Golden Globe Awards

As the grown-up Saroo, the Indian boy adopted by an Australian family in director  Garth Davis’ Lion, Dev Patel found himself on a journey very similar to his own. “This is probably the project that I had the biggest personal connection t”, Dev Patel told us.

What kind of preparation is needed to play a vocal coach to a tone-deaf would-be opera singer? Simon Helberg, who must face this very challenge as Meryl Streep’s long-suffering teacher in Florence Foster Jenkins, had a very specific kind of training, shared with the movie’s illustrious lead actress: “We both came together in New York, and had both been practicing, basically, shitting all over the great pieces of music in the canon of classical and opera”, Helberg shared with us. “She was in New York and I was in LA, and we had been working on this crazy thing, and we came together to see if it made sense in a studio in New York.

Hot on the trail of a series of peculiar bank robberies in dusty, half-dead towns in West Texas, Jeff Bridges’ sheriff Marcus Hamilton cuts a powerful profile – he’s at the same time a lawman from the halcyon days of the frontier and a dim shadow of those legendary times, fading with a land that seems abandoned by all. “The basic thing about a great script, this was one that really rung true.

When Juan, a feared drug dealer ruling over a mean corner in a tough Miami neighborhood, comes across a scared, trembling kid in the opening scenes from director Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, the audience does not expect the layers of care and tenderness that frame the encounter. The surprise is a credit to Mahershala Ali’s nuanced performance of a character based on the life experiences of playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney, whose stage play inspired the movie.

It is a beautiful summer day on the West coast of Denmark. Apart from the roar of the sea and the gulls’ screech there is an unnatural silence.

En las últimas semanas le hemos visto interpretar a un soldado objetor de conciencia en Hasta el último hombre, de Mel Gibson, y a un jesuita misionario en Silencio, de Martin Scorsese. Dos papeles duros de pelar que sin duda le han hecho cuestionar su propia fe y que podrían colocarle en la cima de Hollywood en esta temporada de premios.

The cinema industry (if one can use this word) of Saudi Arabia is minuscule. It only produces a couple of feature motion pictures and a few documentaries each year.

As Randi, a young woman rebuilding her life after a devastating loss, Michelle Williams delivers a quietly powerful performance that adds a whole other dimension to Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester By The Sea. “When you love someone so much right next to that thought is what would I do if I lost (that person), Williams stold us.

In director Theodore Melfi’s Hidden Figures Octavia Spencer plays mathematician Dorothy Vaughn, one of the real-life pioneers of space exploration, a team of women (including a contingent of African Americans) who worked at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics – the precursor of NASA- in the early 1960s, crunching the numbers that put Americans among the stars while dealing with racism and bigotry. Playing Dorothy, Spencer told us, led her to be “extremely, extremely grateful to have been  born in this time because there were so many women like Dorothy Vaughn who paved the way for me.

A boy from a remote village finds himself, by accident, alone and lost in the streets of Calcutta – and, from there, in a comfortable home in Tasmania, adopted by loving Australian parents. In Lion, the cinematic version of this real life story, Nicole Kidman plays Sue Brierley, the boy’s devoted adoptive mother – and her first Australian character in a long while.