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      In This Heroes’ Tale, Real People Risk Their Lives to Get to Europe

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      Matteo Garrone’s Oscar-nominated feature “Io Capitano” dramatizes the harrowing journeys made by thousands of Africans each month looking for a better life in Europe.At the end of “Io Capitano” (“I Captain”), Matteo Garrone’s harrowing contender for best international film at next month’s Academy Awards, a map tracks the journey taken by the film’s two teenage protagonists: over 3,500 miles from Dakar, Senegal, to Sicily, via the scorching Nigerien desert, horrific Libyan prisons and a nerve-racking Mediterranean crossing aboard a rickety vessel.Such perilous voyages, taken each year by countless Africans seeking a new life in Europe, is “one of the great dramas of our times,” Garrone said in a recent interview, and “Io Capitano” is framed as an epic, modern-day Odyssey, with protagonists no less valiant than Homer’s hero.“It’s a journey that’s an archetype so that anyone can identify with it,” said Garrone, who is best known to international audiences for the hyper-realistic 2008 drama “Gomorrah” and his dark and fantastical “Pinocchio” (2019).“Io Capitano” is also, he said, a “document of contemporary history.” This month alone, over 2,000 people reached European shores by crossing the Mediterranean, while at least 74 died, bringing the number of people who have gone missing in that sea in the last decade to more than 29,000, according to the International Organization for Migration, a United Nations agency.Many Europeans learn of these landings, and deaths, from short news segments, often accompanied by clips of lawmakers pledging to stop illegal migration. Garrone’s film, which won the Silver Lion for best directing at last year’s Venice Film Festival, goes beyond the statistics with a plot based on stories of real people crossing the Mediterranean.Garrone said that the migrants’ stories he heard called to mind the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad.via Cohen Media GroupWe 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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Which Oscar Snubs Still Make You Mad? We Want to Know.

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      Greta Gerwig wasn’t the first omission to tick us off. Are you still stewing over “Pulp Fiction” losing to “Forrest Gump” or Marilyn Monroe never getting a nod? Tell us more.As the film editor overseeing movies coverage for The New York Times, I follow Oscar races for a living, so I knew that Greta Gerwig wasn’t a shoo-in for a best director nomination for “Barbie.” Still, when she was snubbed, I was surprised, then somewhat miffed, then truly annoyed as I thought more about it. She brought vision, artistry and both humor and gravitas to what could have been a forgettable summer confection. How could the academy not see this?Of course, as it turned out, I wasn’t alone in my outrage; thank you, Hillary Clinton. If the reaction seemed especially outsized, so has everything about “Barbie,” from the box office haul to the number of think pieces (guilty). And when you throw the Oscars, essentially the Super Bowl of Culture, into the mix, the response is bound to be big.But the truth is that this is only partly about “Barbie.” Most of us have strong opinions about what performances and films are and are not worthy of an Academy Award. We love to get mad when the Oscars mess up. And looking back on movie history, I know they have messed up. So. Many. Times.That got me to wondering: What snubs are you still mad about? It could be a performance, film, director, song, score — you get the idea — that wasn’t nominated. It could be one that was nominated but lost on the big night. Fill out the form below, and we may feature your response in an upcoming story. We will not publish or share your contact information outside the Times newsroom, and we will not publish any part of your submission without contacting you first. More

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      ‘The 2024 Oscar Nominated Short Films’ Review: Small Running Times, Large Themes

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      Many of this year’s films take a darker turn, but there is some levity among the bunch.The Oscar-nominated short films are being presented in three programs: live action, animation and documentary. Each program is reviewed below by a separate critic.Live ActionWhatever your takeaways from the live action section of this year’s Oscar-nominated short films, a good laugh is unlikely to be among them. Suicide, abortion, bereavement, discoloring corpses — they’re all here, in a deluge of downers that only the Danes (and, depending on your tolerance for extreme preciousness, Wes Anderson) can be trusted to alleviate.Those Danes, though! In Lasse Lyskjer Noer’s magnificently morbid comedy, “Knight of Fortune,” two grieving widowers bond over toilet paper and the trauma of viewing a loved one whose flesh — as warned by a pair of ghoulish mortuary attendants — might be the color of a banana. Although, bathed in the sickly spill of the morgue’s fluorescents, no one’s complexion here is exactly glowing.If “Knight of Fortune” is a gentle nudge to the ribs, Misan Harriman’s “The After” is a two-by-four to the gut — and not in a good way. Trafficking in the kind of forced sentiment that can break you out in hives, this handsomely shot movie, featuring a garment-rending David Oyelowo, follows a London ride-share driver in the wake of a shocking personal tragedy. A trite, bullying soundtrack herds us toward the histrionic climax of a film that doesn’t trust us to get there on our own.More restrained, and infinitely more resonant, “Invincible” observes the final 48 hours in the life of a 14-year-old boy (Léokim Beaumier-Lépine) as he struggles to corral his emotions and earn release from a center for troubled youth. The acting is impressive and the direction (by Vincent René-Lortie, drawing from a painful real-life memory) is bold and intuitive. Subtly intimate photography by Alexandre Nour Desjardins does much to enhance a movie that understands when it comes to emotions, less is often more.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Poor Things’ Choreographer Uses Dance to Tell the Story

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      Constanza Macras, founder of the Berlin dance company DorkyPark, uses “dance as a function, as a language,” in her work, be it for the stage or the screen.“I have become the thing I hated, the grasping succubus of a lover,” sulks Duncan Wedderburn, the charming rake played by Mark Ruffalo in a scene set in a belle epoque Lisbon restaurant midway through Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Poor Things,” which is nominated for 11 awards at Sunday’s EE British Academy Film Awards, known as the BAFTAs.Bella Baxter, the film’s heroine played by Emma Stone, doesn’t seem to hear him. She is captivated by the rhythmic thump-thump-thump of the orchestra serenading the dinner guests. As if possessed, she follows the beat to the dance floor, where she lets loose with a joyous, primitive and sublimely wacky dance that has become one of the year’s defining screen moments.For Constanza Macras, the film’s choreographer, that scene was about more than just having fun. “It’s a moment that defines the relationship,” explained Macras, 53, who hails from Argentina and is based in Berlin.Macras noted that “what is great about Yorgos is that dance is a ‘pivot moment’ in his movies.”Schore Mehrdju“It’s the moment that she starts to go free from Duncan,” Macras said of Stone’s character — a woman reanimated with the brain of her unborn infant. Duncan has whisked her on a trip around the world in the hopes of debauching her.Instead, the Lothario finds that he can’t keep up with her in the bedroom or, as the scene under discussion reveals, on the dance floor. When Duncan leaps to his feet as well, he tries to save the situation and assert his control. “He’s trying to constrain her, he’s trying to show her how to dance normally,” Macras said.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      These Grandmas Are Going to the Oscars

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      In the documentary short “Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó,” Sean Wang chronicles the inner lives of his grandmothers. Now, the film is nominated for an Academy Award.After he moved back home to the Bay Area in 2021, weighing a move to Los Angeles amid the pandemic, the filmmaker Sean Wang would often spend time with his two grandmothers. Yi Yan Fuei, his 96-year-old Nǎi Nai (paternal grandmother), and Chang Li Hua, his 86-year-old Wài Pó (maternal grandmother), live in the same house together, and Wang quickly began to observe two versions of them. There they were, enmeshed in the quiet rhythms of their daily lives — folding laundry, peeling fruit, napping in their shared bed. Then, Wang, 29, would intrude, coaxing out their playful sides: receiving a slap on the butt or spurring a dance session.His time with them, enjoying both their tranquillity and these moments of youth-like joy, was juxtaposed against an alarming spate of anti-Asian violence that was happening on streets around the Bay Area to grandparents just like his. It was a dissonance that both angered Wang and magnified this time with his grandmothers. Wang took to his camera to make what he thought of as a home video of them, enshrining their routines in “Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó,” a documentary short that was recently nominated for an Oscar and is streaming on Disney+.“When I walk into the kitchen and I see them there, reading the newspaper or washing the dishes, from a very personal level, I want to remember that image,” Wang said in a video call from his apartment in Los Angeles, where he did eventually move. “I want to remember what it was like to see them do that.”The film, alternately cheeky and humanist, flits between two visual languages, what Wang called “the movie of their lives and the movie that they’re in.” Silly skits that the director constructs for them — arm wrestling, watching “Superbad” — sit alongside quotidian snippets of their inner lives. The film is also philosophical, as his grandmothers reflect on hard pasts and consider the realities of aging.Wang and his family’s reaction to the Oscar nomination was captured on video and recently went viral: Wang jumping for joy and embracing his grandmothers before they can even process the announcement on the telecast.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jeffrey Wright on ‘American Fiction’

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      A couple of years ago, Jeffrey Wright got an email from the screenwriter Cord Jefferson, who was preparing to direct his first film. Jefferson wanted Wright — a cerebral actor known for his commanding, indelible presence even in supporting roles — to star in “American Fiction,” his adaptation of Percival Everett’s mordant 2001 novel, “Erasure.”“In the letter, Cord described how immediate and personal he found ‘Erasure’ to be,” Wright recalled recently. “And he said that he had begun to hear my voice in his head as he read the book. And then he said, ‘I have no Plan B.’”Wright, who is 58, took the job. His exquisitely calibrated performance as the irascible novelist Thelonious Ellison, known as Monk, recently earned him his first Oscar nomination. It is a recognition, among other things, of his ability to elevate any movie or TV show simply by appearing in it. He has a way of burrowing so deeply into his characters that he seems almost to be hiding in plain sight.From the bracing opening scene of “American Fiction,” in which a slur appears on a blackboard as part of the title of a Flannery O’Connor short story Monk is teaching to a class of college students, the film wades into thorny issues of race, authenticity and what white audiences demand from Black artists — and has great satirical fun doing it.“It’s a conversation that’s at the center of the national dialogue right now, but we lack a fluency in how we discuss race — gasp! — and history and language and context and identity,” Wright said. He was being interviewed at the Four Seasons in Manhattan before flying to Britain to receive the London Film Critics’ Circle’s top award.While (obviously) the film doesn’t solve the problems it identifies, he said, at least it’s willing to engage with them.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Oscar Nominees Luncheon 2024: Best Looks and the ‘Anatomy of a Fall’ Dog

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      At the annual Oscar nominees luncheon, there is always a top dog that even a ballroom full of A-listers will clamor to meet. Last year, that honor went to the “Top Gun: Maverick” producer Tom Cruise, a star so huge that the other nominees began to orbit him, biding time until they could dart in to kiss the ring.The luncheon held Monday afternoon at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, Calif., initially seemed to lack that supernova presence, even though there were plenty of famous names including Robert Downey Jr., Emma Stone and Martin Scorsese. Still, they’ve all grown too used to each other to engage in much genuflection: When you treat an awards campaign like a full-time job, the other contenders might as well be your co-workers.From left, Emma Stone, Yorgos Lanthimos and Margot Robbie at the nominees luncheon on Monday in Beverly Hills.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesSterling K. Brown (“American Fiction”), left, with the producer Nicky Bentham and the director Misan Harriman of the nominated live-action short “The After.”Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesMartin Scorsese, whose best director nomination for “Killers of the Flower Moon” is his 10th, the most for a living director.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesWas there anyone who could jump-start this starry but sleepy scene? I didn’t think so, until I saw supporting actress nominee America Ferrera turn to her left, look down and gasp.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More