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      Producers Guild Awards Nominate Several Blockbusters and Omit Films by Women

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      ‘Avatar: The Way of Water,” “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” and “Top Gun: Maverick” made the cut. “The Woman King” and “Women Talking” were snubbed.After a hectic few days of guild nominations and awards shows, the Producers Guild of America announced the 10 nominees for its best feature film award on Thursday, and this list may be the most consequential yet when it comes to predicting the strongest Oscar contenders: Over the last four years, only three movies made it into the Oscars’ best-picture lineup without first being nominated for the PGAs.Here is the producers’ list of feature-film nominees:“Avatar: The Way of Water”“The Banshees of Inisherin”“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”“Elvis”“Everything Everywhere All at Once”“The Fabelmans”“Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery”“Tár”“Top Gun: Maverick”“The Whale”The producers guild has historically been inclined toward blockbuster product, and this list includes several big-screen success stories, including three of the highest-grossing films of 2022 — “Top Gun: Maverick,” “Avatar: The Way of Water” and “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” — and two other box-office hits, “Elvis” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”But the exclusion of epic-scaled projects like the glitzy “Babylon” and Gina Prince-Bythewood’s action drama “The Woman King” may doom those films’ chances at making the Oscars’ best-picture lineup: When academy voters replace a PGA pick with one of their own choices, they typically substitute an indie or international film instead.Another notable snub was the Sarah Polley-directed drama “Women Talking,” which debuted at the fall film festivals with plenty of buzz but has struggled since its theatrical bow during the crowded Christmas holiday. None of the films on the PGA list were directed by women, and if “Women Talking,” “The Woman King” and Charlotte Wells’s acclaimed “Aftersun” fail to make the Oscars best-picture list, it will be the first time the category has excluded female filmmakers in four years.Only three films earned nominations from the producers, directors and actors guild this week: Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical “The Fabelmans,” the sci-fi hit “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” and the dark feuding-friends comedy “The Banshees of Inisherin.” That trio should be considered the strongest Oscar contenders as voting for the Academy Awards begins Thursday.The winners will be announced in a ceremony on Feb. 25. Here is the rest of the Producers Guild list:FilmAnimated Feature“Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio”“Marcel the Shell with Shoes On”“Minions: The Rise of Gru”“Puss in Boots: The Last Wish”“Turning Red”Documentary“All That Breathes”“Descendant”“Fire of Love”“Navalny”“Nothing Compares”“Retrograde”“The Territory”TelevisionEpisodic Drama“Andor”“Better Call Saul”“Ozark”“Severance”“The White Lotus”Episodic Comedy“Abbott Elementary”“Barry”“The Bear”“Hacks”“Only Murders in the Building”Limited Anthology Series“Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story”“The Dropout”“Inventing Anna”“Obi-Wan Kenobi”“Pam & Tommy”Television Movie“Fire Island”“Hocus Pocus 2”“Pinocchio”“Prey”“Weird: The Al Yankovic Story”Nonfiction Television“30 for 30”“60 Minutes”“George Carlin’s American Dream”“Lucy and Desi”“Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy”Live, Variety, Sketch, Standup and Talk Show“The Daily Show With Trevor Noah”“Jimmy Kimmel Live!”“Last Week Tonight With John Oliver”“The Late Show With Stephen Colbert”“Saturday Night Live”Game and Competition Television“The Amazing Race”“Lizzo’s Watch Out for the Big Grrrls”“RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars”“Top Chef”“The Voice”Sports Program“Formula 1: Drive to Survive”“Hard Knocks: Training Camp with the Detroit Lions”“Legacy: The True Story of the LA Lakers”“McEnroe”“Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Come Off”Children’s Program“Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock”“Green Eggs and Ham”“Sesame Street”“Snoopy Presents: It’s the Small Things, Charlie Brown”“Waffles + Mochi’s Restaurant”Short-Form Program“Better Call Saul: Filmmaker Training”“Love, Death + Robots”“Only Murders in the Building: One Killer Question”“Sesame Street’s #ComingTogether Word of the Day Series”“Tales of the Jedi” More

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      ‘The Seven Faces of Jane’ Review: One Movie, Eight Directors

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      Gillian Jacobs’s blank slate protagonist floats through a series of encounters in this feature-length movie made up of short films.A director’s career is often measured by the quality and quantity of their feature films. But short films can offer a chance to experiment with styles and subjects that might not be suited for a wider commercial release. “The Seven Faces of Jane” combines these two modes of production to create an omnibus film; it’s a feature-length movie comprising short films made by emerging directors.At the center of each short story is Jane (played by Gillian Jacobs, who also directs the first of the movie’s shorts), a single mother who opens the movie by dropping off her daughter at summer camp in Malibu. The film’s episodic story follows Jane as she floats through a series of encounters during her week of solitude in Southern California. She begins with a surreal trip to a roadside diner, but her journeys take her to the desert, the beach and the mountains. She connects with strangers, as well as lovers, including a former flame played by Joel McHale, who starred on the TV series “Community” with Jacobs.Jane is a bit of a blank slate as a protagonist, and her flatness feels jarring when she encounters other characters with more depth. One episode introduces Tayo (Chido Nwokocha), an ex of Jane’s who describes feeling alienated from his Blackness and sense of self during their relationship. Another sequence finds Jane teaching the steps of a waltz to a teenager dreading the dances at her quinceañera. Jane acts as a sounding board when these characters describe their feelings about their specific cultures. Yet in her responses, she remains as two-dimensional as a sketch on white paper.The directors — Jacobs, Gia Coppola, Boma Iluma, Ryan Heffington, Xan Cassavetes, Julian J. Acosta, Ken Jeong (another of Jacobs’s “Community” castmates) and Alex Takacs — come from a wide range of creative and personal backgrounds. But the shorts blend together without significant variation. The transitions eschew title cards, subtly eliding shifts by returning to images of Jane in her car.There is continuity in this makeshift road picture‌ — Jane’s costumes and makeup remain cohesive across the shorts, and the film’s segments keep the same cool color palette. But the consistency limits the ability of the directors to lean into their own style, leading to a movie that feels narratively scattered and stylistically inhibited.The Seven Faces of JaneNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Beautiful Beings’ Review: Boys Will Be Boys Will Be Violent Jerks

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      In this brutal Icelandic drama, four teenagers — both bullies and the bullied — struggle and rage against a world that rages back.The bullied and their bullies circle one another restlessly in the brutal coming-of-age tale “Beautiful Beings,” at times coming to catastrophic blows. Set in a shabby corner of Reykjavik, Iceland, far from the usual tourist attractions, the movie focuses on four teenage boys struggling in that sticky, confusing, inescapably unsettling space between childhood and adulthood. At once old enough to know better and too young to be fully in control of much of anything (themselves included), the boys lash out at a world that is all too happy to lash back.The story takes place in what seems like the not-too-distant past and centers on two boys who meet after one, Balli (Askell Einar Palmason), a destitute outcast — a classmate complains that he smells — is viciously beaten by school thugs. The assault lands him in the hospital and on the local TV news, which drones on about problematic Icelandic youth. When Addi (Birgir Dagur Bjarkason), a sweet-faced member of another group of hotheads, watches the broadcast, he voices contempt for Balli. Yet Addi soon shifts course, bringing the needy, understandably wary outsider into his tiny, cloistered circle.What follows is a great deal of adolescent posturing, complete with jutting chins, clenched fists and ostentatiously smoked cigarettes. Along with two other kids — the volatile Konni (Viktor Benony Benediktsson) and the unkind jokester Siggi (Snorri Rafn Frimannsson) — Addi and Balli hang out, run amok, hook up with girls and stare into the distance. Every so often, and usually spurred on by Konni, they mix it up with other guys with exuberant ferocity. Konni is the brawniest, most explosive member of this gang, but it’s Addi who’s the scariest kid because he expresses some regret on his way to the next pummeling.It’s a sad, familiar story of boys being socially constructed, hyper-masculinized, aggressively nasty little jerks, one largely distinguished by the palpable tenderness that the writer-director Gudmundur Arnar Gudmundsson brings to its telling. Gudmundsson’s feature debut, “Heartstone,” also focused on adolescent boys. Here, with a combination of drifty realism and jolts of the fantastic — Addi has strange dreams and visions, which add unfruitful mystery to the narrative — he persuasively conveys the feverish intimacy of adolescent friendship, with its vulnerabilities and inchoate desires. Konni and Addi’s friendship is especially intense, alternately characterized by teasing, cruelty and moments of erotically charged sensitivity.In time, all these feelings, all this fury and confusion, reach a fever pitch, leading to some unsurprising disastrous violence. It doesn’t add up to much, despite the appealing young cast and the handsome cinematography that brings texture and visual interest to every grubby corner. Gudmundsson obviously loves his characters and wants you to be enamored with them as well, but he doesn’t have much to say about them or their reality. He nods at the larger world, suggests that desire fuels some of the boys’ interactions and floats some dubious deterministic ideas about what makes these kids tick, expressed mostly through bad parenting. He intimates and insinuates, gesturing at deeper meaning that never materializes.Beautiful BeingsNot rated. In Icelandic, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 3 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Nanny’ | Anatomy of a Scene

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      Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera.Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera. More

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      ‘The Offering’ Review: A Demon in the Family

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      In this Brooklyn-set horror film, an evil spirit causes torment at a Jewish funeral home.A serviceable slab of possession horror, “The Offering” unleashes evil in the hallowed halls of a Hasidic funeral home in Brooklyn. When the funeral director’s son, Art (Nick Blood), visits with his pregnant wife, Claire (Emily Wiseman), they arrive at the same time as the body of a scholar who summoned a demon before dying. Art’s fecklessness and the demon’s restlessness lead to trouble.Asked to help prepare the scholar for burial, Art promptly makes a hash of things and somehow releases the demon, Abyzou, known as a “taker” of children. Art is less observant than his kindly, widowed father, Saul (Allan Corduner), and has apparently offered the funeral home building as collateral for debts, but his general incompetence makes the story feel less about lost faith than filial failure.With Abyzou activated, the creepy whispers and ghostly assaults commence (with echoes of “The Vigil”). The director, Oliver Park, dwells on the Old World gloom of the funeral home, shuffling through the deck of a somewhat scattered story by Hank Hoffman (who does have impeccable credentials as a former shomer, or guardian, at a Jewish morgue) and Jonathan Yunger.The horror is most uncanny and effective when it’s using simple yet evocative effects — like Art’s exiting a room only to reappear in the same room — rather than jump scares. Wiseman, as Claire, has little to do but look bewildered (as the sole gentile in the building) and await the demon’s morbid attention. But the goat-headed Abyzou, unlike many supernatural beings in the genre, provides blunt frights that are appealingly less invested in elaborate stagecraft than in pure devastation.The OfferingRated R for violence. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Plane’ Review: Flight, Camera, Action

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      In this thriller, Gerard Butler and Mike Colter have to avoid a hostage situation and deliver a plane full of passengers to safety.Jesters on social media have already begun chortling about this movie’s minimalist title. Where did the snakes go?The movie’s basic designation is not without precedent. Some of you may remember “Airport” and its several sequels. Most of those movies spent the majority of their time in the air rather than in the terminal, so maybe it figures that most of the action in this thriller, directed by Jean-François Richet and starring Gerard Butler and Mike Colter (“Luke Cage”), is set on the ground.The twist is that this ground is unsafe in a way that a boarding gate rarely is. Butler plays Brodie, a pilot whose Singapore-to-Tokyo flight — after which he is to reunite with his beloved daughter, because of course — is downed by violent weather. With his co-pilot and fellow family man Dele (Yoson An), Brodie manages a landing on an unidentified island run by “separatists and militias,” whose leader, Junmar (Evan Dane Taylor), has the nasty habit of ransoming, and sometimes killing, hostages. Brodie, determined to deliver his passengers to safety, powers through the jungle in search of a way to communicate with home.If you guessed that the handcuffed convict who’s part of the flight’s manifest is actually a not-wholly-bad guy looking for a shot at redemption, go to the head of the class. Playing that part, Colter makes a good match with the stalwart Butler. Half a world away, Tony Goldwyn clenches his jaw in a kitted-out corporate conference room as the only honest crisis manager in the airline biz.This is a pacey item that can be recommended on the grounds that it’s a January release that’s not even close to awful. “Plane” sinks (or rises, depending on your perspective) to “hell yeah” ridiculousness only at the end, delivering a punchline that lands at the right time.PlaneRated R for bloody violence and language. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Kitchen Brigade’ Review: Oh Chef! My Chef!

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      A sous chef is forced to take a job at a hostel for undocumented minors in this feel-good drama with a white-savior problem.Popular French cinema isn’t the most sophisticated when it comes to telling stories about race relations. It tends to fall back on ethnic stereotypes for laughs and seems to cater to viewers who might find “Green Book,” which has been criticized as tone deaf, to be a touching portrait of cross-cultural redemption. “Kitchen Brigade,” a feel-good drama set in a hostel for undocumented minors — with a kick of cooking-competition-show excitement — is far from the biggest offense to emerge from the country, but it doesn’t break the mold either.The director Louis-Julien Petit has made a career out of social-justice-oriented movies, tackling issues like workplace exploitation and the plight of homeless women through the lens of the people on-the-ground who just won’t take it anymore.In “Kitchen Brigade,” Cathy Marie (Audrey Lamy), an imperious white sous chef, eventually becomes one such angry civilian, but it takes the kindness and vulnerability of the young people to get her off her high horse.Forced out of necessity to take a job as the hostel’s live-in cook, Cathy Marie insists on maintaining the standards of a high-end establishment, which means she’ll need help. She gets it in the form of the hostel’s residents: young men with little to no cooking skills who come primarily from Africa and Southeast Asia. Cue the training process, with Cathy Marie barking orders like a coach in a sports movie, and some minor tensions with an angsty teenager who turns out to be a softy. Learning the tenets of French cuisine works as a metaphor for assimilation into French society, and the charismatic kids assimilate with glee.The real problem, however, is that the boys will be turned out of the country when they turn 18 unless they secure a way to stay, like a youth soccer contract or enrollment in a vocational school. That’s not so easy, it turns out, which galvanizes Cathy Marie into action.“Kitchen Brigade” is a white-savior story par excellence, though at least it’s not difficult to swallow — the young people are lovely, and so is the food.Kitchen BrigadeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Skinamarink’ Review: Night Terrors

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      Two children are trapped in a shape-shifting home in this spookily impenetrable horror experiment.“Where did it go?,” a child whispers early in “Skinamarink,” the unnerving debut feature from the Canadian writer and director Kyle Edward Ball. The child, Kevin (Lucas Paul), is referring to a window which has unaccountably vanished. He’s only 4, and he and his 6-year-old sister, Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault), have awakened in the night to find that the lights don’t work and objects in the home seem to be disappearing. And where are their parents?With a plot so rudimentary as to be virtually nonexistent, this experimental and aggressively inscrutable horror movie is mesmerizing in its dearth of action. For long stretches, Jamie McRae’s camera, adopting a child’s-eye view, patrols shadowy hallways and crawls along floors, its eerie angles and haphazard exposure settings straining the eyes and disorienting the mind. Groans and other, stranger sounds mix with the children’s panicked whispers, though their faces are mostly concealed. Time is unreliable, as is evident when a late title card forces a jolting reassessment.Opening in 1995 and resembling a long-buried V.H.S. tape, “Skinamarink,” with its scratchy silences and piggy bank-budget aesthetic, is chillingly surreal and infuriatingly repetitive. Yet Ball, expanding his 2020 short film, “Heck,” holds us hostage: There’s uncanny logic in his looping shots of pajama-clad legs and scattered Lego bricks, in the tinny jingle of cartoons on a flickering television screen. Like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle whose picture has long been lost, each scene promises a solution to the children’s predicament if we can only find its place within the whole.Ingeniously evoking a child’s response to the inexplicable, “Skinamarink” sways on the border between dreaming and wakefulness, a movie as difficult to penetrate as it is to forget.SkinamarinkNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More