Oscartipped

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeMr Hunham, the worn-down, middle-aged teacher played with such consummate brilliance by Paul Giamatti in Alexander Payne’s new film The Holdovers – which has just hit UK cinemas – finds the world a bitter and complicated place. He is an unsympathetic figure despised and feared by the teenagers under his tutelage at Barton Academy, an elite but stuffy boarding school in New England. He…

Four Daughters, a surreal blend of documentary, memory, meta-fictional re-enactment and therapy now shortlisted for an Oscar, originated years ago: in 2016, when a Tunisian woman named Olfa Hamrouni took to local news to call out her country’s failure to combat the scourge of Isis. And the year before that, when her two radicalized eldest daughters, Ghofrane and Rahma Chikhaoui, fled to join the group in Libya. And the years before that, when Hamrouni struggled to raise her four daughters – the two eldest, rebellious and…

Alasdair Gray was one of Scotland’s most distinctive talents. A Glaswegian artist and writer, he celebrated his native city in tales that combined fantasy with dark urban realism and in paintings that evoked civic life in vivid detail.He wrote Lanark, one of the greatest British novels of the 20th century; adorned many of the city’s bars, restaurants and stations with his distinctive murals; and inspired a generation of younger Scottish writers, including Iain Banks and Irvine Welsh.“He was a modern-day William Blake,”…

At Sunday night’s Oscars, The Banshees of Inisherin is up for nine awards. However, some feel it should be 10.The fisherman knits worn by Pádraic (Colin Farrell) and Colm (Brendan Gleeson) throughout the film have gained something of a cult following, leading some to question … where is the best jumper award?Knitwear shops in Ireland have reported a spike in sales of traditional jumpers following the release of the film. On TikTok, there are videos of Gen Z scouring secondhand shops to find similar woollies, while the…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeCate Blanchett has defended her new film Tár over claims that it is “anti-woman”.The 53-year-old actor won a Golden Globe award earlier this week for her portrayal of fictitious orchestra conductor Lydia Tár in the film, which is also tipped to be a major Oscar contender. Tár follows Blanchett’s character at the peak of a successful music career, before accusations about her behaviour…

A major new film about a real-life escaped slave premiered this week. Emancipation is the story of “Whipped Peter”, who fled barbaric forced labour on a railroad in 1863 and went on a perilous 10-day journey through the Louisiana swamps before finding refuge at a Union encampment. Photographs of his back, a mesh of welts and strafe marks, shocked Americans and aided the abolitionist cause.Reviews were largely ecstatic, praising its commitment to the brutal truth and the unflinching, moving performance of its leading…

Opportunity is quite a character. I’m talking about the star of Ryan White’s crowd-pleasing, Oscar-tipped documentary Good Night Oppy: a Nasa-engineered rover sent on a 90-day mission to Mars in 2003 that surprisingly stretched to 15 years.Opportunity, or Oppy as some affectionately call her for short, is a melange of wheels, wires, antennas and solar panels that come together with traits familiar to humans. She has a neck that looks retrofitted from a kitchen sink drainpipe. And her head has cameras spread horizontally…

The film Tár opens with the dual lenses of celebrity. First, in private, through a screen: Cate Blanchett’s Lydia Tár sleeps in a private jet, curled into the chair, face obscured by an eye mask. We see her through someone else’s phone – an assistant, a flight attendant, a friend? – filmed in the style of an Instagram live overlaid with private, mocking text. She’s a vulnerable cipher, surveilled, alone.Next, in public, in a theater – the vaunted conductor commands the room of a New Yorker talk, hosted by the magazine’s…

The painstaking work to expose Harvey Weinstein comes to the big screen in the first trailer for She Said, the film adaptation of the book by New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey.The duo, who won a Pulitzer prize (along with The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow) for their 2017 investigation into the sexual predation by the formerly untouchable film producer, helped ignite the #MeToo movement and several subsequent investigations into abuses of power.The film, from Unothordox director Maria Schrader and adapted…