Oscars 2023: WSJ Critics on the 10 Best Picture Nominees

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

The nominees for the 95th Academy Awards were announced this morning. Here's a roundup of the films contending for Best Picture, as covered by The Wall Street Journal's critics.

All Quiet on the Western Front

A crash course on World War I might include Stanley Kubrick’s “Paths of Glory,” Barbara Tuchman’s “The Guns of August,” Paul Fussell’s “The Great War and Modern Memory,” and Erich Maria Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front.” Based on his own traumatizing experiences as a young German soldier in the trenches of France, Remarque’s 1929 novel now gets its first German-language adaptation courtesy of Netflix and director Edward Berger. Fully understanding the war—who does?—may not be necessary in appreciating the disturbing, moving and sometimes too-beautiful production. But that production certainly puts a Teutonic tweak on history, sometimes to outrageous effect.

Avatar: The Way of Water


In an era in which theatrical motion pictures prize spectacle above all else, James Cameron has once again out-spectacled them all. With “Avatar: The Way of Water,” Mr. Cameron reaffirms himself as the blockbuster director of his generation—still the king of the world. It’s a deeply immersive, utterly enchanting three-hour escape that can’t be compared with anything except its 2009 predecessor, which for several years was the world’s highest-grossing film (in nominal dollars). To distinguish it from the first film, some might call the second entry in the proposed five-movie series “W.O.W.” And “Wow” is as handy a one-word.

The Banshees of Inisherin

Wounded but funny, quiet but resonant and resistant to anything like a Hollywood formula, “The Banshees of Inisherin” is a strangely profound little comedy.

Elvis

On the cusp of age 60, the hyperkinetic Australian director Baz Luhrmann could earn our forgiveness, and even our gratitude, if he calmed down a bit, but instead Mr. Luhrmann remains the same overcaffeinated film student he has always been. His specialty is updating classics such as “La Bohème” and “Romeo and Juliet” for the young and impatient, but his idea of updating means firing a confetti cannon laced with cubic zirconia and tinsel at the target.

Mr. Luhrmann has returned with “Elvis,” which hopes to make Elvis Presley interesting to people born long after the entertainer perished in 1977 at 42.

Everything Everywhere All at Once

“Everything Everywhere All at Once” may be the most literal film title since Georges Méliès made “A Trip to the Moon.” This ingenious dazzler—half-poignant epic, half-prank—by filmmaking duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (aka The Daniels) introduces us to one woman, Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh, of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”), and her multitudes, the infinite Evelyns scattered across the multiverse whose decisions, big and small, peeled their life trajectories apart from the Alpha Evelyn, a brilliant scientist who invented a technique to leap between her counterparts.

The Fabelmans

As recalled in the deeply felt and finely etched memoir-movie “The Fabelmans,” Steven Spielberg grew up in a family where one parent was an artist and the other an engineer. A more ideal background can scarcely be imagined for a film director, who must navigate overlapping creative and technical challenges on every project. His parents even provided young Steven with narrative sustenance: an appropriately cinematic family mystery that took him many years to understand and that has given much texture to his work. Absent or distracted fathers are a recurring feature in the early films, but Mr. Spielberg learned as an adult that it was his mother who was primarily responsible for a family rift.

Like the best memoirs, “The Fabelmans,” which Mr. Spielberg co-wrote with his longtime collaborator Tony Kushner, drills down into experience with admirable specificity and frankness.

Tár

Cate Blanchett is a force of nature, but then again, so is a blizzard, or a cyclone. My respect for all of the above is considerable, but my love for them is limited.

In Ms. Blanchett’s latest movie she plays an imperious and exacting conductor. “Tár” is meant to be a deep dive in conducting classical music, but unfortunately at its end I understood conducting as little as I did at the beginning, which is to say not at all.

Top Gun: Maverick

The short review of “Top Gun: Maverick” is that it’s half videogame, half car commercial—which may be exactly what audiences want from their big-screen experience now, frictionless storytelling with special effects. They may also want Tom Cruise who, as most readers are likely aware, returns as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, chronically insubordinate Navy captain and the best pilot anyone’s ever seen—even the crusty Rear Admiral Cain played by Ed Harris, who’s on hand to inject the proceedings with a bit of the right stuff.

Triangle of Sadness

Should a woman who makes three times as much as her boyfriend pay for dinner? Can Marxists and capitalists learn anything from each other? More important, what would “Gilligan’s Island” have been like if it had been directed by Luis Buñuel? Such are the questions raised by writer-director Ruben Östlund in his savagely entertaining social satire “Triangle of Sadness,” one of the liveliest and most provocative films of 2022.

Women Talking

“Women Talking” begins in the gruesome aftermath of a hideous mass rape and a question being urgently discussed among a group of women victims: What to do about it? Written for the screen and directed by Sarah Polley from Miriam Toews’s novel, the film nearly boils over with righteous fury at the treatment of its characters, who are meant to stand for women in general.