying to keep lit the fire of a guttering culture is defiantly old-fashioned in form and style.
Nominations:
Best Picture
Actor in a Leading Role, Ryan Gosling
Actress in a Leading Role, Emma Stone
Cinematography
Costume Design
Directing
Film Editing
Music (Original Score)
Music (Original Song), “Audition (The Fools Who Dream)”
Music (Original Song), “City of Stars”
Production Design
Sound Editing
Sound Mixing
Writing (Original Screenplay)
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
Credit: Screen Australia
Lion Will Make You Bawl, But It Could Have Made You Think, Too
Five-year-old Brierley got separated from his older brother at a train station near their remote village. The plucky kid — played by Sunny Pawar with trembling eyes and steely charm — holes up in an out-of-service train to sleep but awakens locked in and barreling east.
Nominations:
Best Picture
Actor in a Supporting Role, Dev Patel
Actress in a Supporting Role, Nicole Kidman
Cinematography
Music (Original Score)
Writing (Adapted Screenplay)
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
Don't worry — they'll heal a little.; Credit: Courtesy Sundance Institute
Manchester by the Sea May Be Kenneth Lonergan's Most Powerful Film
Eventually, there will be so many films about a sullen or damaged man returning to his provincial town to face the demons of his past that Netflix will make a separate category for them.
Nominations:
Best Picture
Actor in a Leading Role, Casey Affleck
Actor in a Supporting Role, Lucas Hedges
Actress in a Supporting Role, Michelle Williams
Directing
Writing (Original Screenplay)
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
Credit: Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
Elle Stars Isabelle Huppert as a Woman Under the Verhoeven Influence
Elle, adapted by David Birke from Philippe Djian’s novel Oh…, is, in a way, Verhoeven's own hot take on his career.
Nominations:
Actress in a Leading Role, Isabelle Huppert
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
Credit: Courtesy of Fox Searchlight
Natalie Portman Thrills in Pablo Larraín's Impeccable Biopic Jackie
Pablo Larraín’s Jackie, a searing, almost scary thrill ride through the psyche of one very determined woman, serves as a reminder that JFK’s visage owns the half-dollar because Jackie owned Americans’ hearts.
Nominations:
Actress in a Leading Role, Natalie Portman
Costume Design
Music (Original Score)
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
Speak now or forever hold your peace.; Credit: Courtesy of Bleecker Street
Viggo Mortensen Is a Flower-Power Survivalist in Captain Fantastic
Don’t let the publicity photos of the ensemble cast clad in ’70s-era tuxes and flower-child dresses, or even the cloying Mumford-mimicking soundtrack on the trailer, fool you: Captain Fantastic ain’t some twee, cutesy, Wes Anderson romp or a Little Miss Sunshine knockoff.
Nominations:
Actor in a Leading Role, Viggo Mortensen
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
This is the story that Amy Adams is reading.; Credit: Merrick Morton, Focus Features
Nocturnal Animals Strands Together Flashy Tales of Male Weakness
Tom Ford has entirely overstuffed his nesting-doll domestic drama–cum-thriller Nocturnal Animals, yet I spent much of the film worrying that it might not have a point.
Nominations:
Actor in a Supporting Role, Michael Shannon
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
Credit: Courtesy of Paramount Pictures
Maybe Florence Foster Jenkins' Unsung Heroine Should Have Stayed That Way
Stephen Frears’ Florence Foster Jenkin is a likable study of delusions of grandeur.
Nominations:
Actress in a Leading Role, Meryl Streep
Costume Design
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
Credit: Courtesy of Focus Features
Kubo and the Two Strings Stop-Motion Kids' Adventure Kubo and the Two Strings Is Another Laika Marvel
From its opening image — of a distraught woman battling massive ocean waves on a moonlit night — to its surprisingly ambiguous final shot. of what, I won’t say, Kubo and the Two Strings sears itself into your brain.
Nominations:
Animated Feature Film
Visual Effects
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
A breakthrough in princess-ing.; Credit: Courtesy Walt Disney
Disney's Moana Is a Blissful Fable About Keepin' On in Terrible Times
Maybe it was the agitated, election-induced state of mind I was in when I saw it, but Disney’s Moana feels like a movie about how easy it can be to give up, and how important it is not to.
Nominations:
Animated Feature Film
Music (Original Song), “How Far I'll Go”
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
Credit: Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
The Red Turtle
This dialogue-free French/Japanese animated fable — a low-key adventure about an unnamed shipwrecked beardo who falls in love with nature — might serve as a potent antidote for post-election depression.
Nominations:
Animated Feature Film
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
This may look like that scene in Crash but is actually from a serious movie about racism.; Credit: Courtesy of Walt Disney Pictures
Disney's Zootopia Paws at Segregated City Life
In Zootopia, animals do a lot of the things that animals in Disney movies usually do: They speak, to begin with; they walk upright and wear funny clothes; they exhibit attitudes that align or ironically misalign with their species' appearance and reputation; they hold jobs; they experience outsize emotion and moral doubt; they sing and dance about their emotions and resolve those moral doubts.
Nominations:
Animated Feature Film
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
Credit: Courtesy of Paramount Pictures
Martin Scorsese's Priests Persevere in the Searching Silence
Martin Scorsese opens his foreword to the latest edition of Shusaku Endo's Silence with a simple, impossible question: “How do you tell the story of Christian faith?”
Nominations:
Cinematography
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
Credit: Courtesy of Paramount Pictures
Zemeckis' Allied Proves Thriller Conventions Can Still Thrill
As Allied opens, Brad Pitt parachutes so gently and quietly onto a stretch of Moroccan desert that at first you think he might be dead.
Nominations:
Costume Design
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
Muggling Along: Fantastic Beasts Conjures Too Little of the Potter Magic
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, written as an original screenplay by author J.K. Rowling, is an expansion of her Harry Potter universe, and a test: Without lovable, adolescent leads Harry, Hermione Grainger and Ron Weasley, or the elaborate narrative backbone provided by Rowling's novels, can the wizarding world continue to interest us?
Nominations:
Costume Design
Production Design
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
Fire at Sea Reveals Parallel Lives as the Refugee Crisis Hits Italy
There are two distinct movies in Gianfranco Rosi’s Fire at Sea, and you could say that somewhere in between them lies the real one.
Nominations:
Documentary (Feature)
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
James Baldwin Speaks to Now in I Am Not Your Negro
Like Ava DuVernay’s 13th, Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro travels a straight, well-researched path from the darkest tragedies of American history to the ones that plague the country today.
Nominations:
Documentary (Feature)
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
In Life, Animated, Disney Helps an Autistic Mind Connect
Quietly moving doc Life, Animated has a hook worthy of the most shameless of Hollywood weepies, offering tragedy and a miracle and much ado about the power of movies themselves.
Nominations:
Documentary (Feature)
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
O.J. Made in America Asks If We Need 464 More Minutes of O.J. Simpson Coverage
Orenthal James Simpson always seemed a singular figure. Hardly anybody got where he got or did what he did. Certainly nobody got away with it. But of course it isn’t just the man who fascinates: It’s the image.
Nominations:
Documentary (Feature)
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
Ava DuVernay's 13th Exposes, in Fury and Fact, Why America Loves to Jail Black Men
You might have let yourself act surprised as the waters have risen and the floods have come. But you can't anymore, not after 13th, Ava DuVernay's miraculous cine-history of the criminalization of American blackness.
Nominations:
Documentary (Feature)
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
Ex-Nazis Dig Land Mines From the Beach in the Suspenseful Land of Mine
Don’t hold it against Martin Zandvliet’s land-mine drama that its English title is the dopiest movie title pun since John Singleton’s Poetic Justice.
Nominations:
Foreign Language Film
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
A Man Called Ove
Movies about grumpy old men learning to lighten up, thanks to colorful neighbors are hardly novel. Yet A Man Called Ove (based on Fredrik Backman's best-selling 2012 novel) works its well-worn conceit to heartstring-tugging effect.
Nominations:
Foreign Language Film
Makeup and Hair Styling
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
Farhadi Remains a Master Dramatist, but The Salesman Fails Its Namesake
Iranian director Asghar Farhadi's The Salesman is a tense, visceral drama of wounded masculinity — and therein lies part of its problem.
Nominations:
Foreign Language Film
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
Tanna
The sight of kids joyously playing with a “penis sheath” is enough to make Tanna recommendable, but fortunately, there's also far more to Bentley Dean and Martin Butler's ethnographic drama, which was filmed on — and stars natives of — the South Pacific island that gives the film its title.
Nominations:
Foreign Language Film
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
Toni Erdmann Toasts the Hilarity of Everyday Humiliation
Delving into microeconomics and macroaggressions, Toni Erdmann, the dynamite, superbly acted third feature by writer-director Maren Ade, is social studies at its finest.
Nominations:
Foreign Language Film
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
Star Trek Beyond Has Blockbuster Action — and Some of the Original's Heart
Trek Beyond might be the Star Trekkiest film of the new, J.J. Abrams–ified Trek era. That is to say, it’s the one that feels the most like a turbo-loaded episode of the original series, and has at least some of that classic spirit of exploration and derring-do.
Nominations:
Makeup and Hair Styling
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
The Villains of Suicide Squad Almost Transcend the Usual Comic Book Action
David Ayer’s film may not always work, but when it does, it’s a perverse delight.
Nominations:
Makeup and Hair Styling
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
Passengers Jettisons Moral Complexity for Rom-Com Convention
In the early scenes of the sci-fi drama Passengers, Chris Pratt gets to be every dope who ever woke up in the middle of the night, thought it was morning and started to make the coffee.
Nominations:
Music (Original Score)
Production Design
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
Trolls Insists That Only Male-Female Couplings Can Make Your Kids Happy
Trolls is a pretty standard piece of subpar DreamWorks product: loud and shiny, more than a tad frantic despite a generic set of characters, written and directed by in-house lifers.
Nominations:
Music (Original Song), “Can't Stop the Feeling”
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
The Coens’ Hollywood Farce Hail, Caesar! Flames Out
A kick for those who’ve distractedly thumbed through Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon, Joel and Ethan Coen’s bustling comedy Hail, Caesar! looks back to the waning days of moviedom’s golden age: specifically, to 1951, when big-studio fixers were still tidying up the messes left by the talent.
Nominations:
Production Design
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
Deepwater Horizon Makes Rousing Adventure From a Real-Life Tragedy
Deepwater Horizon is the most entertaining Hollywood disaster movie in years.
Nominations:
Sound Editing
Visual Effects
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
Eastwood's Sully Continues the Director's Interrogation of American Heroism
Like his American Sniper (2014), Clint Eastwood’s Sully is a movie of nightmares.
Nominations:
Sound Editing
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story Is More Product Than Myth
The first thing to say about Rogue One is that it might be the most visually splendid Star Wars movie to date — with its mist-covered mountains, its tsunamis of dust and fire, its X-wing fighters blazing through rainswept nights.
Nominations:
Sound Mixing
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
13 Hours Trades Truth For Explosions — But It's Not Truly Political
Michael Bay's 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi has an explanation, though it should be taken with a grain of salt — or rather, a kilogram of dynamite.
Nominations:
Sound Mixing
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
Marvel's Sorcerer Supreme Won't Blow Your Mind, but Doctor Strange Is Still a Trip
It's too much to ask that a studio moneymaker/sequel generator like Doctor Strange actually be strange, much less flaunt doctoral levels of weirdness.
Nominations:
Visual Effects
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
In The Jungle Book, Disney Builds a Better Blockbuster
Disney and Jon Favreau's The Jungle Book reinvigorates an oft-told tale with star power, technology and calculated charm.
Nominations:
Visual Effects
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
Love Hurts in Lanthimos' Daring The Lobster, but It Beats the Alternative
Even by the standards of Yorgos Lanthimos, The Lobster's premise is a doozy: Colin Farrell plays a recently single schlub forced to report to the Hotel, where he has 45 days to form a romantic relationship, lest he be turned into an animal of his choosing.
Nominations:
Writing (Original Screenplay)
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
Woman Power Serves a Boy in Mike Mills' Late-’70s Remembrance
One of the quasi-bohemians in Mike Mills’ gauzy 20th Century Women loves to document ephemera, taking photos of everything she owns
Nominations:
Writing (Original Screenplay)
Read the full L.A. Weekly review here.
Advertising disclosure: We may receive compensation for some of the links in our stories. Thank you for supporting LA Weekly and our advertisers.