Film

My Octopus Teacher, the family-friendly feature debut of the eco-journalist Pippa Ehrlich and the nature-documentary producer James Reed, is a stunningly looking animal-loving film. The 2020 Netflix original documentary has just won the Producers Guild of America (PGA) Award for Best Documentary and is now nominated for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar.

Time, a gripping, touching, and relevant film, is one of the five nominees for the 2021 Best Documentary Feature Oscar. It centers on one extraordinary woman, Sibil Fox Richardson (nicknamed Fox Rich), as she fights boldly and relentlessly for the release of her husband Rob serving a long prison sentence.

Romanian-German filmmaker Alexander Nanau’s Collective (Colectiv in Romanian) is a searing exposé of systemic corruption, government cover-up, institutional injustice, and indifference to suffering – as well as a cautionary tale about the significance of honest, critical, and dispassionate press. World-premiering out of competition at the 2019 Venice Film Festival, the film later screened at the Toronto and Sundance Film Festivals.

Vigilantism is a topic frequently explored in movies, perhaps because it’s such an easy and visceral way to tap into feelings of individual helplessness in a cruel or unjust world. Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson helped mainstream and popularize the revenge genre in the 1970s, and it’s been a reliable commercial performer ever since – in stylized comic book adaptations, like The Crow.

Black and white films are a staple of world cinema. From achievements in the early silent era such as Metropolis (1927) and M (1931) to masterpieces like The 400 Blows (1959), Tokyo Story (1953) and Wings of Desire (1987), this format never actually died after color films were invented.

The Garden Court Apartments, at 7021 Hollywood Boulevard, are long gone, replaced by an ugly mini-mall with a drugstore, a fitness club, and a Fresh and Easy supermarket. Mack Sennett used to live there, just opposite the still standing Roosevelt Hotel when it was a fancy address.

There are so many iconic images of legendary actress Audrey Hepburn: sitting on her New York balcony, strumming the guitar as she croons “Moon River” in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, riding her Vespa through the streets of Rome in Roman Holiday, dancing through Paris with Fred Astaire in Funny Face. Born in Ixelles, Belgium, Audrey Kathleen Ruston, as she was known, grew up in the throes of World War II, in desperate poverty and the product of a broken home.

When it comes to choosing the official foreign-language submission to enter the Oscar race, each country carefully looks through many entries submitted by the best filmmakers. The horror genre is a rare pick for considerations.

MLK/FBI is the first film to uncover the extent of the Federal Bureau of Investigations’ surveillance and harassment of the reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Munich-based Mongolian filmmaker Byambasuren Davaa’s documentary The Story of the Weeping Camel was an Oscar nominee in 2005. The film has a very rare theme.