Watch List Weekly Recap 1/27/23

Sundance reports and musings on the latest Oscar nominations.

Jan 27, 2023

This is the Friday recap of Ty Burr’s Watch List postings for the week. If you’d like to receive this weekly email ONLY, please go to your account page and under “Email notifications” uncheck every box except “Weekly Digest.” If you’d prefer to not receive it at all, uncheck just “Weekly Digest.”

A heavy workload this week: I’m just back from a six-day stint at the Sundance Film Festival — the first in-person version of the fest in three years — where I spent the week watching movies, talking about movies, writing about movies, and posting about movies. Here are the three field reports I sent out on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday:

Anne Hathaway (l.) and Thomasin McKenzie (r.) in ”Eileen”

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Sundance 2023 Report I

The first in-person Sundance Film Festival in three years is unfolding as a congenial if slightly askew affair. Moviegoers, publicists, and even the volunteers seem dazed as they wander about in the high-altitude sunshine of Park City before plunging into the dark of the screenings. The buses are running on a rusty, overcrowded schedule. Even the magpie…

2 years ago · 8 likes · 13 comments · Ty Burr

Greta Lee (l.) and Teo Yoo (r.) in “Past Lives”

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Sundance 2023 Report, Part II

You know a movie is special when you’re sitting in a festival screening surrounded by hardened industry professionals who are all, men and women alike, quietly weeping in the dark. “Past Lives” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐), the first film from writer-director Celine Song, isn’t so much the big buzz film of…

2 years ago · 12 likes · 6 comments · Ty Burr

l. to r. Chiwetel Eijiofor, Rosalie Craig, and Emilia Clarke in “The Pod Generation”

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Sundance 2023 Report, Part III

I have this odd and rather silly failing of memory: Every time I come to a film festival like Sundance, I arrive looking forward to the narrative features, and every time I find myself surprised at how good the documentaries are – how gripping and/or entertaining and/or simply compelling as a record of human experience. And they’re almost always richer …

2 years ago · 5 likes · 1 comment · Ty Burr

The nominations for the 95th Academy Awards were announced Tuesday morning, and I had a few thoughts to offer about the dominance of “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” among other surprises. And that’s all I’ll have to say on the matter until we get a little closer to the Oscars themselves.

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Oscar Nominations 2023

If you had told me all the way back in March of last year that a crazy movie about parallel universes, martial arts, mother-daughter bonding, and laundry would dominate the nominations for the 2023 Academy Awards, I – well, I would have smiled in happy disbelief. Is there a chance…

2 years ago · 5 likes · 18 comments · Ty Burr

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