'Oscar Nominated Shorts 2021: Documentary': Film Review

The complete list of winners for the 2021 Golden Raspberry Awards has been announced.

EXCLUSIVE: Triple Oscar nominee Tomm Moore has joined the creative team of The Inventor, the feature animation being helmed by Ratatouille writer Jim Capobianco.

My Wonderful Wanda takes its title (zingier in the original German: Wanda, Mein Wunder) from a line of dialogue, an affectionate and somewhat deluded exclamation by a 70-year-old bedridden Swiss man to his 30-something Polish caretaker. The two have a secret, a side deal, that will disrupt the already shaky serenity of the man's family and draw hers into a clash of cultures and classes.

Alissa Simon Film CriticMoney can buy outside help, opportunity and material possessions, but not happiness in “My Wonderful Wanda,” a punchy satire from Swiss auteur Bettina Oberli (“Late Bloomers”). Taking a wry but empathetic approach to the phenomenon of care migration, Oberli and her co-writer Cooky Ziesche focus on the changing relationship between one privileged Swiss family and their financially fragile Polish home-care worker over nine months.

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BUCHAREST -- Seeing the day that her life changed forever played out on a big screen was an emotional moment for Tedy Ursuleanu.“I watched the film for the first time in this cinema," the 34-year-old told The Associated Press in an interview at Bucharest’s Elvire Popesco cinema. "The fire scenes at the beginning of the film when the pillar next to the stage starts burning — I felt the same intensity from the night I was there.

In his 92 years, African-American businessman Horace Bowers Sr.—one of the two main subjects of the Oscar-nominated short documentary A Concerto Is a Conversation—has faced many obstacles in his path. He’s always found a way around them.

When Judy Heumann—one of the main subjects of the Oscar-nominated documentary Crip Camp—was five years old in the early 1950s, her mother tried to register her for kindergarten in New York City. The staff took one look at Judy, who used a wheelchair as a result of polio, and denied her.

Haley Bosselman editorAcademy Award-nominated documentary “Hunger Ward” paints an intimate portrait of the children in Yemen suffering from starvation and malnourishment as a result of war-induced famine.

Oscar nominee “Minari” came from a very personal place.

Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal went into 2019’s Toronto International Film Festival without a distributor. Now, a year-and-a-half on, it’s a six-time Oscar nominee and perhaps the most hard-fought of all of this year’s crop of Best Picture candidates. Joe Utichi meets Marder and stars Riz Ahmed and Paul Raci to take stock of a film that transformed its key players in ways they hadn’t expected.

Oscar nominations have been announced. Due to the pandemic, the annual ceremony was pushed back from its usual late February or early March time slot to 25 April.

EXCLUSIVE: Following its Oscar nomination, Elvira Lind’s short film The Letter Room has been racking up the sales. The movie, which stars Oscar Isaac and Alia Shawkat, has sold to France and Germany (ARTE France), Spain (Telefonica), Denmark (TV2), Russia (Shot TV), Poland (New Europe Film Sales), Airlines (JetBlue) as well as an international deal with Kanopy for the educational circuit.

Despite previous outrage that streaming service Netflix could have films nominated for Oscar Awards, this year the site has proven once again that its movies can play with the big boys.

The Oscar-nominated filmmaking team behind the documentary Time are looking forward to a reunion at Union Station in Los Angeles, the main venue for this year’s Academy Awards. Director-producer Garrett Bradley and producers Lauren Domino and Kellen Quinn haven’t seen each other in person for a while, because of Covid-19.

In the Oscar-nominated documentary short A Concerto Is a Conversation, acclaimed composer Kris Bowers traces a line from his family history to the premiere performance of his original concerto "For a Younger Self" at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2019. Following that line is Horace Bowers Jr., Kris Bowers' 91-year-old grandfather, who sits down with his grandson to tell the story of his journey out of the Jim Crow-era South in the pursuit of his American Dream.

Brent Lang Executive Editor of Film and MediaCatalin Tolontan wasn’t ready for his close-up.The Romanian sports journalist whose investigative work provides the spine of the Oscar-nominated documentary “Collective,” initially turned down director Alexander Nanau’s offer to capture him at work as he sought to expose widespread fraud and corruption.

Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticThose who typically scope the Academy Award-nominated shorts programs hoping to win the Oscar pool will have a particularly tough time of it with this year’s animated roster, as the options are wide-ranging but lack a clear frontrunner. A few of the talents have ties to Pixar, though only one short was actually developed at a studio, while the other four are far more personal, independent expressions with little in common, least of all technique.

Imprisonment, in many senses of the word, is at the center of each of the five nominees for this year's live-action short film Oscar, which is not to say they're a homogenous bunch: Though all have political undercurrents and speak to present-tense issues, their moods and styles vary enough that their one big (mostly) common theme —cops, and how they wield power —stands out only because we've already been thinking about it every day for what feels like forever.