Jane Austen's Period Drama (2025)/The Singers (2025)/Two People Exchanging Saliva (2025)/A Friend of Dorothy (2025)

Nominated for Best Live Action Short    For expediency's sake, I'm lumping all the shorts together.

Jane Austen's Period Drama - Kanopy - a very funny short that people online have likened to a better class of SNL skit.  I think that's setting the bar too low but I don't like SNL.  

Miss Estrognia Talbot (Julia Aks) is in the middle of being proposed to by handsome bachelor Mr. Dickley (Ta'imua) when she unexpectedly gets her period.  Confused and alarmed, Dickley rushes her home where she argues with her sisters over how much she should educate him on women's biology.

Honestly, it's 2026.  If we cannot as a society be over the "ew, girls have cooties" factor about periods, what are we even doing?

The Singers - Netflix-  almost the polar opposite of Jane Austen, this doesn't have a single woman on screen and is four times as emotional.

A bar full of men is energized by a late-night bet:  whoever is the best singer wins a free beer and $100.

Absolutely magical performances.

Two People Exchanging Saliva - YouTube - what if Carol had been directed by Yorgos Lanthimos?

A shopgirl (Luàna Bajrami) and a wealthy housewife (Zar Amir Ebrahimi) try to suppress their desire in a world that criminalizes kissing as disgusting.

Only the French would think that the fastest way to show a dystopia is to make kissing illegal.  The garlic gum is going to give me nightmares, though.

A Friend of Dorothy - Kanopy - And we're back to being wholesome and cute.

A teen (Alistair Nwachukwu) trying to retrieve an errant soccer ball from a garden befriends an elderly lady named Dorothy (Miriam Margolyes) who encourages him to pursue his dreams.  All of them.

So sweet.  

Little Amelie or the Character of Rain (2025)

Nominated for Best Animated Feature   Content warning: child endangerment (drowning)

Amélie (Loïse Charpentier) is a Belgian toddler living in Japan with her diplomat family.  She spends the first two years of her life in a vegetative state, believing that she is a god.  An earthquake "awakens" her and allows her to finally begin interacting, but being limited to a squishy human form is very frustrating, so her family hires a nanny, Nishio (Victoria Grosbois), based on the recommendation of their austere landlady (Yumi Fujimori).  Amélie and Nishio bond, which angers the landlady, who still blames all foreigners for the war that killed her husband and son.  Geopolitical resentments are tough to navigate when you are only three-years-old.  

This was a little jarring at first because the animation is like MS Paint-style pixelation.  It wasn't what I was expecting but it was certainly eye-catching.  I don't think it will win but it's still absolutely worth supporting independent animation.  

Sirat (2025)

Nominated for Best International Film and Best Sound    Content warning: dog in distress, animal death (dog, off-screen), child death (off-screen), violence, mild gore

Luis (Sergi Lopez) has traveled to a rave in southern Morocco with his son, Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona), in the hopes of finding his missing daughter, Mar.  He shows her photo around and manages to inspire some pity in a small group of ravers, who tell him there is a second rave planned even deeper in the desert, close to Mauritania.  Against their advice, Luis and Esteban follow the group into the desert, slowly becoming closer as a group until unimaginable tragedy strikes.

If I had to count all the ways this movie wasn't for me, we'd be here all day.  It's well-made.  That's about all the praise I can spare.  I hated the music.  I don't like house, techno, EDM, or trance.  I don't like concerts or live music, really, at all so the idea of going to the middle of nowhere to hear super-loud repetitive music gives me a full-body shudder.  I got the found family thing.  I got the "trial by faith" thing.  It wasn't enough to make me like the movie.

However, a lot of people really do like it and maybe you'll be one of them.  It's currently not available for streaming so fire up that VPN.

It Was Just an Accident (2025)

Nominated for Best International Feature and Best Original Screenplay    Content warning:  animal death (dog, off-screen but you hear it), descriptions of torture.    Biggest surprise of the season for me, so far.

Vahid (Vahid Mobassari) is having a normal day trying to get stuff ready for his sister's wedding when a customer comes into his repair shop.  Vahid recognizes the sound of the man's prosthetic leg squeaking as belonging to the interrogator Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi), who tortured him in prison.  But Vahid was always blindfolded, so he can't be sure.  Impulsively, he kidnaps the customer and seeks out Shiva (Mariam Afshari), a former journalist who was also imprisoned and tortured by Eghbal, to see if she can positively identify him.  Shiva is now doing wedding photography for Goli (Hadis Pakbaten), another torture victim, and when Goli hears they might have Eghbal, she demands to be included in the decisions.  Shiva only knows one person who could make a positive ID, Hamid (Mohammed Ali Elyasmehr), but he is volatile and bitter, and Vahid doesn't necessarily trust that Hamid would tell the truth.

Okay, so all of that is an accurate synopsis of the movie that does not in any way tell you how funny it is.  Yes, very serious, kidnapping, moral quandary, wrestling demons, but also (!) goofy bureaucratic nonsense, cartoonish levels of graft, and five good people who are trying to do the right thing for justice that had been denied to them.

Don't sleep on this one because it looks too heavy.  I promise you, it is handled so well.  It's streaming on Hulu.

Arco (2025)

Nominated for Best Animated Feature    

Arco (Juliano Krue Valdi) lives in the far future where time travel is possible thanks to rainbow-colored capes and diamonds that break down light.  His parents and sister travel to the past to retrieve rare or extinct plants but all Arco wants is to see real dinosaurs.  One night, he steals his sister's flying suit and goes to the past, but shorts it and ends up in the near future of 2075 instead.  After a crash landing, he meets Iris (Romy Fay), a ten-year-old girl desperate for connection since her parents work all week and leave her and her baby brother in the care of Mikki, a robot.  Arco lost his traveling diamond in the woods where he landed and Iris agrees to help him look for it despite the pending threat of wildfires.

This is a very pretty movie.  That's about all I can say about it.  It's fine.  It feels like an anime but is French.  I tried to get the French language track on Amazon but it wouldn't take, for some reason, so I watched the English dub.  I found the three brothers super annoying but otherwise, it's not bad.  It's at least an original.  Currently only available for rent.

Jurassic World: Rebirth (2025)

Nominated for Best Visual Effects    All right, we are in the homestretch.  The ceremony is tonight so I'm going to push out as many posts as I managed to get drafted during the week.

Zora (Scarlett Johansson) is a mercenary hired by a pharmaceutical company to get blood samples from some of the largest dinosaurs produced during the ill-fated Jurassic World theme park expansions.  She is assisted by Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), a paleontologist eager to see specimens up close.  But when they hear a mayday from a family whose sailboat was capsized by a mosasaur, the objectives change.

Talk about a series with diminishing returns.  This has an A-list cast spouting the most wooden, cliche-ridden dialogue, zero thrills, bland humor, and nowhere near enough gore to make up for all the above.  Unless you are seriously into the franchise, skip this one entirely.  It's basically Jurassic Park 3 but without the charm of Michael Jeter.

It does make a good point about how quickly we become inured to miracles but it's not worth sitting through just to hear that.  Also, it's part of the villain's monologue because of course it is.  When I watched it, it was streaming on Peacock but it has since moved to Netflix if you can't heed warnings and want to watch it anyway.

The Voice of Hind Rajab (2025)

Nominated for Best International Feature   Content warning: war violence, child death

Six-year-old Hind Rajab Hamada is trapped in a car in the West Bank, pinned down by Israeli soldiers.  Over an hour away, a team of Red Crescent emergency call workers try desperately to navigate the bureaucratic red tape to send an ambulance to rescue her.

This docu-drama uses actor portrayals for the emergency team but the real, actual emergency calls as audio.  You will hear real people die.  DO NOT feel like you have to watch this movie.  You are not "bearing witness"; you are traumatizing yourself.  Trust me.  You don't need to hear a six-year-old crying while she is being shot at.  The only people who need to hear that are ones on a jury at the ICJ.  

That being said, the film itself isn't that great.  It probably should have just been a straight documentary.  Competition is really stiff in this category, as well, so I'm not giving it good odds.  I watched this on Amazon so you don't have to.