Why F1 the Movie should win the best picture Oscar

It may not be in pole position, but Brad Pitt and director Joseph Kosinski’s sleek, technically inventive ode to motor racing definitely qualifies for the Academy podium Could, should, would F1 the Movie win the best picture Oscar? Well, we have to be realistic here: F1 is currently a massive outsider, at 200-1 along with The Secret Agent , which has no chance either but for very different reasons. It’s not hard to see why: this is a swaggeringly mainstream film, where tech and branding dwarf the human input, with the film itself acting as a front-end battering ram for a sports organisation desperate to break into the promised land of the US auto racing circuit. (I mean it’s right there in the title.) So even the most reactionary, conservative Academy voter is going to find it hard to mark F1 with their tick. So no, I don’t think it could win. That’s not to say F1 doesn’t have quite a bit going for it. The Oscars, as we know, have historically had a problem with so-called “popular” ...

Anemone review – Daniel Day-Lewis returns for a bleak and painfully serious misfire

New York film festival: the actor un-retires, with his son onboard to direct, for a portentous and plodding film about war-torn men

It has been eight long years since Daniel Day-Lewis last graced the screen, after the filming of 2017’s Phantom Thread left him “overwhelmed by a sense of sadness”. Retirement, it turns out, was more “retirement”, an extended bit of rest and recuperation for another gauntlet. Anemone, the three-time Oscar winner’s quote-unquote comeback film and the feature directorial debut of his son Ronan Day-Lewis, is an even less sunny experience. (At least for the viewer; Day-Lewis has described filming with his son as “beginning to end, just pure joy to spend that time together with him”.) In fact, it’s gray-skies-only for the film’s plodding two hours, the better to hammer home the point of roiling disquiet within, to quote the logline, “the complex and profound ties that exist between brothers, fathers, and sons”.

Father and son, who co-wrote the script set in the late 1980s, seem aligned on the somber task of peeling back what has not been said for two generations of stoic, war-torn men. Anemone – a title that, like the film, is vaguely symbolic and overly portentous – settles in like fog on the northern English coast: at once heavy and weightless, overcast with dour import. It starts with a prayer (from Sean Bean, face creased with unrelenting seriousness) and proceeds into the mist of unexpressed trauma, over-communicated in close-up shots of bloody knuckles, blank walls and truncated torsos.

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