Each of this year's Best Picture nominees has survived a journey to cross the finish line, before earning the Academy's consideration. Here's how they came together. The Father Playwright Florian Zeller's The Father enjoyed several award-winning runs on the stage before it made its evolution to film, but first-time…

Even in a world as volatile as the film industry, Thomas Vinterberg has had some serious ups and downs. After becoming the toast of Cannes in 1998 with his Dogme film Festen, the Danish director fell sharply from grace with the follow-up It's All About Love and endured several commercial flops before returning to…

Chances are, you haven't seen Rachel Mason's debut film, The Lives of Hamilton Fish, a surreal, arty musical about two men—one a politician, the other a cannibal—who died on the same day in 1936. It toured the indie festival circuit, and that's about all, and Mason didn't expect a whole lot more from her follow-up…

Spike Lee’s 1995 thriller Clockers, based on the novel by Richard Price, drew some of the best reviews of Delroy Lindo's career, but astonishingly, it has taken 25 years for the duo to reunite, for the Netflix streaming hit Da 5 Bloods, and the results are just as incendiary. Cast against type, and almost over the…

In a year that has stymied many of his peers, Riz Ahmed has been incredibly prolific, with two 2020 feature releases—Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal and Bassam Tariq’s Mogul Mowgli—as well as an album, The Long Goodbye, which came with a powerful short imagining life in a racist, post-Brexit Britain. If The Long Goodbye…

Spike Lee loves cinema and he loves making movies, but, perhaps more than either, he loves filmmakers who are willing to share that kind of love for the art and its craft. For Lee, it began in the early '80s at NYU's film school, where his classmates included Ernest Dickerson and Ang Lee, and where Jim Jarmusch, two…

Hollywood campaigned hard for President Donald Trump's ouster, but most have been holding back the spirit of celebration until he's finally shown the door on January 20. Spike Lee is popping the cork early. It's been a good year for director, who took the number one slot for Netflix streamers with his acclaimed summer…

Martin Short turned 70 during the pandemic, and if it hadn't been for the worldwide lockdown he'd probably still be on the road somewhere, doing his two-man vaudeville show with his old friend Steve Martin. It is, he recalls with a lot of affection and no small amount of wonder, nearly 50 years since he began a career…

Andrea Riseborough came to Park City with two films this year, and they couldn't have been more different. In Brandon Cronenberg's blood-drenched cyber-thriller Possessor she plays a cool, calculating hit-woman who takes over other people's bodies to carry out increasingly brutal assassinations to order. In Zeina…

Following its well-received premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in September, the Safdie brothers' Uncut Gems, their sixth film, proved just as successful on release, grossing a record per-venue average of $105,099 for distributor A24 before going wide Christmas Day. Set in 2012, it stars Adam Sandler as Howard…

Debuting nearly a year ago at Sundance, Alma Ha'rel's Honey Boy has been one of the indie hits of 2019. Scripted by Shia LaBeouf, it tells the story of a troubled young actor (played at different ages by Noah Jupe and Lucas Hedges) who reflects on his life as a child star while serving time in rehab for a DUI offence…

From the moment it picked up the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, Todd Phillips' Joker clearly wasn't going to be another comic-book movie. Staring Joaquin Phoenix as troubled loner Arthur Fleck, the Warner Bros film has grossed over $1 billion worldwide, making it the first R-rated film to do so. Speaking at…