Insanely stubborn: these are the 5 most stunning films of this awards season

Author: Simon Meier

Miracle after miracle is happening this awards season. And comeback after comeback. One of the miracles is called “Everything Everywhere All at Once” by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. The Story of an Asian Laundromat Owner (Michelle Joehoe) in America, which has to do with the most annoying thing America has to offer, namely the tax authorities. In the battle for her business and her family, she falls into increasingly absurd fantasy scenarios. A grandiose, surrealistic and downright threatening-looking storm of images and ideas from a film. And a collage of Yeoh’s previous work. Sensational.

The 60-year-old Yeoh started her career exactly 40 years ago as Miss Malaysia and then went on to become an icon of action-loving Hong Kong cinema, where she spent herself in cool shit as “The Heroic Trio”. In 1997, she entered our consciousness as a tough Bond girl in “Tomorrow Never Dies”. In 2023 she was nominated for a Golden Globe for the first time, she just had to win it and she won it. What a pleasure.

The most obvious comeback is Jennifer Coolidge with her Golden Globe for the HBO series “The White Lotus”. She rose to fame long ago as Stifler’s mother in the I-cum-in-my-apple-pie series ‘American Pie’. But that’s only marginal. Because the comeback of all comebacks this year belongs to the Vietnamese actor Ke Huy Kwanwho until now, until his role as Michelle Yeoh’s husband in “Everything Everywhere All at Once”, has never regained the early fame of his first role as Little Round in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom”.

He’s also bagging awards now, the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor is so well deserved, he and Yeoh play such a touching married couple as ever Michelle Williams and Paul Dano in “The Fairytales”.

Stephen Spielberg won the Golden Globes for Best Director and Best Picture for the fictionalization of his childhood and childhood memories in «The Fabelmans». Justly. What a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful movie! Almost nothing can be revealed about this for embargoed reasons, but there has rarely been a more loving and original detour of menacing crashes into nostalgic kitsch. You want to adopt or be adopted by this family of melancholic nerd birds, if only to appear in a home video of little Stephen aka Sam.

It’s like this: two people go into the same movie and see another. why exactly “The Banshees of Inisherin” landed at the Golden Globes in the Musical or Comedy category (en “Elvis” under “Drama Film”) is a mystery to me. This is a tragically accurate, laconic study of how thoroughly village people can edit themselves for no reason. The first laughs turn into incredulous shudders. Like The Fabelmans and Everything Everywhere at Once, this is an unusually quirky film. There were three trophies for that and he became Spielberg’s toughest competitor at the Oscars.

Are we ever over “Tar” from Todd Field talk? Cinematically you can’t call that a miracle, but Kate Blanchett will win her third Oscar for it after “Blue Jasmine” and “The Aviator”, that’s for sure, the Golden Globe already has it. She plays a top lesbian conductor, a woman in a profession that requires her to constantly raise the baton, and she uses that job to secure a supply of eager fresh meat.

So far, so famously, there is a little Harvey Weinstein hidden in many great classical conductors, and if Field were to tell the story with a man, it would seem expected and cliche. The fact that he is now going through it with a woman gives the subject a new sharpness, makes it more universal and describes the tragedy of a creative system, but also of a perpetrator himself. This Tár is bad. And this tár failed. Not for long, but then all the more shabby. Because unlike her, the fresh meat does not age. It knows how to help itself. A movie I didn’t want to see at first, but Cate Blanchett as Tár destroys any resistance with highly intriguing energy.

or “Elvis”, Baz Luhrmans lavish, intoxicated, impressionistic take on the man who left us so much music and the Elvis Toast. It’s not entirely clear what exactly drives Luhrman, what exactly he wants to tell us, aside from “great story, great look, great music”. But that’s all – very cool. Marvel including credits. Cinematic overwhelm.

Sure Austin Butler won the Golden Globe for best actor in its category (“Drama”). It is also clear that he will lose to the winner of the “Musical or Comedy” category at the Oscars. Because while Butler is the perfect Elvis body and impersonator (which is why he still talks like Elvis even now), he’s missing something in the whole spectacle Colin Farell has painfully too much in “The Banshees of Inisherin”: soul.

On January 24, it will be clear who will be present at the Oscars in March and with what. Judging by the Golden Globes, all real movies. In any case, in my 27 years as a journalist, I have never experienced such a good vintage. None with so many quirky, insane and megalomaniac films. It’s a party.

The Banshees of Inisherin is now in cinemas. “Tár” will be in cinemas from February 23, “The Fabelmans” on March 9.
“Everything Everywhere All at Once” and “Elvis” run on Amazon Prime.