Best Picture: Part I

Dunkirk


Visionary director and innovative story-teller, Christopher Nolan tackles the tale of one of Britain's most dangerous challenges during the Second World War: the evacuation of Dunkirk. The story is told in three temporalities with three areas of battle - we spend a week on land, a day on the sea, and an hour in the sky. The stories, interwoven into one another, capture the struggle and determination of both the British public and armed forces.

Nolan is at his visceral best. Every bomb hit you, water pouring into a claustrophobic space engulfs you. This is sensory film making as it should be. Delicately balancing his timelines to maximum effect, Nolan manages to tell three powerfully engaging stories which are all as gripping and nerve wracking as one another. A master class in war films.

Phantom Thread


Daniel Day-Lewis' 'retiring' film, Phantom Thread tells the story of a man, a dress maker, though more importantly, he's a perpetual bachelor, allowing women to float through his life and inspire him on a breeze before they drift away again. But falling for one of them disrupts his whole life.

Beautifully shot and wonderfully crafted, Paul Thomas Anderson's latest struggles at times to be fully engaging. Grounded by solid performances by the whole cast, notably Day-Lewis, Phantom Thread is, in essence, a film about the consuming world of fashion and an eccentric designer but his quirks often rub the wrong way, making it difficult to support the central figure and his reluctant pursuit of romance. It works as proof that making a technically brilliant film does not necessarily make a brilliant film.

Get Out


Take a the sense of unease you get in any good horror movie. Combine it with overtones of the racial oppression that haunts suburban, southern USA. What you get is Jordan Peele's phenomenal Get Out, a striking racial satire with Daniel Kaluuya anchoring the film with a star-making leading turn.

The important social issues presented in Get Out are the reason satire exists - to hold a mirror up to society and highlight its blemishes - and Peele focuses his quiet anger on making the audience feel uncomfortable before unleashing it in loud, brutal fashion.  Get Out is bold. Get Out is brave. But most of all, Get Out is terrifying. The question that remains is whether it is the film that is scary, or the darker reality it is portraying?

Call Me by Your Name


Beautiful, relaxed, loving film-making. This is what is on display in Call Me by your Name, the unconventional and forbidden character driven love story set in the countryside of Italy. The camera floats around the leads passively, simply observing something, allowing characters and relationships to evolve in its view. 

Featuring strong performances from its leads but also from the minor characters (particularly Michael Stuhlbarg, who was robbed of a Best Supporting Actor nomination), Call Me by your Name is arguably the most rounded, well crafted film at the Oscars this year. It succeeds on every single level, not to mention Luca Guadagnino's immense control over combining all these elements. This is film making at its very best, its most powerful, its most emotive. And the the long takes are to die for.