The best part of the Oscars Death Race project is the nice surprises: the films I expected to have to endure that gripped me instead.
I faced Ajami as one does a hated vegetable, and got …

It’s hard to tell if the movie intends to portray Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel as morally compromised and often bratty, as part of a larger conversation about the forging of genius. If so, the script could …

Shear Genius has had problems from the beginning. The use of the Project Runway cookie-cutter for competitive reality shows about other lifestyle genres is understandable, but not always successful; with Top Design, the glitch seemed …

The first hour is diverting, with beautiful costumes and some interesting shot-making, but in the end, the movie tries to do too much and doesn’t pull it off. The last five minutes throw their hands …

It’s about what you’d expect from a Wes Anderson movie, in animated form: if you find his work twee, you’ll hate it, and if you like its offbeat charm, you’ll enjoy it.
It tries a little …

It seems like more than a few seventies movies have lines of dialogue in which girls swoon over Al Pacino. A quick search only revealed the one, the girl in Saturday Night Fever who sighs …

The acting is good across the board, in spite of writing that lurches between motivations and tempos like a car dropping out of gear. By that measure, it’s not Jeff Bridges, the presumptive Best Actor …

A more entertaining slate overall than the live-action shorts, by far.
Again, I’ll cover them in the order screened, along with the “highly commended” shorts that showed.
French Roast. A single joke, not terribly funny to begin …

It’s…fine. It has a few charming bits; the return of Jojo is predictable, but done well, and a funeral at the end has a sweet callback to a running sight gag. But the coda is …

It’s nice to see a heroine of color in a Disney movie, but I don’t know if Tiana spending the bulk of the story as a frog necessarily strikes a great blow for multiculturalism, not …