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    Cannes Film Festival 2025: What to Watch From This Year’s Star-Packed Lineup

    The event is packed with high-profile English-language movies, including the new “Mission: Impossible” and a Jennifer Lawrence-Robert Pattinson drama.The 78th edition of the Cannes Film Festival begins Tuesday, and this lineup is particularly star-packed. Which titles could follow in the path of last year’s big breakouts like “Anora” and “The Substance”? Here are the stories we have our eye on this year.It’s a Hollywood-heavy lineup.Though Cannes is traditionally known for showcasing the best in global cinema, the lineup is packed with so many high-profile English-language films that it could be mistaken for a festival in Hollywood.The biggest premieres include “Die My Love,” which pairs Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson as a couple in a crumbling marriage; the new Spike Lee film, “Highest 2 Lowest,” with Denzel Washington; and Wes Anderson’s caper “The Phoenician Scheme,” with Benicio Del Toro leading an ensemble that includes Michael Cera, Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hanks and Riz Ahmed.There’s also the romantic drama “The History of Sound,” with Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor; Richard Linklater’s “Nouvelle Vague,” a tribute to the French new wave; and “Eddington” from Ari Aster (“Midsommar,” “Hereditary”), with an A-list cast featuring Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone and Austin Butler. And if that weren’t Hollywood-heavy enough, Tom Cruise will debut his final “Mission: Impossible” movie on the festival’s second day.Actors are making their directorial debuts.Kristen Stewart, Scarlett Johansson and Harris Dickinson are all Cannes mainstays, but for this year’s fest, the three actors are instead stepping behind the camera for their feature directing debuts. And lest you assume they’re making vanity projects, all three declined starring roles in their own movies.Stewart’s long-in-the-works “The Chronology of Water” will bow first, starring Imogen Poots as a young woman struggling with issues of addiction and sexuality. Next up is “Urchin,” from the “Babygirl” breakout Dickinson, about a London drifter (Frank Dillane) struggling to find his place in society. And the second week of the festival will debut Johansson’s “Eleanor the Great,” a comedy starring June Squibb.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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    ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ Review: Kristen Stewart, Crazy (and Scary) in Love

    In this neo-noir, the ever reliable, always watchable actress plays a small-town loner who’s struck by the unexpected arrival of a mysterious drifter.Watching Kristen Stewart is always an adventure. A performer who makes good movies better and dreary movies tolerable, she has a restlessness that has made her one of the more interesting attractions in American film. She has a gift for making a character’s inner life transparently readable, and while she can be subtle and withholding, it is her fascinatingly unquiet presence that draws you in, an itchy intensity that can keep her (and you) on edge. Pauline Kael wrote that Jane Fonda’s “motor runs a little fast” — so does Stewart’s.In her latest vehicle, “Love Lies Bleeding,” a neo-noir in a violent and winkingly nasty key, Stewart plays Lou, short for Louise, a small-town loner somewhere in New Mexico, yearning to escape a classic dead end. If this were a 1940s noir, Lou would be fixing jalopies in a dingy garage while waiting for a dame to stroll in to change his fate. That’s more or less what happens here, except that it’s the ’80s, and Lou is a woman who works in a gym where she’s wasting away, unclogging toilets and slipping steroids to bulked-up juicers. Then, a beautiful stranger walks into the gym and changes her life, as sirens sometimes do in movies.The stranger, Jackie (a good, physically imposing Katy O. Brian), immediately catches Lou’s eye. It’s destiny, Old Hollywood style, and it lights the movie up and sets it on its incendiary way. What happens is hot, yummy stuff, but romances like these need something to get in their way, whether it’s a bag of loot, a jealous ex or just a contrivance. This movie obliges with violence, lots of guns, spooky flashbacks and a classic villain, played by a fantastic Ed Harris with a sneer and an epically terrible wig. There’s a lot of extravagantly and comically bad hair in “Love Lies Bleeding,” along with equally rotten teeth and souls.It’s a good guess that the director Rose Glass (“Saint Maud”) has read James M. Cain or seen some of the films made from his hard-boiled books; she may have thumbed through a few Jim Thompson novels, too. (Glass wrote the script with Weronika Tofilska.) “Love Lies Bleeding” isn’t on par with Cain or Thompson, and overselling a comparison would be silly. Even so, when Jackie first walks into the gym, the world-altering effect she has on Lou recalls the moment when the drifter in “The Postman Always Rings Twice” meets his kismet: “Then I saw her,” he says, “her lips stuck out in a way that made me want to mash them in for her.”Lou and Jackie’s don’t connect until after the gym closes and the darkness is wrapping them in its embrace. Outside, they meet and greet, sizing each other up with hungry eyes and faint smiles. First, though, they need to deal with some narrative interruptus. One of the gym rats hits on Jackie after the gym closes, but when he grabs at her, she punches him, hard. He hits her right back in an exchange that, among other things, announces the movie’s bad-ass attitude as well as Jackie’s fearlessness, her recklessness and rage. It also effectively serves as violent foreplay to Lou and Jackie’s progressively unhinged and dangerous romance.They fall into bed quickly, and the story soon heats up, too. A bodybuilder en route to a contest in Vegas, Jackie has drifted into town, as mysterious types tend to do, where she soon lands a job to earn some cash. She crashes with Lou, who — after a steamy night and a cozy morning-after breakfast — is understandably eager for Jackie to stick around. Yet Lou also remains super-jumpy and wary, like someone permanently looking over her shoulder, and Stewart gives the character a tremulous energy that vibrates in her every look, gesture and head bob. At times, you can almost see the anxiety spreading under her skin like an electric current.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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    Kristen Stewart at the Sundance Film Festival

    She stars in two of the festival’s most discussed films so far: “Love Me,” opposite Steven Yeun, and “Love Lies Bleeding,” with Katy O’Brian.Ever since Parker Posey was dubbed the queen of Sundance in the late ’90s, festival-watchers have been eager to pass that title on each year to whichever actress proves most ubiquitous.This year, the tiara goes to Kristen Stewart, who I expect would wear it with Chanel and Converse. The 33-year-old actress stars in two of the fest’s most discussed movies: “Love Me,” a postapocalyptic story about a buoy that falls in love with a satellite, and “Love Lies Bleeding,” an ultraviolent thriller that casts her as a gym employee engaged in a dangerous affair with an ambitious bodybuilder (Katy O’Brian).Aside from the fact that these two love stories feature Stewart in her go-for-broke, just-have-fun-with-it era, “Love Me” and “Love Lies Bleeding” couldn’t have less in common, which makes them a delightfully whiplash-inducing demonstration of what Stewart is capable of. Here are some of the things I’ve watched her do over the last few days, whether onscreen or off:inject a love interest’s rear end with steroids, as foreplaycheerily extol the virtues of Blue Apron quesadillasdispose of corpses (multiple times)sing the theme song to “Friends” (multiple times)catfish Steven Yeunsink to the bottom of the ocean for fear of being rejectedpage through the book “Macho Sluts”choose her Sim avatardigressively describe “Love Me” at a post-premiere Q. and A. as “such a cool way into all of our stories. Like, it could be a relationship movie but also self-love, but not in the way that word … just make new words for that. When you’re like ‘no’ or you’re like, ‘hey, I identified a thing and I think I enjoy that,’ but then, like, seconds later it’s a different thing and you don’t have to feel bad about that or feel like, ‘Ooh, I didn’t know myself, maybe I’m different.’ Like, no. It’s like” — she snapped twice — “yeah. And now I’m, like, trying to be with a person? Yeah. It’s like this is the most honest relationship movie slash people movie.”realize she has just served an endearing amount of word salad and then mutter, “Wow. Wow. That was really … thank God I’m here!” More

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    Sundance Film Festival Kicks Off With Jodie Foster, Robert Downey Jr, and More

    At the opening night gala for the film festival, celebrating its 40th edition, actors and filmmakers reflected on what kept them coming back.On Thursday night, the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, which is celebrating its 40th edition this year, was bustling. Banners hung on snowy Main Street, Leon Bridges was performing at a new music venue and the Eccles Theatre was packed for one of the opening films: “Freaky Tales.”And around 7 p.m., some 500 guests shuttled to a convention center about 20 minutes away in Kamas, Utah, for the festival’s Opening Night Gala, hosted by the Sundance Institute. The organization, which puts on the festival and has the mission of supporting independent filmmakers, held this type of fund-raising event for the first time last year.The Sundance Institute brought together a crowd of people, which included film industry players like Christopher Nolan, who found early success through the festival. They filed into a cocktail reception, spread across two floors.The dress code, listed as “upscale mountain chic,” led to ensembles ranging from boxy sweaters to velvet suits. Guests discussed the film lineups, ate dates wrapped with bacon and drank espresso martinis. Nearby, actors and actresses posed for photographers and dredged up old festival memories.Sundance has become known for propelling little-known films and filmmakers into the spotlight. “The Blair Witch Project” (1999), “American Psycho” (2000), “Napoleon Dynamite” (2004) and “CODA” (2021) all emerged from Park City.Jodie Foster remembered the festival in the 1980s. “I was on the jury for the year of ‘Sex, Lies, and Videotape,’ which was a big year,” she said, referring to Steven Soderbergh’s 1989 film.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

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    15 Fashion Triumphs From Cannes Over the Decades

    Movies aren’t the only thing to watch. The film festival has made red carpet waves since “being seen” became mainstream.If the Met Gala is the all-star showcase of red carpet entrances, the Oscars the skills championship, and the MTV Video Music Awards the X Games, then the Cannes Film Festival is effectively the playoffs: an extended period in which celebrities show up multiple times in clothes high and low, demonstrating all their moves.And though outfits seem to be getting increasingly extreme with the proliferation of social media, a look back through the history of the festival’s runway (oops, red carpet) — which this year runs May 16-27 — reveals that it was, in fact, ever thus.The Croisette boulevard has always been a catwalk and we, the rapt audience looking on.The actress Elizabeth Taylor grasps the arm of her husband at the time, the film producer Mike Todd, at the Cannes Film Festival, wearing a Balmain gown and Cartier tiara.Malcolm McNeill/Mirrorpix, via Getty Images1957Elizabeth TaylorWhen she attended Cannes on the arm of her third husband, the producer Mike Todd (who was there to promote “Around the World in 80 Days”), Ms. Taylor was Hollywood royalty, and she dressed the part — from the tip of her diamond Cartier tiara to the hem of her white Balmain gown and the fingertips of her opera gloves. The princess dress would forever after be a festival staple (not least on Princesses Grace and Diana when they would take their own Cannes bows).Catherine Deneuve attended a screening of “Les Cendres” by Andrzej Wajda at Cannes in an Yves Saint Laurent T-shirt dress.Gamma-Keystone, via Getty Images1966Catherine DeneuveMs. Deneuve attended Cannes with her then-husband, the photographer David Bailey, in a long seaside-striped sequin Yves Saint Laurent T-shirt dress. She was a de facto YSL ambassador before that term had even entered the fashion playbook (back then, the usual appellation was “muse”). She would remain one for decades, loyally wearing YSL onscreen and off. When it comes to casual glamour, however, this dress set the tone, proving the concept was not an oxymoron, but a whole potential genre unto itself.Jane Birkin toted her signature picnic basket as a handbag to Cannes.Gilbert Giribaldi/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty Images1974Jane BirkinMs. Birkin popped up at Cannes with her beau, Serge Gainsbourg, and a picnic basket as a handbag, toting it not just during the day, but on the red carpet with a glimmering frock. Reportedly discovered in a fishing village in Portugal, it was the Birkin bag before the Birkin bag. It became a symbol of the British star and of a certain je ne sais quoi in boho style and the freewheeling nature of Cannes.Madonna arrived for the premiere of her film “Madonna: Truth or Dare” (known internationally as “In Bed with Madonna”) in a pink Jean Paul Gaultier coat that she shed to reveal a satin undergarment set.Dave Hogan/Getty Images1991MadonnaShe came to Cannes to unveil “Madonna: Truth or Dare” — and herself. Decades before Lady Gaga stripped down to her undergarments on the Met Gala steps, Madonna walked the carpet for her premiere in a voluminous pink taffeta coat by Jean Paul Gaultier — only to drop it at the last moment to reveal a white satin cone bra, knickers and a garter belt set. She jolted the public out of their torpor and started a new era of peekaboo dressing.Sharon Stone came to the premiere of “Unzipped” unbuttoned — a satin skirt parted to uncover a bedazzled romper.Stephane Cardinale/Sygma, via Getty Images1995Sharon StoneIn 2002 Ms. Stone came to Cannes as a member of the film festival jury and revived her flagging profile by walking the red carpet in a different fashion statement every night. But years before that, she made dressing noise when she arrived at the premiere of “Unzipped” in a champagne-colored satin skirt that was, well, unbuttoned to reveal a bedazzled romper beneath. Ever since, shorts have been a festival staple.For the screening of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” Johnny Depp was accompanied by his girlfriend at the time, Kate Moss.Patrick Hertzog/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images1998Kate MossMinimalism came to the Croisette courtesy of Ms. Moss, attending the premiere of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” with her then-boyfriend, Johnny Depp. Ms. Moss wore a black cocktail dress with ostrich feathers at the top and almost no makeup with merely a touch of diamonds and barely-there sandals. She made everyone else look overdone and overdressed, washing the Augean stables of Cannes clean.Tilda Swinton walked the Croisette in a metallic pantsuit.Daniele Venturelli/WireImage2007Tilda SwintonMs. Swinton strode the carpet in a metallic pantsuit, proving that a woman does not need a big dress to make a big statement.Linda Evangelista in a gold Lanvin dress.Kurt Krieger/Corbis, via Getty Images2008Linda EvangelistaMs. Evangelista posed like a gold Greek statuette in Lanvin at the premiere of “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.” Models had become key parts of the festival’s opening evening mix, upping the fashion ante even further.Lupita Nyong’o in a chiffon Gucci dress.Venturelli/WireImage2015Lupita Nyong’oMs. Nyong’o seemed to embody springtime itself in a green pleated Gucci chiffon dress accented with crystal flowers. It was only a few months after Alessandro Michele had taken over as creative director of the Italian house, and the dress heralded the arrival of a new aesthetic and Hollywood love affair with Gucci.Amal Clooney in an Atelier Versace dress.Andreas Rentz/Getty Images2016Amal ClooneyMs. Clooney made her Cannes debut in a classic butter yellow Atelier Versace dress with a high slit on one leg, entirely overshadowing her husband, George, at the premiere of his film, “Money Monster,” and, once again, proving style and substance are not antithetical concepts.Rihanna in a Dior couture gown.Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images2017RihannaShe made her first Cannes appearance at the “Okja” premiere in an ivory Dior couture gown with a long matching coat and New Wave-style sunglasses. Two years later, Dior owner LVMH would announce a deal with the artist for her own fashion line, and though it was shut down during the pandemic, her ability to channel cool has never wavered.Kristen Stewart, in a Chanel dress, removed her Louboutins to ascend the stairs barefoot.Andreas Rentz/Getty Images2018Kristen StewartMs. Stewart’s short chain mail Chanel dress was a fighting mix of armor and crystals, but what really made news was her decision to doff her Christian Louboutin stilettos and walk up the stairs barefoot. Coming a year after the actor complained about the festival’s unspoken high heels dress code, it was an unmistakable fashion throw down and, well, a step forward for wardrobe equity.Isabelle Huppert in a Balenciaga gown.Andreas Rentz/Getty Images2021Isabelle HuppertThe French actress made the ultimate elegant refusal of Cannes convention in a high-necked, long-sleeved all-black Balenciaga gown, matching boot leggings and matching shades. It cut through the carpet froth and excess like a knife.Spike Lee in a colorful suit made by Virgil Abloh for Louis Vuitton.Eric Gaillard/Reuters2021Spike LeeThe sole man in this trendsetting list, Mr. Lee put ye olde penguin suits to shame as jury president, eschewing the usual tuxedo or white dinner jacket for a bouquet of sunset-toned suiting, by Virgil Abloh for Louis Vuitton. He did the right thing.Aishwarya Rai Bachchan in a Gaurav Gupta gown.Stephane Mahe/Reuters2022Aishwarya Rai BachchanSometimes, it seems like the wide open skies of the Côte d’Azur encourage even wider skirts on the Cannes carpet, but Ms. Bachchan topped them all in a fantastical creation from Gaurav Gupta that made her look like some sort of alien smoke goddess materializing on Earth. Sometimes, it really does seem like the looks at Cannes are out of this world. More

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    This Year, the Berlin Film Festival Sparkles

    After two years of pandemic disruptions, the festival returns in full, with Kristen Stewart as the jury president and gems like Celine Song’s “Past Lives.”In February, when the Berlin International Film Festival takes place, the German capital is reliably what meteorologists term “bloody cold.” The overriding fashion aesthetic is puffer jackets, the puffier the better, accessorized with a scarf and a scowl.That might be one reason that, contrary to other major European festivals in Venice or Cannes, the Berlinale, as it’s also known, has never acquired much of a reputation for glamour: One can’t expect too many stars to hazard shoulder-frostbite in red-carpet gowns, especially as Oscar night looms in a couple of weeks.But this year’s festival, which runs through Sunday, feels a little different. Call it the trickle-down effect of appointing Kristen Stewart — whose effortless, dressed-down cool and sulky, up-all-night charisma make her very much the Berlin of American movie stars — as the jury president. Or perhaps it’s the result of Steven Spielberg being in town to receive an honorary lifetime achievement award presented by Bono, or the fashionably late arrival of Cate Blanchett, alongside her German co-star Nina Hoss and the director Todd Field, to toast the German premiere of “Tár.”Most probably it’s the rising tide of an unusually strong of lineup — which has scattered high-profile titles among debuts, documentaries and world-cinema darlings — that has lifted all ships. After an online festival in 2021, and a restricted, in-person 2022 edition, the Berlinale Bear has fully emerged from pandemic hibernation ‌‌this year, set to dazzle its attendees, however bulky their outerwear.Kristen Stewart, the jury president for the film festival, on the Berlinale red carpet.Ronny Hartmann/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt’s a tricky line to walk, including starrier U.S. titles without seeming to be pandering. But not even the snobbiest cinephile could grumble at the selection of the American director Tina Satter’s “Reality,” based on her Off Broadway play “Is This a Room?” and starring a de-glammed, deeply convincing Sydney Sweeney as the whistle-blower Reality Winner. Using dialogue exclusively taken from an F.B.I. transcript, it is a gripping look at the mechanisms of state power brought to bear on an individual; every sniff, every pause and every non sequitur, culled from the original ‌recording, somehow highlight just how unreal reality can be.‌In tension-building, closed-space prowess, that film is matched by Ilker Catak’s “The Teacher’s Lounge,” a thornily unsettling drama of clashing social and generational values set in a German school where a teacher (Leonie Benesch) copes with an outbreak of theft. Then there is Ira Sachs’s excellent, sexy and conflicted “Passages,” starring Franz Rogowski, Ben Whishaw and Adèle Exarchopoulos. Such is the strength of the year’s selection that these two excellent films, along with “Reality,” played in the Panorama sidebar, when they could easily have slotted into the competitive sections.Not that the main competition lacks in luster. After premiering at the ‌Sundance ‌Film Festival last month, Celine Song’s shimmeringly soulful debut “Past Lives” provides Berlin with some radiance. Greta Lee plays Nora, a Korean-Canadian playwright living in New York City, like Song herself, who reconnects with her Seoul-based childhood sweetheart Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) before meeting and marrying an American writer (John Magaro). It sounds like a standard love-triangle setup. In fact, it is anything but, unfurling into a gorgeous, glowing, aching thing that connects with viewers from every conceivable background, so universal are its highly specific observations on love and friendship.Naíma Sentíes in the feature “Tótem,” in which a family gathers to celebrate the birthday of a dying man.LimerenciaIf “Past Lives” doesn’t grab the Golden Bear, the festival’s highest honor for a feature film, my pick would be “Tótem,” the second film from the Mexican director Lila Avilés (“The Chambermaid”), a vibrant child’s-eye portrait of an extended family gathering to celebrate the birthday of a dying man. Blithely ignoring the W.C. Fields adage about never working with children or animals, Avilés manages to corral both, often in the very same shot, delivering deceptively naturalistic performances that plunge us into a young girl’s first experience of the terrible and beautiful coexistence of life and death.The flagship German festival always debuts some outstanding homegrown work. “Afire,” from Christian Petzold, has many of the hallmarks of the celebrated director’s recent work: a woozy edge of ever-so-slight surreality; the transformative deployment of a music track, here “In My Mind” by Wallners, an Austrian band; the actress Paula Beer. But it’s also subtly different from Petzold’s recent titles “Undine” and “Transit,” unfolding largely in a chatty, Rohmerian register. Petzold’s films are many things, but rarely are they as funny as this discursive tale of an insecure writer struggling to finish his book — the press corps’ laughter felt ruefully self-directed — during a beachside getaway with a friend, while forest fires threaten nearby.At the opposite end of the accessibility spectrum, there’s the severe German formalist Angela Schanelec’s “Music,” a beautifully composed but extraordinarily opaque riff on Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex.” It’s the definition of not for everybody, but if you’re the kind of masochist who enjoys the Sisyphean challenge of a movie that refuses to give up all its secrets, no matter how much you mentally wrestle with them, it might be for you.The contrast between those two titles highlights the exciting diversity of this year’s thoughtful curation. One can only applaud a competition selection that includes a fun, true-story, rise-and-fall comedy from Canada (Matt Johnson’s “Blackberry”); a stark, despairing Australian colonial-oppression allegory (Rolf de Heer’s inaptly titled “The Survival of Kindness”); and a Spanish trans-themed coming-of-ager (Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren’s “20,000 Species of Bees”).The competition also featured three pleasantly eccentric Asian titles: Zhang Lu’s “The Shadowless Tower,” a personal favorite; Makoto Shinkai’s wild-ride anime “Suzume”; and Liu Jian’s animated slacker memoir “Art College 1994.” Even the films that did not appeal to me — such as Philippe Garrel’s “The Plough” or Margarethe von Trotta’s “Ingeborg Bachmann — Journey into the Desert” — added something to the overall picture, both representing the old guard of European auteur cinema.Toward the end of a festival I always get a little sentimental — chalk it up to lack of sleep or a surfeit of stories vying for space in my addled brain. But this robust, often sparkling edition of my beloved Berlinale has earned certain indulgences. When I sit in the Berlinale Palast for the last time this weekend, the lovely starburst trailer — my favorite festival ident, a glittering rain of gold briefly coalescing into the outline of a bear — will feel starrier still. More

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    Who Will Win This Year’s Wild Best Actress Race?

    There are cases to be made for and against every contender, and no one has an obvious advantage in this upended season.The best actress category is doing the most.Without a strong front-runner to dominate the field, nearly every awards show is offering a different lineup of ladies as we hurtle toward the March 27 Oscar telecast. Will that make it hard to predict the ultimate winner? Yes, but I’m choosing to revel in the chaos.After all, the only actress who hit every notable awards precursor was the “House of Gucci” star Lady Gaga, who wasn’t even nominated for an Oscar. And while you’d normally look to this weekend’s BAFTA ceremony, the EE British Academy Film Awards, to offer some sort of clarity — as it did last year, when the organization picked the eventual Oscar winner, Frances McDormand for “Nomadland” — not a single one of BAFTA’s best actress nominees made the Oscar lineup this year.Like I said, chaos! But fluid races are often more fun, and each of the five Oscar nominees has some notable pluses and minuses that could keep us guessing until the very end. Here’s my rundown.Jessica Chastain, ‘The Eyes of Tammy Faye’The case for her: A big, prosthetics-laden performance in a biopic is exactly the sort of thing that awards voters tend to go for, but even Chastain seemed shocked when she prevailed over a tough field at last month’s Screen Actors Guild Awards. Another win in the best actress category at the Critics Choice Awards this Sunday could give her some serious momentum, and it doesn’t hurt that she recently starred in the HBO series “Scenes From a Marriage,” offering a prestige-TV display of her range that can help contextualize the work she did as the lavish-lashed evangelist Tammy Faye Bakker. Also, after two previous nominations, you could argue that she’s due for a win.The case against her: “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” came out all the way back in September and failed to make much of a splash with critics or moviegoers. And though that SAG victory gave Chastain a nice, televised bump, only one of the last three best actress winners there also prevailed with Oscar, suggesting a recent trend of academy members going their own way.Explore the 2022 Academy AwardsThe 94th Academy Awards will be held on March 27 in Los Angeles.A Makeover: On Oscar night, you can expect a refreshed, slimmer telecast and a few new awards. But are all of the tweaks a good thing?A Hit: Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Drive My Car” is the season’s unlikely Oscar smash. The director Bong Joon Ho is happy to discuss its success.  Making History: Troy Kotsur, who stars in “CODA” as a fisherman struggling to relate to his daughter, is the first deaf man to earn an Oscar nomination for acting. ‘Improbable Journey’: “Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom” was filmed on a shoestring budget in a remote Himalayan village. In a first for Bhutan, the movie is now an Oscar nominee.Olivia Colman, ‘The Lost Daughter’The case for her: It isn’t easy to win a pair of best actress Oscars in short succession, but after Frances McDormand snagged two of the past four trophies in this race, why shouldn’t Colman add another to the Oscar she won for “The Favourite”? (I suspect she came very close to winning a best supporting actress Oscar last year for her sympathetic performance in “The Father,” and that will only raise her chances.) It helps, too, that she’s the only best actress candidate from a film with a screenplay that was also nominated — in fact, “The Lost Daughter,” about a conflicted mother, took the screenplay award and two more this past week at the Independent Spirit Awards, including the show-closing trophy for best film.The case against her: Despite all of that love from the Indie Spirits, Colman’s performance wasn’t even nominated by the group, and she was snubbed again by BAFTA even though British actors are ostensibly her main constituency. (I told you this best actress race was screwball!) Some Oscar voters simply aren’t sympathetic to her character’s doll-stealing arc, and there’s always the chance that her co-star Jessie Buckley’s presence in the supporting actress category might dilute Colman’s candidacy, since they play the same woman at different ages.Penélope Cruz, ‘Parallel Mothers’The case for her: The membership of the academy is growing ever more international, which probably helped Cruz leap into this lineup and may even push her toward a win. Sony Pictures Classics is handling “Parallel Mothers,” and Cruz’s late-breaking momentum recalls the studio’s “The Father,” which netted a lead-actor win for Anthony Hopkins last year after it peaked just as his competitors’ films began to fade. And in a field of polarizing performances, Cruz’s well-reviewed work offers a chic choice that Oscar voters can feel good about taking.The case against her: Cruz is the only actress on this list who was snubbed by SAG, BAFTA, the Golden Globes, and the Critics Choice Awards, and though it’s harder to score with those groups when you’re delivering a performance that’s not in English, that still leaves her with no real place to pop before the Oscars.Nicole Kidman, ‘Being the Ricardos’The case for her: Doesn’t Nicole Kidman seem like the sort of movie star who should have two Oscars by now? Her only win came almost 20 years ago, for “The Hours,” and when Colman and Cruz are also vying for a second statuette, Kidman could credibly claim that she’s been waiting the longest for her pair. Kidman’s “Ricardos” co-stars Javier Bardem and J.K. Simmons were nominated, too, suggesting that the academy’s sizable actors branch has real affection for the film. And of all of the best actress candidates who transformed themselves to play a real person, Kidman may have had the highest difficulty curve to overcome, since her character, Lucille Ball, was a once-in-a-lifetime comic genius.Our Reviews of the 10 Best-Picture Oscar NomineesCard 1 of 10“Belfast.” More

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    2022 Oscars Nominations: Snubs and Surprises for Lady Gaga and Jared Leto

    “The Power of the Dog” led the Oscar nominations on Tuesday, but plenty of other high-profile contenders fell short. Here, the Projectionist muses on the morning’s most startling surprises and omissions.Kristen Stewart gets the royal treatment.Kristen Stewart’s role as Princess Diana in “Spencer” is the sort of thing Oscar voters usually rush to crown: It’s a juicy, transformative lead in a biopic, performed by a famous actress who has successfully leapt from blockbusters to prestige films. Then came a shocking snub from the Screen Actors Guild, followed by another shutout from BAFTA, and pundits worried whether she’d get nominated at all. Still, Stewart was game, continuing to do press and awards-season round tables, and the 31-year-old actress was rewarded Tuesday morning with her very first Oscar nomination.Lady Gaga and Jared Leto are shut out.“House of Gucci” was stripped to its studs Tuesday, as former winners Lady Gaga and Jared Leto were both snubbed by the academy. Few performances this year were talked about more — both by audiences and by the two actors themselves — and the red carpet will be a little lesser for their absence. (Hey, nobody said the Oscars were particularly ethical … but they are fair.)‘Drive My Car’ overperforms.Coming out of last summer’s Cannes Film Festival, no one had tagged Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Drive My Car” as a major Oscar spoiler: Instead, films like Asghar Farhadi’s “A Hero” and Julia Ducournau’s “Titane” had all the buzz. But a funny thing happened on the way to the Dolby Theater: A year-end surge from critics’ groups put Hamaguchi’s contemplative three-hour drama in the thick of the awards conversation, thanks to high-profile best-film wins from the critics in New York and Los Angeles. Off that momentum, “Drive My Car” managed an astounding four Oscar nominations, with citations in picture, director, adapted screenplay and international film.‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’ is snubbed.There was no bigger film last year than “Spider-Man: No Way Home” — in fact, with a domestic gross of more than $748 million so far, there are only three other films that have ever been bigger. As the superhero movie kept raking in cash, the drumbeat grew louder that if the Oscars really wanted to reflect the year in film, they should honor one of the few movies that kept theaters open at all. And the academy did … but only with a nomination in visual effects. A best-picture nomination proved well outside the web-slinger’s reach.The director of ‘Dune’ goes missing.The academy’s directing branch is often dazzled by technical achievement, and a filmmaker who can wield blockbuster scale in the service of a soulful story usually has a leg up over more intimate fare. That’s why it’s startling that this year’s best-director race didn’t make room for Denis Villeneuve, especially since his sci-fi film “Dune” did score 10 nominations in a host of categories. But history was made elsewhere in that category, as Jane Campion became the first woman to earn two directing nominations (for “The Power of the Dog” and 1993’s “The Piano”) and the “West Side Story” filmmaker Steven Spielberg became the first person to be nominated in that category in six different decades.Two couples were nominated.Not only did the real-life partners Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons score their first Oscar nominations this year for “The Power of the Dog,” so did Penélope Cruz (“Parallel Mothers”) and Javier Bardem (“Being the Ricardos”), the rare married couple to have already won before. Even better: It’s a four-category split, as Cruz and Bardem were nominated in the lead races while Dunst and Plemons continued the spread in the supporting categories. Talk about a double date!Kenneth Branagh makes history.Even before “Belfast,” Branagh was an Oscar favorite, collecting five nominations over the course for his career in categories as varied as director, actor, supporting actor, adapted screenplay and live-action short film. But Tuesday morning’s collection of nods for the black-and-white film “Belfast” vaulted Branagh to a surprising Oscar record: He is now the first person to be nominated in seven different categories, having added citations for best picture and original screenplay to his haul. (Hopefully that makes up for a few surprising “Belfast” snubs in editing and cinematography.)‘Flee’ scores the hat trick.Look, it’s hard enough to earn just one Oscar nomination, as so many of the morning’s snubbed artists can attest. That makes what “Flee” just accomplished all the more remarkable: This animated documentary about an Afghan refugee is now the first film ever to receive Oscar nominations for documentary, animated film and international film all in the same year. A win in any of those categories seems unlikely, but at least when the makers of “Flee” claim it’s an honor just to be nominated, you’ll know that they mean it. More