Indholdsfortegnelse for Awards Special 34A - December 5, 2024 i The Hollywood Reporter

For an impossibly long we luxuriate in a family living their best lives in Rio. We know what’s coming in this haunted movie, and yet the 1970s nirvana washes over us: mother and father throwing spontaneous dance parties as the children and neighbors join in, a family heading out for an endless-summer kind of day at the beach. By the time the unthinkable happens more than 30 minutes in, we are so sunburnt by the tropical glow we have to blink to be certain of what we saw. Did that really happen? Was the father really taken in for “questioning” by Brazil’s military dictatorship, never to be seen again? Such is the low-key wallop of Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here. Inspired by real events and the director’s own childhood visitations…

“It was weird that Greta wasn’t nominated, and coming off of Little Women when she wasn’t nominated, either. It was very bizarre. Barbie has such cultural impact.” Honorable mention: Richard Curtis’ 2003 holiday classic Love Actually. “It was very underrated [by voters].” (The film got zero Oscar noms.)…

There are filmmakers who start big and get bigger, their project mushrooming ever larger as new ideas, characters and scenes enter their landscape. Then there’s Tim Fehlbaum. The Swiss writer-director — he previously made two indie sci-fi films — started really big. He was going to capture from every angle that fateful day of Sept. 5, 1972, when eight terrorists from the Palestinian militant group Black September infiltrated Munich’s Olympic Village and attacked Israeli athletes, killing two and taking nine hostage. (All would end up dying.) Police officers, Olympians, journalists, civilians, government diplomats — Fehlbaum and his co-writers Moritz Binder and Alex David would cut between them all, creating a Rashomon for the Olympic era. The seismic event — a brazen act of evil on the world’s biggest stage —…

Making an indie film anywhere is hard. Making it in Russia while criticizing Vladimir Putin? That’s Siberia tough. So went the challenge faced by Georgian writer-director Rusudan Glurjidze, whose film The Antique has run into monumental release hurdles thanks, it would appear, to the efforts of powerful Russian interests. Set against Russia’s deportation of Georgians in 2006, Glurjidze’s movie tells of a young native Georgian woman in St. Petersburg who comes to live with a curmudgeonly Russian man as she seeks to avoid being shipped from the country — a subtle drama whose snowy miseen-scène suggests a chilly chapter of modern Russian history. The film is Georgia’s official entry for the international Oscar. Just getting it to that point has been a kind of triumph. Glurjidze recently visited Los Angeles…

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes wouldn’t seem to owe an obvious debt to the films of James Cameron. But key special effects in the latest simian adventure couldn’t have happened without Weta Workshop’s creations for the Oscar-winning Avatar: The Way of Water. “The Water Solver we used came off the back of that movie and had a good half-dozen years of concentrated research and development into water simulation. So coming into the project, that was one of the aspects of this film that I wasn’t as concerned about,” says visual effects supervisor Erik Winquist. While the building blocks for the effects were there, pulling off director Wes Ball’s vision required “a different mix” of the water itself. “The ferocity and turbulence of the water is very different from…

Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui first worked together on the Alexander McQueen doc McQueen. “We had so many issues with access and with archive,” remembers Ettedgui. “It was a partnership forged in the fire, and we came out the other end of it and thought, ‘Let’s do something else together where it’s not going to be such a shit show.’” The duo then made Rising Phoenix, about the history of the Paralympic Games, which came out in 2020 on Netflix. It was because of these two films, one about a public figure and the other centered on the world of disability, that they felt prepared to tackle the story of Christopher Reeve when approached by his children — William, Matthew and Alexandra — in 2022. Heavily featuring family home videos,…