We know that Oscar ballot in your office pool can be daunting. Do you just rely on what the experts say or do you see the movies for yourself? With less than a week to get caught up on all the Academy Award favorites, we think it’s time to start binge-watching. Here’s how to watch the 10 Oscar nominees for Best Picture and other assorted nominated films, including best animated movies and best foreign-language films.
Best Picture:
Call Me By Your Name
Director: Luca Guadagnino
How to Watch: In theaters
Call Me By Your Name is an exquisitely shot movie, alive with the privilege and luxury of what it means to spend one’s formative sexual years in the Italian countryside, but more importantly, it’s a movie that aches far harder for the lives and relationships that could have been. —Dom Sinacola / Full Review
Darkest Hour
Director: Joe Wright
How to Watch: Amazon, iTunes, In theaters
Darkest Hour is a film of flummoxed old white men hollering at each other, a perfect foil to (and double-bill alongside) Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, both because the two take place at about the same time during the early years of World War II—as Hitler’s world domination began to take shape and an invasion of the UK imminent—and because they are entirely different experiences: Dunkirk is all action, while Joe Wright’s film is all words. Gary Oldman’s performance is formidable. Not only is his makeup beyond convincing (and undoubtedly Oscar-worthy), but Oldman understands that the bluster of what’s required of him to overcome the silliness of both his casting and facade must be balanced in quiet. —Dom Sinacola / Full review
Dunkirk
Director: Christopher Nolan
How to Watch: Amazon, iTunes, On Demand, Redbox, YouTube
Christopher Nolan has always been a filmmaker of contradictory impulses. He wants to awe you with spectacle but also capture the restlessness of the soul, to twist every emotion for all its worth but also stand outside and objectively observe, to be plain and direct and earnest but also leave you locked in puzzle-boxes to take apart and put back together again. He is ambitious but reserved; pop but art; loud but quiet. He has been wrestling with all these impulses for years, sometimes resulting in the greatest popcorn blockbuster of this century (The Dark Knight) and sometimes resulting in an awkward, overly complicated mishmash of corn and kitsch (Interstellar). He has a filmmaking instrument of almost overwhelming power, but has, especially recently, had an increasingly difficult time reigning in that power. Which is why Dunkirk is such a staggering, almost fantastical achievement. It takes everything Nolan does well and everything he doesn’t, everything he fights against and everything he embraces, everything great and terrible about him, and streamlines it, focuses it, until it’s pure Nolan, straight into your veins. It’s the most Christopher Nolan film imaginable. It also might just be his best one. —Will Leitch / Full Review
Get Out
Director: Jordan Peele
How to Watch: HBO Go, Amazon, iTunes, On Demand, Redbox, YouTube
Peele’s a natural behind the camera, but Get Out benefits most from its deceptively trim premise, a simplicity which belies rich thematic depth. Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) and Rose (Allison Williams) go to spend a weekend with her folks in their lavish upstate New York mansion, where they’re throwing the annual Armitage bash with all their friends in attendance. Chris immediately feels out of place; events escalate from there, taking the narrative in a ghastly direction that ultimately ties back to the unsettling sensation of being the “other” in a room full of people who aren’t like you—and never let you forget it. Put indelicately, Get Out is about being black and surrounded by whites who squeeze your biceps without asking, who fetishize you to your face, who analyze your blackness as if it’s a fashion trend. —Andy Crump / Full Review
Lady Bird
Director: Greta Gerwig
How to Watch: Amazon, iTunes, On Demand, YouTube
Before Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson (Saoirse Ronan)—Lady Bird is her given name, as in “[she] gave it to [her]self”—auditions for the school musical, she watches a young man belting the final notes to “Being Alive” from Stephen Sondheim’s Company. A few moments before, while in a car with her mother, she lays her head on the window wistfully and says with a sigh, “I wish I could just live through something.” Stuck in Sacramento, where she thinks there’s nothing to be offered her while paying acute attention to everything her home does have to offer, Lady Bird—and the film, written and directed by Greta Gerwig, that shares her name—has ambivalence running through her veins. What a perfect match: Stephen Sondheim and Greta Gerwig. Few filmmakers are able to capture the same kind of ambiguity and mixed feelings that involve the refusal to make up one’s mind. —Kyle Turner / Full Review
Phantom Thread
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
How to Watch: In theaters
Phantom Thread is a movie that is so wonderfully made, so meticulous in its construction, so deeply felt in execution, that you can almost overlook how prickly and scabrous it is. This has to be the most luscious-to-watch film, ever, that is in large part about how self-centered and inflexible the world of relationships can be, how we can only give up so much of ourselves and it’s up to our partner to figure out how to deal with that, if they want to at all. —Will Leitch / Full Review
The Post
Director: Steven Spielberg
How to Watch: In theaters
The Post begins as a restrained procedural, sticking only to the facts surrounding The Washington Post obtaining, in 1972, top secret Pentagon Papers showing (without a doubt) that the American resolve for winning the war in Vietnam was severely diminished—the exact opposite mood the U.S. administration was claiming at the time. This strictly matter-of-fact approach would have made directors like Gosta Gavras and, yes, Alan J. Pakula proud. Of course, this being a Steven Spielberg joint, The Post can’t help but gradually bring heavy emotional tension to the film’s forefront, easing us moment by moment into a fairly manipulative yet exhilarating finale. —Oktay Ege KozakFull Review
The Shape of Water
Director: Guillermo del Toro
How to Watch: In theaters
Guillermo del Toro’s latest, an ageless story of true love between a human woman and a fish-man, references his filmography both at and below surface levels: It suggests a riff on Abe Sapien, the psychic ichthyoid sidekick in both Hellboy films, but directly invokes the structure and fairy tale trappings of his 2006 breakout picture, Pan’s Labyrinth. Del Toro has us set down in 1960s Baltimore, where Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins) works the janitorial night shift for the not-at-all-shady Occam Aerospace Research Center. She’s alone, mostly, except for her next door neighbor, Giles (Richard Jenkins), and her coworker and friend, Zelda (Octavia Spencer). Giles and Zelda give Elisa a voice she quite literally lacks: She’s mute, and spends most of the film communicating with sign language. Elisa’s clockwork days are disrupted by the arrival of the Asset (Doug Jones, the actor behind Abe Sapiens’ prosthetics), the aforementioned fish-man, in the custody of Colonel Strickland (Michael Shannon). Del Toro weaves together his influences so finely, so delicately, that the product of his handiwork feels entirely new. That’s the magic of the movies, and, more importantly, the magic of del Toro. —Andy Crump / Full Review
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Director: Martin McDonagh
How to Watch: Amazon, iTunes, On Demand, YouTube
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri stars Frances McDormand as Mildred, a divorced mother who lives in a rural Missouri community. Everybody in a small town knows everybody else’s business, and Mildred is Ebbing’s walking tragedy. Whether it’s Our Town or Dogville, fiction occasionally uses small towns as a microcosm for America at large, showing what’s wonderful or toxic about our country. Judging by this film, the state of our union is fractious and violent—and only getting worse. You probably didn’t need a movie to tell you that, but writer-director Martin McDonagh’s volatile comedy-drama keeps poking at our scabs, pinpointing our humanity and surprising us with a series of small revelations. This is a film that’s proudly impertinent but also deeply morally serious. And even if Three Billboards doesn’t always hold together, that’s appropriate for its anxious characters who are, themselves, a little unsteady. —Tim Grierson / Full Review
Other Movies with Nominations:
Abacus: Small Enough to Jail (Documentary) – Amazon Prime, iTunes
All the Money in the World (Supporting Actor – Christopher Plummer) – In theaters
Baby Driver (Film Editing, Sound Editing) – Amazon, iTunes, On Demand, Redbox, YouTube
Beauty and the Beast (Costume Design) – Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, On Demand, Redbox, YouTube
The Big Sick (Original Screenplay) – Amazon, iTunes, On Demand, Redbox, YouTube
Blade Runner 2049 (Cinematography, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing, Production Design, Visual Effects) – Amazon, iTunes, On Demand, Redbox, YouTube
Boss Baby (Animated Movie) – Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, On Demand, Redbox, YouTube
The Breadwinner (Animated Movie) – Amazon, iTunes, On Demand, YouTube
Coco (Animated Movie) – Amazon, iTunes, In theaters, On Demand, YouTube
Disaster Artist (Adapted Screenplay) – Amazon, iTunes, On Demand, YouTube
Faces Places (Documentary) – Unavailable
The Florida Project (Supporting Actor – Willem Defoe) – Amazon, iTunes, On Demand, Redbox, YouTube
The Greatest Showman (Original Song) – In theaters
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (Visual Effects) – Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, On Demand, Redbox, YouTube
I, Tonya (Lead Actress – Margot Robie; Supporting Actress – Allison Janey) – In theaters
Icarus (Documentary) – Netflix
Kong Skull Island for SFX (Visual Effects) – HBO, iTunes, On Demand, Redbox, YouTube
Last Men In Aleppo (Documentary) – Netflix
Logan (Adapted Screenplay) – HBO, Amazon, iTunes, On Demand, Redbox, YouTube
Loving Vincent (Animated Movie) – Amazon, iTunes, On Demand, YouTube
Marshall (Original Song) – Amazon, iTunes, On Demand, Redbox, YouTube
Molly’s Game (Adapted Screenplay) – Unavailable
Mudbound (Supporting Actress – Mary J. Blige; Cinematography – Rachel Morrison) – Netflix
On Body and Soul (Foreign Language Film – Hungary) – Netflix
Roman J. Israel (Lead Actor – Denzel Washington) – Amazon, iTunes, On Demand, Redbox, YouTube
The Square (Foreign Language Film – Sweden) – Amazon, iTunes, On Demand, YouTube
Star Wars the Last Jedi (Sound Editing, Original Score, Visual Effects) – Unavailable
Strong Island (Documentary) – Netflix
Victoria and Abdul (Makeup and Hair, Costume Design) – Amazon, iTunes, On Demand, Redbox, YouTube
War for the Planet of the Apes (Visual Effects) – Amazon, iTunes, On Demand, Redbox, YouTube