Ten films will square off for Hollywood’s biggest prize on Sunday night during the 98th Academy Awards. Here’s how to watch all the movies nominated for best picture and what the Star’s film critics thought about each.
Bugonia
Stream it on Prime Video. Rent it on Apple TV or YouTube.
“Bugonia” wants to be a movie about a bunch of different things at once: the combatants and casualties of the culture war, the dangers of ideological echo chambers, the ambient despair tied to impending environmental collapse. Will Tracy writes like a nursing student trying and failing to tap a vein; he keeps jabbing until you’re prickly and irritable and wishing for somebody with more precision to show up and draw blood.
Read Adam Nayman’s full review of “Bugonia.”
F1
Stream it on Apple TV. Buy it on Prime Video or YouTube.
Brad Pitt has become Hollywood’s hero in a can, a reliable star who can be called upon to improve any story, like a pantry staple bolstering a weak stew. Once again, Pitt’s services are sorely needed and obligingly supplied in “F1 The Movie,” which plunks him into a vroom-vroom car and a story as messy as a kid’s toy box. The film is more like an extended ad for Formula One racing — and innumerable product placements — than it is narrative drama. But “F1” is a Jerry Bruckheimer-produced summer blockbuster directed by “Top Gun: Maverick” helmer Joseph Kosinski. We know going in that it’s about dazzling the eyes rather than the brain.
Read Peter Howell’s full review of “F1.”
Frankenstein
Stream it on Netflix.
With “Frankenstein,” monster maestro Guillermo del Toro finally gets to tell the Mary Shelley horror story of his boyhood dreams. The Toronto-filmed epic is a thing of grotesque beauty, body horror of such operatic spectacle and emotional impact, it makes you want to applaud with two severed hands. A teenage Shelley wrote in the preface to her 1818 novel that her tale of a lonely humanoid pieced together from stolen corpses is more than “merely weaving a series of supernatural terrors.” Indeed it is, much more.
Read Peter Howell’s full review of “Frankenstein.”
Hamnet
Rent it on Prime Video or YouTube.
Directed and co-written by Chloé Zhao, and adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s acclaimed novel of historical imagination, “Hamnet” finds its soul in the story of Shakespeare’s lost son, whose name, interchangeable with Hamlet in the 16th century, echoes with grief and artistic realization. You want a challenge? Try keeping your eyes dry as the plague known as the Black Death casts its shadow and love yields to mourning, building to a third-act catharsis like no other movie in recent memory. Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal anchor an awards-worthy ensemble, conjuring magic, anguish and whispered secrets in a world trembling between history and legend.
Read Peter Howell’s full review of “Hamnet.”
Marty Supreme
Rent it on Apple TV, YouTube or Prime Video.
Think of classic movie grifters, such as the characters played by Paul Newman in “The Hustler,” Robert Preston in “The Music Man” and Richard Dreyfuss in “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.” They’re mere shrimps of scamming compared to Timothée Chalamet’s title swindler in “Marty Supreme,” a pleasing tale of hubris in motion from Josh Safdie (“Uncut Gems”), a director who, both as a solo filmmaker and with his brother Benny, never saw a scoundrel he didn’t want to get to know better.
Read Peter Howell’s full review of “Marty Supreme.”
One Battle After Another
Stream it on Crave. Rent it on Apple TV or Prime Video.
“One Battle After Another,” freely riffing on Thomas Pynchon’s novel “Vineland,” is a political satire-turned-urban warfare epic. If “The Master” was about spiritual combat and “There Will Be Blood” chronicled economic ruthlessness, Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest plunges headlong into literal battle, punctuated by rat-a-tat gunfire, shouted recriminations and constant generational and ideological crossfire. It may be Anderson’s best film; it’s certainly his most violent.
Read Peter Howell’s full review of “One Battle After Another.”
The Secret Agent
Stream it on Mubi. Rent it on Apple TV or Prime Video.
The title card at the beginning of Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s “The Secret Agent” identifies the film’s backdrop of Recife circa 1977 as a place of “great mischief.” Like everything else in this vivid period thriller, the phrase is laced with a wry and devastating understatement. “Mischief,” in this case, is a euphemism for widespread and dangerous institutional corruption, for the corrosion of the social order under an increasingly venal military dictatorship. It also serves, more happily, as a description of the director’s sensibility: if it’s possible for a movie to somehow be grave and playful simultaneously, “The Secret Agent” fits the bill.
Read Adam Nayman’s full review of “The Secret Agent.”
Sentimental Value
Stream it on Prime Video. Rent it on Apple TV.
Renate Reinsve and Elle Fanning are like two sides of a golden coin in Joachim Trier’s tangled family drama, in which a celebrated filmmaker (Stellan Skarsgård) tries to use his art to reconnect with the family he abandoned long ago. When his daughter (Reinsve), a stage actress, turns down a role in the film she deems too close for comfort, it’s taken up by an American star (Fanning), who doesn’t realize the doppelgänger dynamics she’s getting into. Fantastic performances across the board — especially by Reinsve and Fanning — and a keen sense of the meaning of the title make this film a bittersweet pleasure to watch.
Read Peter Howell’s full review of “Sentimental Value.”
Sinners
Stream it on Crave. Rent it on YouTube, Apple TV or Prime Video.
“Sinners” was filmed in Louisiana, an appropriate locale given that it’s a gumbo of music and ideas. The movie takes its time getting going and then seems in a bit of a rush during its blood-soaked finale, but at no point is it just another vampire tale. This is horror with a sense of purpose and an appreciation of music and history, grooving the body and gnawing at the conscience even as it nibbles on the neck.
Read Peter Howell’s full review of “Sinners.”
Train Dreams
Stream it on Netflix.
Clint Bentley, co-writer of the Oscar-nominated “Sing Sing,” returns with a bold, ravishing reimagining of Denis Johnson’s Pulitzer-nominated 2011 novella. What begins as a classic Western steadily deepens into frontier myth. The film breathes both tragedy and wonder, echoing hard truths and aching beauty of Thomas Hardy novels. Joel Edgerton gives a deeply felt portrayal of an ordinary man, Robert Grainier, a logger and railroad worker, who is caught between the wild and the civilized, watching his world transform faster than he can reckon.
Read Peter Howell’s full review of “Train Dreams.”
