This year is very concerning for the Supporting categories. The Supporting Actor category is a barren wasteland, and I really don’t care who wins there. However, the Supporting Actress category is also a very strange one because the five nominees are all very good, and are all truly very worthy of winning the Academy Award…
Author: The Postmodern Pelican
The Firemen’s Ball (1967)
I am not quite sure where I find the time and motivation to watch such bizarre and strange films, but it is certainly a wonderful feeling to watch something weird. Miloš Forman, in my humble opinion, has directed two of the greatest films ever made – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus, but…
Macbeth (2015)
There is not any shortage of adaptations of the works of William Shakespeare, and Shakespeare’s plays have the distinction of having been adapted onto film from the earliest days of the silent era to the current modern cinematic age. There are far too many of these adaptations to name here, and spanning between the Western…
The Hateful Eight (2015)
The problem with being a cinephile that also reviews films is that you have such a wide variety of directors that you absolutely adore, and in each review of a film by them, they are suddenly your favorite director, and the one you consider the best working at that time. In the past, I have…
Grandma (2015)
2015 was most certainly the seminal year for veterans actresses having their moment in the spotlight with lead roles in acclaimed films. Charlotte Rampling in 45 Years, Blythe Danner in I’ll See You in My Dreams, Dame Maggie Smith in The Lady in the Van, and perhaps most interestingly, Lily Tomlin in Grandma. I have…
Ranking the 88th Academy Award Nominees: Best Actor in a Supporting Role
Last year, the Best Supporting Actor category was truly one of the strongest of the year, and that is very often the case with this category. For the first time in my career of watching and following the Academy Awards, I have not seen this category be quite as weak as it is this year….
Spotlight (2015)
How do I begin this review? I think a film about any form of investigation, whether by the police or by journalists, are bound to be fascinating. I have always been very interested in films that showed an investigation taking place, and I was fascinated by the concept of the film Spotlight, which told the…
Ranking the 88th Academy Award Nominees: Best Actress in a Leading Role
The next category is the polar opposite of Best Actor – it has five remarkable and brilliant performances, by five extraordinary ladies, each one would be an easy and deserving winner in any other year. They are absolutely splendid, each and every one of them, and are amongst these actresses finest work. It is a…
Ranking the 88th Academy Award Nominees: Best Actor in a Leading Role
So I have decided to do something different this year, in lieu of actual predictions, I am going to rather rate and rank the nominees, category by category, in the four acting categories and the Best Director and Best Picture categories, as I watch them and complete each category. Instead of simply predicting winners based…
The Revenant (2015)
It was just over a year ago when I have what I consider to be my cinematic rebirth, when I saw a film that completely changed my perception on what cinema should and can be. That film was Birdman or (the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), which has now risen to third place on my list…
The Postmodern Pelican 