Movies

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      Gypsy Rose Blanchard and the Big Shift in True Crime

      by

      Not long ago, true crime storytellers had little in the way of first-person footage captured in real time to rely on. Now, as much of our daily lives are documented, the genre is transforming.There’s a moment near the end of the 2017 documentary “Mommy Dead and Dearest” where Gypsy Rose Blanchard is filming her boyfriend at the time, Nicholas Godejohn, as he lies nude in a hotel room bed. A day earlier, Godejohn had stabbed to death Gypsy’s mother, Dee Dee Blanchard. The killing was part of a plot the couple hatched to free Gypsy, who was then 23, from her mother’s grip so they could be together. In the short video, we hear Gypsy make a playful sexual comment amid her copious, distinctive giggling.Dee Dee Blanchard had abused and controlled her daughter, mentally and physically, for decades. It was believed by many to be a case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy — a form of child abuse in which a caregiver might induce illness to draw public sympathy, care, concern and material gifts — and the saga captured the collective interest.The snippet is the first time we see it unfolding through Gypsy’s eyes, and the point of view serves as a glimmer of what would become one of the biggest shifts in true crime storytelling.Stories like these were once conveyed through re-enactments, dramatizations and interviews with police officers, journalists, medical professionals, family and friends. If there were primary sources, those were typically scans of photos of happy families or of grisly crime scenes underpinned by voice-over narration, exemplified on shows like “20/20,” “Dateline,” “Snapped,” “Forensic Files” and “48 hours.” Home video cameras, which became popular in the 1980s, certainly changed the true crime landscape, but those recordings were generally sparse and supplemental. In rare instances, viewers might hear directly from the perpetrators or victims in interviews often conducted years after the fact.Dee Dee Blanchard, right, with her daughter, Gypsy Rose Blanchard, who endured decades of physical and mental abuse by her mother. via The Blanchard Family/LifetimeNow we have reams of first-person digital footage, which means that viewers, more than ever, are privy to the perspectives of those directly involved, often during the period in which the crimes took place, closing the distance and making the intermediaries less essential. The case of Gypsy Rose Blanchard encapsulates the trajectory of this phenomenon. Her saga, for example, received the scripted treatment with “The Act,” a 2019 limited series on Hulu, for which Patricia Arquette won an Emmy. But those looking for a definitive, unvarnished, visceral take on the events now have options and direct channels, rendering that series as almost an afterthought.The rise of social media has, of course, accelerated this dynamic. Blanchard and Godejohn’s relationship was almost exclusively online before the murder, and Facebook posts and text messages between them were used in court by prosecutors to incriminate them. Godejohn was sentenced to life in prison; Gypsy received 10 years, of which she served about seven.She was released on Dec. 28, 2023, and the following day she posted a selfie to Instagram with the caption “First selfie of freedom,” which has gotten more than 6.5 million likes. Online, she’s been promoting her new Lifetime series, “The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard.” “This docuseries chronicles my quest to expose the hidden parts of my life that have never been revealed until now,” we hear her say from prison.Blanchard and her husband married in 2022 while she was still in prison. via Gypsy Rose Blanchard and Ryan AndersonShe has quickly become a social media celebrity, with more than eight million Instagram followers and nearly 10 million on TikTok. Since her release, she has shared lighthearted videos like one with her husband, Ryan Anderson (they married in 2022 while she was in prison), at “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” on Broadway and more serious ones, like a video in which she explains Munchausen syndrome by proxy.Technology’s influence on modern criminal investigations has become foundational in many documentaries from recent years.In the two-part HBO documentary “I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth v. Michelle Carter” (2019), the story is largely told through the thousands of text messages exchanged between two teenagers, Michelle Carter and Conrad Roy III, from 2012 to 2014. The text messages led up to the exact moment of Roy’s suicide. Selfie videos that Roy had posted online are also shown. Carter spent about a year in prison for her role in his death. The documentary (by Erin Lee Carr, who also directed “Mommy Dead and Dearest”) left me “spinning in circles, turning over thoughts about accountability, coercion and the nebulous boundaries of technology,” as I wrote last year.One of the highest profile murder trials in the United States in recent years — that of the disgraced lawyer Alex Murdaugh, who shot and killed his wife, Maggie, and son Paul in 2021 — ultimately rested on a staggering recording captured moments before the murders. That video, on Paul’s phone, placed the patriarch at the scene of the crime, sealing his fate: two consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.Alex Murdaugh, center, as seen in the Netflix docuseries “Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal.” His murder trial was among the most talked about in recent years.NetflixThe use of that footage, along with abundant smartphone video that brought viewers into the world of the Murdaughs, in documentaries like Netflix’s two-season “Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal,” would have been unimaginable not long ago.But perhaps no recent offering illustrates this shift like HBO’s docuseries “Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God.” Members of the group Love Has Won live-streamed their days and nights; they filmed and posted untold hours of preachments and online manifestoes to YouTube and Instagram Live. Much of the three-episode series comprises this footage, and in turn viewers watch Amy Carlson, who called herself “Mother God,” slowly deteriorate over the course of months from the perspective of the people who were worshiping her.It’s a vantage point so unnerving and haunting, it dissolves the line between storytelling and voyeurism. When the group films her corpse, which they cart across numerous state lines, camping with it along the way, we see all that, too, through the eyes of the devotees. Several of the followers continue to promote her teachings online.Amy Carlson, center, who led a group called Love Has Won, as seen in the HBO docuseries “Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God.”HBOIt was clear this month in the comments on Blanchard’s Instagram that many were uncomfortable with her re-emerging as a social media presence. Some found it odd that she would participate so heavily and publicly immediately after her release. Others thought it was in bad taste for her to celebrate her freedom while Godejohn serves a life sentence.The greatest criticism of the true crime genre is that horrors are being repackaged as guilty-pleasure entertainment, allowing viewers to get close — but not too close — to terrible things. And perhaps the best defense of true crime is that it allows viewers to process the scary underbelly of our world safely. It is a strange dance between knowledge, observation and entertainment.Either way, the fourth wall is cracking, and perhaps the discomfort this might cause has been a long time coming. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      ‘The Underdoggs’ Review: Guess Who the New Coach Is, Kids

      by

      Snoop Dogg, as an egomaniacal retired football star, turns community service into a sport when he sees a chance to rekindle romance with a player’s mom.It’s not until the film’s postscript that “The Underdoggs” suddenly makes sense: The movie, starring Snoop Dogg as a retired athlete coaching a Pop Warner team, is inspired by the Snoop Youth Football League, the real-life organization that he started in 2005. The film, directed by Charles Stone III, is perhaps best understood as something meant as a fun dedication to the program — but it makes for a forgettable, often aggressively perfunctory work.Snoop plays Jaycen Jennings, a former star wide receiver who’s become an insufferable has-been and, after a reckless driving charge, is forced to do community service in his hometown. After running into his old flame (Tika Sumpter), whose son is on a helpless youth football team, he decides to coach the squad to burnish his public image and cozy up to his former sweetheart.It’s a familiar narrative — an embittered narcissist, down on his luck, forced by circumstances to coach, and eventually connect with, a ragtag group of kids — a situation the film knowingly plays with, making frequent references to the Emilio Estevez character in “The Mighty Ducks.” But it can’t come up with any memorable jokes or genuine heart to fill in the beats that it mostly slogs through. The kids in the film are simply too young to make an impact, and Snoop, who is fine enough as an actor, ultimately doesn’t possess the charisma necessary to elevate a lazy script.What we’re left with instead is the occasional chuckle from Mike Epps as the hapless class clown he usually plays, and the vague outline of other movies that have done this story with more charm.The UnderdoggsRated R for pervasive language, sexual references, drug use and some underage drinking. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. Watch on Prime Video. More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Tótem’ Review: The Girl Who Sees Too Much

      by

      In Lila Avilés’s second feature, a 7-year-old girl begins to grasp the severity of her father’s illness while birthday preparations are underway at home.There are worlds inside worlds in “Tótem,” a soulful drama populated by an array of creatures, some with two legs and sad smiles, others with feathers, fur and shells. Set largely in a rambling house on a single momentous day, it focuses on a serious-eyed girl, Sol, who serves as the story’s luminous celestial body. You see much of what she sees, the warmth and disorder. Yet because Sol is just 7, you also see what it means to be a child in that messy reality known as adulthood.The Mexican writer-director Lila Avilés plunges into the mess the minute Sol (Naíma Sentíes), wearing a red clown nose and a floppy rainbow-colored wig, arrives at her grandfather’s house. There, amid the homey clutter of a house that actually looks lived in rather than art directed, two of her aunts are busily, and none too efficiently, prepping an evening birthday party for Sol’s gravely ill father, Tona (Mateo García Elizondo). As people and animals exit and enter the story — a raptor portentously flies overhead early on, part of a menagerie that includes bugs, dogs and a goldfish in a plastic bag — one aunt bakes a cake as the other dyes her hair.Avilés soon maps the house’s labyrinthine sprawl, swiftly building a tangible sense of place with precise, well-worn details and quick-sketch character portraits. “Totem” is a coming into consciousness story about a child navigating realms — human and animal, spiritual and material — that exist around her like overlapping concentric circles. Yet even as the story’s focus sharpens, what matters here are the characters: their emotions and worried words, how they hold it together and fall apart, their individual habits and shared habitat. (Avilés’s 2019 feature debut “The Chambermaid,” set in a hotel, is about another ecosystem.)Sol serves as a narrative through line in the movie, which opens with a kind of prelude set in a single-room public bathroom. She’s parked on the toilet, and she and her mother, Lucia (Iazua Larios), are chatting and laughing. Lucia tells Sol to finish (“push it out”), encouragement that amusingly evokes Freud’s theory about the anal-retentive stage. Whether Avilés herself is pushing, as it were, a Freudian take or not, the scene works as a run-up to what follows. Sol’s childhood reality is expectedly circumscribed, its limits expressed by the boxy aspect ratio and the closely attentive, hovering camerawork. Her reality is also changing, as becomes painfully clear by the contrast between her mother and her fast-fading father.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Sometimes I Think About Dying’ Review: Life, in Drab Gray

      by

      Daisy Ridley stars as an office worker who’s just going through the motions.Fran thinks about dying, but not gruesomely. Her mental tableaux of death look as if they were staged by the artist Gregory Crewdson. Sometimes her body is draped dramatically over driftwood on a serene beach or posed in a foggy forest on a soft green bed of moss. She imagines standing alone in a nondescript finished office basement as a giant snake slithers by. She imagines death, essentially, as peace in the midst of ever-changing nature.Her reality is less beautifully hued. By day, Fran (Daisy Ridley) dons drab business casual and works in the sort of space that makes the environs of “The Office” seem like a magical wonderland. A small group of people perform clerical tasks to keep the local port in their tiny Pacific Northwest town running smoothly, and spend most of their time on crushingly banal chatter. Why is this cruise ship docked in such a way that it blocks the views of the mountains? Where are the mugs?By night, Fran’s life isn’t much more interesting, but at least she’s in control of it. She goes home, pours a glass of wine and takes a long, restorative sip, then reheats some kind of insipid patty and eats it with a side of cottage cheese. Sudoku, brush teeth, bed, repeat. It feels like she’s starring in her own one-woman play, one where all other people are background noise — her mother’s phone call goes to voice mail — and nobody is watching.“Sometimes I Think About Dying,” directed by Rachel Lambert, comes by its theatricality naturally; it’s based, in part, on the play “Killers” by Kevin Armento. (The other credited writers are Stefanie Abel Horowitz and Katy Wright-Mead, the latter of whose credits include “Boardwalk Empire” and “The Knick.”) The play entwined the tale of a young woman who thinks about dying with a secondary story about a young woman obsessed with killing, and though I haven’t seen it, I assume that means its themes were very different. But onscreen, “Sometimes I Think About Dying” can do what it could never do as easily onstage: We float in and out of Fran’s mind, entering her mood, her lethargy, her fixations on the back of people’s heads or their mouths while they speak. We start to become a little bit Fran.Perhaps the best term for Fran’s persistent mood is acedia, that feeling of not caring much about anything, especially one’s position in the world. (Ancient monks called it the “noonday demon.”) It’s often equated with depression, but there’s a particular torpor provoked by a soul-sucking office that can bring it on. Many a new college graduate has discovered, quickly, that a 9-to-5 job can become unbearable even if the work itself is simple, pleasant and well-paid. Something about the prospect of everlasting sameness can sap the will to live.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

    • 113 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      Hillary Clinton on ‘Barbie’ Snubs: You’re ‘More Than Kenough’

      by

      The former presidential candidate joined the chorus of disappointment in the omission of Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie from the best director and best actress Oscar categories.It was hard for fans of last year’s blockbuster film “Barbie” to ignore the twist of fate on Tuesday when Greta Gerwig, the movie’s director, and Margot Robbie, its titular star, were shut out of the best director and best actress Oscar categories. It could have quite literally been a plot point in the movie, which serves as a lesson on the patriarchal structures that shape our institutions and our ways of thinking.On Wednesday, Hillary Clinton joined the conversation by posting a message to Gerwig and Robbie on social media. “Greta & Margot, while it can sting to win the box office but not take home the gold, your millions of fans love you,” Clinton wrote. “You’re both so much more than Kenough,” she added, referencing a phrase that shows up on Ken’s sweatshirt in the film.Perhaps the message couldn’t have come from a more appropriate public figure than Clinton, a former secretary of state who, of course, lost the presidential election in 2016 to Donald Trump despite winning the popular vote.She was just one of many to share their dismay about Gerwig and Robbie being snubbed while the film itself earned eight nominations — including for best picture; for best actor, for Ryan Gosling, who plays Ken; and for best supporting actress, for America Ferrera.On Tuesday, after the nominations were read, Gosling issued a lengthy statement expressing his disappointment: “No recognition would be possible for anyone on the film without their talent, grit and genius,” he wrote. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Ferrera called their work “phenomenal” and said that they both “deserve to be acknowledged for the history they made, for the ground they broke, for the beautiful artistry.”Billie Jean King, the tennis champion who won equal pay for women at the 1973 U.S. Open, posted on Wednesday that she was “really upset about #Barbie being snubbed, especially in the Best Director category.”“The movie is absolutely brilliant,” King wrote, “and Greta Gerwig is a genius.” More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Barbie’ Is Adapted? Let’s Fix the Oscar Screenplay Categories.

      by

      In the midst of the squabbles about actors and directors, there’s always at least one screenplay to debate when Oscar nominations are announced. Last year, in fact, there were two, and I regularly get collared by people wondering: What in the world were “Glass Onion” and “Top Gun: Maverick” doing in the best adapted screenplay bucket? Adapted from what? Was there some secret book about fighter pilots or tech mogul whodunits they’d missed?Nope. There’s also no previous story about a Barbie who starts thinking about death and sets out on an existential journey. But that didn’t keep the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the industry organization that gives out the Oscars, from kicking “Barbie” into the adapted category.Judd Apatow declared the reclassification of “Barbie,” the biggest movie of 2023 any way you slice it, “insulting” to its writers, Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach. Moving “Barbie” from the best original screenplay category — where it was the probable winner over films like “The Holdovers” and “Past Lives” — to adapted changed its Oscar chances. Now, alongside a slate that includes the juggernaut “Oppenheimer,” it’s a horse race. I don’t know what’s going to win.The academy posts some of its Oscar rules publicly, but not the ones that distinguish original screenplays from adapted ones. The Writers Guild of America, the union to which Hollywood’s scripters belong, does. And for the most part, judging from Oscar history, they’re in sync. Sequels, remakes and screenplays based on underlying material (including nonfiction, like a biography, that contains a narrative) are considered “nonoriginal,” and in awards contexts are usually classed as adaptations. Original screenplays either are not based on material (generally as stipulated in the writer’s contract), or they’re based on a nonfiction book that doesn’t have a narrative, like a study of sailing ships in the 19th century.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Why Greta Gerwig Was Snubbed for a Best Director Nomination

      by

      “Barbie” scored a best-picture nomination and scooped up eight nods overall. Several factors could have led to Gerwig’s omission.In her own world, Barbie can accomplish just about anything. But in the real world, “Barbie” was dealt a significant setback Tuesday morning: Though Greta Gerwig’s colorful comedy skewering the patriarchy was the biggest blockbuster of last year and set a record for the highest-grossing movie ever directed by a woman, Gerwig failed to receive an Oscar nomination for best director.The snub had many in Hollywood scratching their heads, since the 40-year-old filmmaker had earned best director nominations from the Golden Globes and Directors Guild of America for “Barbie” and had picked up an Oscar nod for her solo debut, “Lady Bird,” just six years ago.Ryan Gosling, Ken to Margot Robbie’s Barbie, criticized the academy’s vote even as he himself received an Oscar nomination. “No recognition would be possible for anyone on the film without their talent, grit and genius,” he said in a statement, referring to both Gerwig and Robbie, who missed out on a best actress nod. “To say that I’m disappointed that they are not nominated in their respective categories would be an understatement.”Does the matter come down to simple sexism? Certainly, if it were not for the presence of Justine Triet, the “Anatomy of a Fall” filmmaker, among the directing nominees, the academy would have a lot more explaining to do. Oscar voters have long been accused of ascribing more importance to male-led stories, a bias the academy has tried to rectify in recent years by diversifying its ranks. Still, comedies often struggle to win favor with the Oscars, and a female-led comedy has even more hurdles to overcome, as Robbie found.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      2024 Oscar Nominations: ‘Oppenheimer’ Leads the Way With 13 Nominations

      by

      The nominees for the 96th Academy Awards were announced Tuesday morning and last summer’s “Barbenheimer” phenomenon proved to be a dominant duo once again, with “Oppenheimer” leading the way with 13 nominations and “Barbie” collecting eight. A handful of major awards contenders are still exclusively in theaters, most notably “American Fiction,” “Poor Things” and “The Zone of Interest,” which are all best picture nominees. But the vast majority of titles are currently available to stream or rent on various platforms. Here’s a complete rundown of where to find all the major awards hopefuls.The writer and director Christopher Nolan narrates the opening sequence from the film.Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures, via Associated PressNominated for: Best picture, director, actor, supporting actor, supporting actress, adapted screenplay, production design, costume design, cinematography, editing, makeup and hairstyling, sound, original score.How to watch: Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.Conjuring the dark wizardry of the Manhattan Project, the director Christopher Nolan turned the Trinity test into a seat-rumbling summer spectacle, placing it at the center of “Oppenheimer” like the nuclear core of 20th-century history. But there’s a disturbing intimacy to the film as well, with Cillian Murphy’s tremulous J. Robert Oppenheimer leading an unstable band of scientists while nearly drowning in uncharted political and ethical waters. In exploring the origins of a technological boogeyman that continues to haunt mankind, Nolan embraces the contradictions of the flawed, brilliant man whose spirit seems to embody it.‘Barbie’[embedded content]Nominated for: Best picture, supporting actor, supporting actress, adapted screenplay, production design, costume design, original song (two nominees).How to watch: Stream it on Max. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.Perhaps “Barbie” was destined to become the year’s biggest box-office phenomenon, but Greta Gerwig had to thread a very thin needle in creating a pop entertainment of buoyancy and substance. While playing off the fizzy appeal of the fashionable plastic doll that has lined toy shelves for over half a century, Gerwig seizes the opportunity to reflect on the distance between Barbie’s vision of womanhood and the troubling messiness of reality. As Gerwig’s bruised idealist, Margot Robbie’s Barbie keeps the tone light as she journeys from the matriarchal paradise of Barbieland to the real world, which isn’t the utopia she might have imagined.‘Killers of the Flower Moon’[embedded content]Nominated for: Best picture, director, actress, supporting actor, production design, costume design, cinematography, editing, original score, original song.How to watch: Stream it on Apple TV+. Buy it on Amazon, Vudu, Google Play and YouTube.The nativist skirmishes and corruption that have defined so many of Martin Scorsese’s gangster (and non-gangster) dramas surface again in this sprawling epic of American greed and violence, based on David Grann’s historical nonfiction book. Set in the oil-rich Osage territory of 1920s Oklahoma, “Killers of the Flower Moon” looks into a murderous conspiracy to wrest claim rights away from the native population. At the film’s center is the toxic love story between an Osage woman (Lily Gladstone) and an impressionable war veteran (Leonardo DiCaprio) whose affection for her is clouded by his relationship to his scheming uncle (Robert De Niro) and a taste for the finer things.‘The Holdovers’Alexander Payne narrates a sequence from his film featuring Paul Giamatti and Dominic Sessa.Seacia Pavao/Focus FeaturesNominated for: Best picture, actor, supporting actress, original screenplay, editing.How to watch: Stream it on Peacock. Buy it on Apple TV, Google Play, YouTube, Vudu and Amazon.Reuniting for the first time since “Sideways” nearly 20 years ago, the director Alexander Payne and his lovably cantankerous star, Paul Giamatti, have made a film (destined to become a future holiday staple) about the relationship between three people left to themselves over Christmas in 1970. Giamatti stars as the least-liked teacher at an elite New England boarding school, assigned to babysit the small handful of students whose parents didn’t pick them up for the break. After a good deal of friction, he starts to forge a warmer relationship with one troubled student (Dominic Sessa) and the school’s head cook (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), who’s facing her first Christmas since losing her son in Vietnam.‘Maestro’The director Bradley Cooper narrates a sequence from the film in which he stars alongside Carey Mulligan.Jason McDonald/NetflixNominated for: Best picture, actor, actress, original screenplay, cinematography, makeup and hairstyling, sound.How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.In his follow-up to “A Star Is Born,” the director/actor Bradley Cooper again turns to the emotionally turbulent life of a musician, casting himself as Leonard Bernstein, the famed American conductor and composer who lived a double life in full. Starting in lustrous black-and-white, “Maestro” depicts the young Bernstein’s intoxicating rise through the New York Philharmonic and his romance with the stage actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan) in the 1940s. The film then shifts to color in later decades, as Bernstein’s sexual dalliances and substance abuse take their toll on a marriage that’s under sharp public scrutiny.‘Anatomy of a Fall’[embedded content]Nominated for: Best picture, director, actress, original screenplay, editing.How to watch: Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.The winner of the Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, Justine Triet’s penetrating drama sounds like a routine did-she-or-didn’t-she courtroom procedural, as a novelist (Sandra Hüller) stands trial for murdering her husband at their Alpine chalet. Yet the courtroom theatrics open up a deeper investigation into a difficult marriage and the toll it exacts on the couple’s legally blind son (Milo Machado Graner), who discovers the body. Though the woman’s innocence is at stake, Triet is more compelled by the domestic tensions leading up to the death and the fallout from the trial.‘Past Lives’The writer and director Celine Song narrates a sequence from her film, featuring Greta Lee and Teo Yoo.Jon Pack/A24Nominated for: Best picture, original screenplay.How to watch: Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.In her heart-rending feature debut as a writer-director, the playwright Celine Song offers a what-if romantic scenario that pulls at the identity of a happily married woman in New York, even decades after she and her family moved from South Korea. Once extremely close childhood friends, Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) reconnect as adults on social media, and meet again in America, where they reminisce and inevitably begin to wonder about the path not taken. Comparisons to Richard Linklater’s “Sunrise” trilogy may be inevitable, but the temptation and longing in “Past Lives” is uniquely complicated by the cultural crosswinds that affect Nora, Hae Sung and Nora’s American husband (John Magaro), who waits patiently in the wings.‘Nyad’[embedded content]Nominated for: Best actress, supporting actress.How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.After directing a series of documentaries about seemingly impossible physical feats, like scaling the 3,000-foot El Capitan rock wall without ropes (“Free Solo”) or pulling off the Thailand cave rescue (“The Rescue”), Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin make a natural transition to features with this biopic about the distance swimmer Diana Nyad. Nyad (Annette Bening) had set several distance records in the 1970s, but the film focuses on her effort to swim from Cuba to Florida at the age of 64, with help from her close friend Bonnie Stoll (Jodie Foster). Vasarhelyi and Chin once again tap into the indomitable spirit of an athlete willing to court death to push the limits.‘May December’The director Todd Haynes narrates a sequence from his film starring Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore.Francois Duhamel/NetflixNominated for: Original screenplay.How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.With their prismatic take on a tabloid scandal that echoes the Mary Kay Letourneau case, the director Todd Haynes and the screenwriter, Samy Burch, adopt a serio-comic tone that echoes high art like “Persona” one minute and early 2000s USA Network fodder the next. Natalie Portman stars as a semifamous actress who travels to Savannah, Ga., to study for the role of a Letourneau-like woman (Julianne Moore) who was caught having sex with a seventh-grade boy, but wound up marrying him and having children after a prison stint. The actress’s presence, asking simple questions that the couple has been studiously avoiding, destabilizes their relationship, particularly the much-younger husband (Charles Melton), who starts to reflect on what happened to him.‘Rustin’[embedded content]Nominated for: Best actor.How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.In championing a less-heralded yet fascinatingly multidimensional figure in the civil rights movement, “Rustin” gains much of its power from Colman Domingo’s electrifying lead performance as Bayard Rustin, a gay activist and socialist who had the ear of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The action leads up to Rustin’s greatest triumph as an organizer, the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech in front of an estimated 250,000 people. But “Rustin” digs into the intense internal divisions within the movement over holding the march as a message to the Democratic front-runner John F. Kennedy. It also explores the depth of Rustin’s personal passion for economic justice.Other Major Nominees‘Society of the Snow’Nominated for: Best international feature. Makeup and hairstyling.How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.‘Elemental’Nominated for: Best animated feature.How to watch: Stream it on Disney+. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.‘Nimona’Nominated for: Best animated feature.How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.‘Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse’Nominated for: Best animated feature.How to watch: Stream it on Netflix. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.‘Bobi Wine: The People’s President’Nominated for: Best documentary feature.How to watch: Stream it on Disney+.‘The Eternal Memory’Nominated for: Best documentary feature.How to watch: Stream it on Paramount+. Buy it on Google Play, Vudu, YouTube and Apple TV.‘Four Daughters’Nominated for: Best documentary feature.How to watch: Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.‘20 Days in Mariupol’Nominated for: Best documentary feature.How to watch: Rent it on Amazon, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube. More