‘Girl Picture’ Review: Alli Haapasalo’s Finnish Oscar Entry

Second generation Hollywood royalty. Jane Fonda comes from a family of actors, but she quickly made a name for herself and became an icon in her own right.

Best Documentary Feature front runners All That Breathes, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Fire of Love, and The Territory are safely through to the next round after the Academy’s Documentary Branch whittled the list of remaining contenders to a shortlist of 15 films.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has revealed the shortlists for Documentary Feature, Documentary Short, Live Action Short, and Animated Short for 2023. As expected acclaimed films “All That Breathes” and “All the Beauty and All the Bloodshed” made the cut for the top category.

It has been apparent in talking to Oscar voters across many branches that the one title that keeps coming up at the top of their lists is Netflix’s All Quiet on the Western Front, which is the German entry for International Feature Film. That it has strength across the board though is borne out with the Oscar shortlists in 10 categories released Wednesday by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.

Finding his happiness. In addition to embarking on new creative career endeavors over the years, Jonah Hill has been on a journey of self-discovery in order to find personal and professional happiness.

Colombian cinema has shown a ferocious loyalty to the country’s dispossessed: to the generation that lost its lands to exploitation and its moral moorings to the drug trade, to the kids who grew up parentless on the streets or found some kind of refuge in the militias that terrorized the country. It has also proved to be a hotbed of vibrant artistic experiment. Films such as Monos (2019) and La Jauria (2022), in which myth, magic and documentary observation collide and mingle, are notable for their untethered energy and complete disregard for prescribed categories. Stories are not so much told as imaginatively experienced. Perhaps, in a country with so few visible rules, anything is possible. 

From Bergen to Malta, Liverpool, New York and Halifax: Norwegian merchant seamen Alfred (Kristoffer Joner) and Sigbjorn (Pal Sverre Hagen) sometimes seem to be competing for screen time with datelines in Gunnar Vikene’s epic War Sailor, Norway’s Oscar submission. Sprawling, packed with anecdote and surging from one dramatic peak to the next, War Sailor sets out to tell the stories of the ordinary but unsung heroes who helped defeat Germany in 1945. It has the best of intentions.

Philip Yung delivers an ambitious decade-spanning true crime thriller with Where The Wind Blows, Hong Kong’s entry for the International Feature Oscar. Previously known as Theory of Ambitions, it’s a technically impressive feat with an equally impressive cast lead by Aaron Kwok and Tony Leung Chiu-wai. Fast-paced and dense with detail, it challenges the audience to keep up with its complex story of two cops rising up the ranks in Hong Kong in the 1960s and beyond.

EXCLUSIVE: UTA has signed Nkechi Okoro Carroll and her production company, Rock My Soul Productions, for representation in all areas.

Cáit runs back home, we see a crying baby, and her mother upbraids her for coming into the house with mud on her shoes.Bairéad and director of photography Kate McCullough (Hulu’s “Normal People”) emphasize Cáit’s alienation from her surroundings in their compositions, but they also strive to give the images a very soft look, with ghostly light on Cáit’s serious face. Cáit is always looking down and then looking up apprehensively, as if she expects some calamity at any moment, which is justified when boys knock some milk into her lap at school; other kids call her “a weirdo” because she keeps so much to herself.The effects with light that McCullough gets in these early scenes can be entrancing, as when she catches the way that a white neon light above a bar molds the head of Cáit’s father in profile, or the pink light from a television set as it is reflected on a wall.

Love and compassion don’t require grand gestures. Often, the subtlest actions forge the deepest, most meaningful connections — a patient ear, a shared space, a gentle hand.

Why do we have children? Cait’s Mam and Da would be hard-pressed to answer that, with a house full of sour teenage daughters, a toddler barely walking, another baby about to land and not enough money to pay a day laborer to bring in the hay. These are the kind of kids who go to school with no lunch. 

It’s 2002 and raining brains in Riyadh, at least from the gormless Nasser’s wonky perspective. Nasser’s doctor is firmly convinced he has a brain tumour, which is his explanation for the protracted hallucinations Nasser experiences and that he, Dr Ahmed, is all too ready to excise. Nasser isn’t so sure: his dreams, fantasies and visions are more fun than the rest of his life, yoked beneath the twin tyrannies of his fanatical father and his boss at the thinly patronized Dove Hotel. Why get rid of the good stuff? Especially once those visions start to include the mysterious young woman who arrived unannounced one day to ask for the key to room 227. She’s welcome to walk the corridors of his mind any old time.

An Afro-European woman connects with her roots in Bantú Mama, the Dominican Republic’s entry for the Best International Feature Film Oscar. Co-written and directed by Ivan Herrera, it’s was picked up by Ava DuVernay’s Array Releasing. It’s a compelling drama featuring a strong performance from Clarisse Albrecht, who also co-wrote the screenplay.

For years HBO Documentary Films, under the stewardship of Sheila Nevins, dominated the Oscars, racking up nominations and wins left and right. But since her departure in 2018 it has faced an Oscar dry spell, at least in the documentary feature category. All that could change this year, in a major way.

Elisabeth Finch — the former Grey’s Anatomy consulting producer whose myriad lies about her medical and personal history led to her resignation in March– gave her first career rehabilitation interview by saying “what she did was wrong” and how it was “not okay.”

A little five-year-old girl has died of Strep A after becoming seriously ill last week.

Jordanian director Darin J. Sallam and producers Deema Azar and Ayeh Jadaneh have accused Israel of mounting a disinformation campaign against their film Farha and also rebuked the country for attempting to get it removed from theatres and Netflix.