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” ...

The Tasters review – wartime historical drama about Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair food samplers

A shallow, unconvincing storyline and deeply uncomfortable scenes as starving women, unaware of why they are there, are fed titbits

Did Hitler really have food tasters? Was his inner circle so paranoid about the risk of assassination by poisoning that young women were forced to sample every dish that was due to pass his lips? That was the account given to a German newspaper in 2012 by the then 95-year-old Margot Wölk, who claimed to have been one of Hitler’s food tasters. Historians have pointed to lack of evidence, with nothing in the records to back up her witness testimony.

Whatever the veracity of the story, it has been turned into a shaky, unconvincing historical drama by Silvio Soldini, whose film is an adaptation of a novel by Rosella Postorino. Elisa Schlott plays the fictional Rosa, a young woman from Berlin whose soldier husband is missing on the eastern front. After heavy bombing in the city, she flees to her in-laws in east Prussia close to Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair military headquarters. One day, the Nazis come knocking for Rosa, and load her on to a van with six other terrified young women.

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