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Updated 12/22/2023 with details on shortlisted A Still Small Voice. Updated with quotes, 1:37 Pm: American Symphony, the Obamas-executive produced documentary about Grammy-winning musician Jon Batiste, scored a remarkable hat trick today as the Oscar shortlists were revealed, but a couple of documentary icons were left on the bench.

In more headlines from the announcement, a beloved documentary filmmaker who died unexpectedly in August earned a place on the nonfiction feature shortlist. And the film about cherished actor Michael J. Fox, directed by Oscar winner Davis Guggenheim, made the list. Two films earned double recognition – making shortlists for doc feature and International Feature Film. [See full shortlists for doc feature and doc short below].

Suleika Jouad and Jon Batiste in ‘American Symphony’

The most eye-popping takeaway is the recognition for American Symphony, the Netflix film directed by Oscar nominee Matthew Heineman and produced by Higher Ground, the production company of former President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama. It made the...

With the 2024 Oscars shortlists for 10 categories arriving in late December, one key element to look out for is the international contenders with the legs to make it into categories past Best International Feature Film. This time last year, Netflix’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” established itself as a possible Best Picture nominee with multiple craft mentions, and by the March ceremony, the Edward Berger film collected the majority of Academy Awards given to below-the-line artisans.

This year, lightning may strike twice, as established Hollywood filmmaker J.A. Bayona’s “Society of the Snow” (Netflix), Spain’s official submission for Best International Feature Film, landed on four shortlists. A last-minute premiere at the Venice Film Festival, the moving retelling of the harrowing story of how the Uruguayan rugby team survived a plane crash in the Andes in 1972 has been building momentum as a must-watch among voters this holiday season.

Still...

Oscar nominee Bobi Wine: The People’s President

Contenders in the Best Documentary category for the 2024 Oscars were announced today, with a diverse range of themes including US history, international politics, romance in the face of Alzheimer's disease, and the art of creating film audio. The 15 films were whittled down from a list of 167 qualifying films. Only a third of them will go on to receive actual Oscar nominations, and we'll find out which on 23 January.

American Symphony Apolonia, Apolonia Beyond Utopia Bobi Wine: The People’s President Desperate Souls, Dark City And The Legend Of Midnight Cowboy The Eternal Memory Four Daughters Going To Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project In The Rearview Stamped From The Beginning Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie A Still Small Voice 32 Sounds To Kill A Tiger 20 Days In Mariupol ...

Shortlists announced in 10 categories for 96th Academy Awards.

The Academy has announced shortlists in 10 categories for the 96th Oscars in March 2024, with The Taste Of Things (France), Fallen Leaves (Finland), The Zone Of Interest (UK), Totem (Mexico), and Amerikatsi, Armenia’s first entry on the shortlist, among those making the cut in the international feature film category.

The international contest also sees Pawo Choyning Dorji’s drama The Monk And The Gun becomes Bhutan’s second film to make the shortlist after his Oscar nominee Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom from two seasons ago.

A strong showing by European...

Shortlists announced in 10 categories for 96th Academy Awards.

The Academy has announced shortlists in 10 categories for the 96th Oscars in March 2024, with The Taste Of Things (France), Fallen Leaves (Finland), The Zone Of Interest (UK), Totem (Mexico), and for the first time Armenia (Amerikatsi) among those making the cut in the international feature film category.

The international contest also sees Pawo Choyning Dorji’s Bhutanese drama The Monk And The Gun become the country’s second film to make the shortlist after his Oscar nominee from two seasons ago.

A strong showing by European films besides the aforementioned comprises J.A. Bayona...

Shortlists announced in 10 categories for 96th Academy Awards.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced shortlists in 10 categories for the 96th Academy Awards, with The Taste Of Things (France), The Zone Of Interest (UK), Fallen Leaves (Finland), The Mother Of All Lies (Morocco), and Totem (Mexico) among those to make the cut in the international feature film category.

Shortlists were also announced for documentary feature, documentary short film, makeup and hairstyling, music (original score), music (original song), animated short film, live action short film, sound and visual effects.

More to follow…

Documentary Feature Film

Fifteen films will...

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on Thursday announced shortlists in 10 categories for the 96th Academy Awards.

The shortlists were unveiled in the following categories: documentary feature film, documentary short film, international feature film, makeup and hairstyling, music (original score), music (original song), animated short film, live-action short film, sound and visual effects.

Barbie, Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon, The Color Purple and The Zone of Interest are among the film that made the cut on multiple lists.

Nominations voting run Jan. 11-16, with the official noms announcement set for Jan. 23.

The Oscars ceremony will be held March 10 at the Dolby Theatre at Ovation Hollywood and will be televised live on ABC. Jimmy Kimmel is returning as host.

See the full shortlists below, along with the Academy’s comments about each category.

Documentary Feature Film

Fifteen films will advance in this category. One hundred sixty-seven films were eligible in the category.

Today is not just significant for the solstice and the passing of fall into winter, it also is the first bell ringing in the race for Oscar as the Academy has just announced semi-finalists in 10 categories.

Fifteen movies each are moving forward in the contests for International Feature Film, Documentary Feature, Original Song and Music Score, plus the documentary, animated and live action short-film categories. Ten movies each advanced today in the categories of Sound, Visual Effects and Makeup & Hairstyling.

Not surprisingly, 2023’s box office champ Barbie leads the way with five shortlist mentions including Original Score, Sound and three for Original Song, but curiously did not make the cut for Hair & Makeup. Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon ( including two for the late musical icon Robbie Robertson in Score and Song), and J.A. Bayona’s Spanish Oscar entry Society of the Snow are next with four each.

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

The Adults (Dustin Guy Defa)

Six years after directing his last feature, Dustin Guy Defa returns with The Adults, a film of complicated shared histories and gradually revealing inner lives. With his relatively sprawling Person to Person, Defa followed a wide array of characters over five interweaving storylines. This time he focuses on one family and, closer still, on an unmistakable feeling: that of moving out and growing up, only to return home and realize all that delicately assembled adulthood was merely a façade. Playing out across a leafy town in upstate New York, The Adults follows a trio of siblings as they reunite: the brother who went away and the sisters who did not. – Rory O. (full review)

Where to Stream:...

As a teen, Samantha suffered trauma from assaults. She had Veronica, a friend who stood by her until one day she vanished. Finally she met Becca and in Samantha’s troubled mind, believed Veronica had returned. Samantha will do whatever it takes to make Becca remember what she never experienced. Disremembered will be available early 2024.

Disremembered tells the story of a teenager who lived through a nightmare and then grows up to be a woman filled with vengeance. Physical and mental abuse left many scars and fuel unbelievable behavior. This is the darkest film yet from Acrostar Films.

Disremembered stars:

Angel Nichole Bradford – Morrigan Thompson – Beth Metcalf – Kelsey Ann Baker – Al Vitucci – Olivia Tracy – Christopher Kahler

Producer Ann Myrna

Directed By Steve Hermann Music By Tony Parsons

Written By Steve Hermann and Zackary Akers – SFX Deryk Wehrley and Beth Metcalf

Disremembered will be filmed in November 2023 in central Illinois. A...

Joe Buck (Jon Voight) with Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman) in John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy

In the second instalment with Nancy Buirski on Desperate Souls, Dark City And The Legend Of Midnight Cowboy (special advisor Martin Scorsese) we discuss Jon Voight as Joe Buck with the little girl reading a Wonder Woman comic, Jennifer Salt’s Crazy Annie and Sylvia Miles’s Cass in Midnight Cowboy. John Schlesinger with Dp Adam Holender showing New York the way it really was, a Roberta Flack song and William Wyler’s adaption of Lilian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour, starring Shirley MacLaine and Audrey Hepburn, Nancy’s longtime cinematographer Rex Miller, Far From The Madding Crowd and Vietnam, Brian De Palma on Dennis Hopper and the “international invasion”, and screenwriter Waldo Salt also came up.

Nancy Buirski on Crazy Annie (Jennifer Salt) with Joe Buck (Jon Voight): “Many of the women in...

When Midnight Cowboy came out in 1969, Miami Herald critic John Huddy heralded its arrival with a string of superlatives: “Staggering, shattering, heartbreaking, hilarious, tragic, raw and absurd.”

Over the years, the ranks of its admirers has only grown, among them documentary filmmaker Nancy Buirski.

“I remember feeling that it was a really radical film,” recalls Buirski, who first saw Midnight Cowboy sometime after its original release. “It felt different from anything I had seen… It was like a gut punch.”

Director Nancy Buirski

Buirski’s documentary Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy, now playing in limited release in New York, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Detroit and other cities, digs into the loam that produced such a bleak yet beautiful flower of a film. Midnight Cowboy hit theaters the same year as Hello, Dolly! and Paint Your Wagon but unlike those celluloid larks, John Schlesinger’s film...

Footage of late Sixties New York City seamlessly sways into Dustin Hoffman’s Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy stealing a handful of plum tomatoes and a coconut from a fruit stand with help from his new sidekick Joe Buck (Jon Voight). “These Eyes” sing Guess Who, and Lucy Sante comments that the film “could be an advertisement for anti-glamour and yet by doing this it manages to express the zeitgeist.”

Nancy Buirski’s masterful Desperate Souls, Dark City And The Legend Of Midnight Cowboy, edited with Anthony Ripoli is much more than a documentary on John Schlesinger’s multiple Oscar-winning film. Based on James Leo Herlihy’s novel, adapted by Waldo Salt, shot by Adam Holender, with costumes by Ann Roth, Midnight Cowboy features an impressive supporting cast, including Sylvia Miles, Brenda Vaccaro, Jennifer Salt, and...

Desperate Souls, Dark City and The Legend Of Midnight Cowboy director Nancy Buirski on Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo: “They become appealing because of these wonderful performances by Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman.”

Nancy Buirski’s masterpiece is much more than a documentary on John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy, screenplay by Waldo Salt, shot by Adam Holender, costumes by Ann Roth, and starring Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman with Sylvia Miles, Brenda Vaccaro, Jennifer Salt, and Bob Balaban. Desperate Souls, Dark City And The Legend Of Midnight Cowboy, edited by Anthony Ripoli, features on-camera interviews shot by Rex Miller with Lucy Sante, Brian De Palma, Edmund White, Michael Childers, Charles Kaiser, Jim Hoberman, Ian Buruma, Voight, Vaccaro, Balaban, Holender, and Jennifer Salt.

Brenda Vaccaro with John Schlesinger: “Ann Roth saved my life,” says Vaccaro, “by putting me in that fur coat.”

The evocative, wide-ranging, and evermore timely documentary drops us...

Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy professes to be something more than just a documentary about the making of Midnight Cowboy: an extremely ambitious film attempting to navigate the impact and cultural presence of John Schlesinger’s masterpiece while also exploring the history of American queer cinema, the death of the Western in the mainstream, and the counter-culture of the ’60s transforming into the nihilism of the 1970s. Packing so much information and so many perspectives into 101 minutes occasionally comes across as overstuffed. But Desperate Souls’ sheer enthusiasm for Midnight Cowboy and the cultural period is infectious, a vibe that compensates for certain faults holding it back from becoming a truly great documentary.

While structurally ambitious in its approach to montage, the precise cutting is flawed and fragmented. Transitions between interviews and archival footage are often awkward and lackluster, and editing plays slightly rushed during...

By Glenn Charlie Dunks

“When in doubt, make a western.” – John Ford.

This quote stuck out to me in the opening of The Taking, the latest film about film from Swiss director Alexandre O. Philippe. Like ford, director John Schlesinger made a western himself after an early-career stumble. The films of John Ford and Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy aren’t linked too much; at least not on the surface. But with two new documentaries, they are given visual deep-dives that tie them together as logical ends of a spectrum that used images to sell America as a hard land or hard men.

Both Philippe’s The Taking and Nancy Buirski’s Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy err on the side of cinematic essays than traditional behind-the-scenes making-of documentaries. Each offer their subjects’ take on the (quote unquote) western as both of their time and in many ways timeless.