What our critics (and one anonymous weirdo) think of this year's Best Picture contenders

The Academy Awards are happening this Sunday, and we thought you might want to read everything our critics wrote about the nine films vying for Best Picture. Or maybe you just wanna look at these illustrations made by someone who hasn't seen any of these movies.

Gravity

City Paper grade: B+

For months, partisans of Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity have been lobbing claims that the movie, which nearly amounts to a real-time account of stranded astronaut Sandra Bullock's attempt to return from orbit, represents a bold new frontier — a redefinition, even, of cinema's possibilities. But it's more accurate, if less starry-eyed, to say that it takes us back to the beginning, to the primal astonishment of seeing a locomotive rush by on the screen.

The difference is that there's no locomotive, and, if you see the movie in IMAX 3D — sit close — there's no screen. It's as if the movie theater's black and the vast darkness of space are part of a continuum, and when Bullock spins loose from a space shuttle pelted with hurtling satellite debris, Earth whizzes by over our heads as well. When she quips, early on, "Just keeping your lunch down is harder than it looks," she's not just speaking only for herself.

What plot Gravity has is pitched between elemental and crude: Bullock and fellow spacewalker George Clooney pin their hopes of survival on a nearby space station, and deal with some personal demons on the long, lonely trip over. But the lyricism of Cuarón's filmmaking overwhelms the leaden clumsiness of his dialogue (co-written with son Jonás), which often functions simply as subtitles for the subtext-impaired. When Bullock floats in the safety of an airlock and the camera pulls back to focus on a single, weightless tear, words aren't just superfluous but unwanted.

Steven Price's Hans-Zimmer-meets-the-Queen-Mary score mistakes bombast for grandeur, and the moments when sensory overload gives way to clunky character-building are painful, but there's legitimate awe in Cuarón's approach to the cosmos. Gravity's technical achievements are doubtless substantial, but they're so seamless they become irrelevant: Eventually, you stop asking "How the hell did they do that?" and just accept that it's done.

—Sam Adams

American Hustle

City Paper grade: B- 

A lumpy cocktail of polyester suits and plunging necklines, David O. Russell’s semi-fictional take on the Abscam scandal wants to be a movie and a half. The performances — especially by Christian Bale (wielding his pot belly like a tank) and Bradley Cooper (here, as in Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook, urged toward his worst instincts) — are oversized, the plot overloaded, the camera work arbitrarily frenetic. When Russell’s not ripping off GoodFellas — which, very frequently, he is — he likes to pointlessly swing the camera toward an actor’s hands and back up again, not because hands are important but because he just can’t keep still. Unlike, say, Robert Altman or David Mamet, Russell doesn’t have any particular affection or feel for the professional con artists played by Bale and Amy Adams, and he garbles a subplot about how Adams got stuck for months using a fake English accent with Cooper’s FBI agent. But then almost everything about American Hustle is garbled; the good bits (which are significant) are mixed in with the junk willy-nilly. Even for Russell, who’s hardly a master of structure, it’s an unforgivably sloppy mess. That people buy into it feels like the biggest swindle of all. 

—Sam Adams

Dallas Buyers Club

City Paper grade: B+

In the most miraculous career resurrection not precipitated by Quentin Tarantino, Matthew McConaughey has abruptly transformed himself from half-forgotten shirtless rom-com himbo to an expertly sleazy, electrifying screen presence. I'm not sure how it happened, either, but if you look at his remarkable two-year run — The Lincoln Lawyer, Bernie, Magic Mike, Killer Joe, The Paperboy, Mud and now Dallas Buyers Club — what comes through strongest is that Matthew McConaughey now really loves being Matthew McConaughey.

These days, he's exuding an infectiously naughty sense of self-delight, one that serves him well in director Jean-Marc Vallee's somewhat schematic, tad-too-crowd-pleasing take on the early days of the AIDS crisis. McConaughey, starved to an alarming fraction of his body weight, stars as Ron Woodruff, a hard-partying, good-ole-boy rodeo fixture diagnosed with HIV and given 30 days to live. Never one to follow protocol, Ron starts out buying stolen AZT from crooked hospital orderlies in parking lots, and eventually ends up smuggling unapproved drugs across all sorts of borders in a variety of silly costumes as part of a rather ingenious entrepreneurial gambit.

Scamming his way around the FDA, turning a quick buck and staying alive in the process, Woodruff gamed a broken system for as long as he could. Yes, this subject was covered in much greater depth in last year's essential documentary How to Survive a Plague — and of course, when Hollywood told the story, they had to pick the time it happened to a straight guy — but Dallas Buyers Club still knows how to work a crowd.

Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack's screenplay follows the template of every Bill Murray slobs-vs.-snobs comedy from the '80s, except this time people are dying. More nuanced is McConaughey's business partnership with a drag queen named Rayon (Jared Leto, yep — Jordan Catalano in a dress). Ron's redneck homophobe prejudices gradually melt away for expediency's sake, but nobody ever makes a big deal out of that.

Dallas Buyers Club is sometimes terribly overwritten, yet always admirably underplayed. And McConaughey is just heroic.

—Sean Burns

The Wolf of Wall Street

City Paper grade: A-

Three hours long without an ounce of fat, The Wolf of Wall Street is an utterly controlled monument to self-indulgence. As Jordan Belfort, a small-time broker who makes several fortunes selling penny stocks to increasingly well-monied chumps, Leonardo DiCaprio finally pays off the unrealized potential of his long collaboration with Martin Scorsese; he's the self-made man as permanent huckster, taking the salesman's always-be-closing maxim to unparalleled lengths. DiCaprio's recent roles as Jay Gatsby and Django Unchained's slaveowner indicate that the actor, who'd never quite settled into grown-up roles, has found his wheelhouse in playing smooth-talking, morally crippled men.

Working from the real Belfort's autobiography, screenwriter Terence Winter structures Wolf as a series of swindles and bacchanals which grow redundant and draining by design; Jordan's the life of the party, but he's also the one waking up in a puddle of fluid the morning after. He's surrounded by men, including Jonah Hill as a composite second-in-command, who'll do anything for him as long as the money keeps coming — and it does. There are women in this world — a few wives and a lot of prostitutes, frequently stripped of clothing and body hair, and a few brokers who keep up with the two guys — but it's essentially a dick-measuring contest that never stops. When the government sends him a subpoena, Jordan whips his out and pisses on it.

Wolf runs the risk of making financial corruption seem attractive, but that's because it is — at least to those of sufficient amorality, willing to pay the fines and do their brief terms and emerge from prison with barely a crease in their bespoke dress shirts. It won't turn people off financial crime any more than any cautionary tale can stop people from trying drugs, but it's a frightening and clear-eyed look at why so many indulge, and why they get to keep on indulging.

—Sam Adams

Nebraska

City Paper grade: B

After trekking to California's wine country for Sideways and Hawaii for The Descendants, Alexander Payne returns to his home turf for his latest, the father-son road trip Nebraska. And like any homecoming, it's a combination of nostalgia and resentment.

The Omaha native renders the film's Midwestern landscapes in a stark black and white reminiscent of Depression-era photographs, capturing a bleak emptiness in both harsh and poetic imagery. Against this backdrop, Payne sets the withered features of Bruce Dern as Woody Grant, an aged alcoholic who is determined to walk from Montana to Lincoln, Neb., to claim a million dollars supposedly won in a mail-order scam. His aimless son David (Will Forte) eventually agrees to shepherd him on his fool's errand, hoping they'll form that elusive bond. The pair detours from their quest for a reunion with Woody's extended family in his hometown, where secrets from his past begin to come to light.

Dern, a veteran character actor given to playing eccentrics and sleazeballs, seizes his first opportunity in recent memory to sink his teeth into a sizable role, sporting a perpetual expression of pained disgust. Forte, known mostly for his stint on Saturday Night Live, is an intriguing choice for the lead, with his sad eyes and pinched look giving him a put-upon, long-suffering quality.

The film's uneasy divide between heartfelt drama and broad comedy so perfectly fits with Payne's oeuvre that it's surprising to learn that he didn't write the screenplay. But that balance is particularly precarious here as Payne depicts small-minded, small-town folks with both condescension and intimate understanding. Woody's grasping clan and forgotten hopes are meant to form a bridge between a lost past and his embittered old age, but Payne never quite manages to make that connection palpable.

—Shaun Brady

12 Years a Slave

City Paper grade: B+

The most painful portrait in Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave, based on the true story of criminally enslaved freeman Solomon Northup, is one of its stillest. Noosed to a low-hanging tree branch after scrapping with cruel overseer Tibeats (Paul Dano), Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) struggles to draw breath, his mud-dug tiptoes the only force preventing his trachea from being crushed. All the while, McQueen's staid wide shot reveals Northup's fellow slaves in the background, dilly-dallying through their daily chores — aware of their friend's plight, but too physically and psychologically fettered to doing anything about it. It's these difficult observations of man left powerless, and how such a state breaks down or emboldens its victims, that gives McQueen's third feature such teeth. John Ridley's screenplay, largely faithful to the 1853 source material, follows Northup's journey, from blissful Saratoga family man to beaten-raw Louisiana field hand, at a pace that seems to disregard the rudimentary passage of time. In starkest step with the insecurity of Northup's future, there are no on-screen displays of month or year nor tally marks scratched into walls to quantify that shackled decade-plus. While both his captors (Benedict Cumberbatch, Michael Fassender) and companions (standout Lupita Nyong'o) prove fragile and impressionable, the steadiness of Northup's humanity is almost superhuman. McQueen is not a perfect filmmaker, but he's succeeded in his goal of building a unflinching visualization of America at its most shameful.

—Drew Lazor

Captain Phillips 

City Paper grade: C+

With his rootless camera and manic editing style, Paul Greengrass turns the true story of a cargo ship hijacked by Somali pirates into a tense, claustrophobic thriller. What may be surprising is that the film is at once unambitious, stubbornly focusing on Tom Hanks' noble, stoic captain to the detriment of the remainder of his faceless crew; and defensively apologetic, preemptively defusing racial tensions by drawing condescending parallels between the pirates' third-world plight and the struggles of their working class first-world counterparts. Only two significant scenes, at the film's outset, take place on land: the first shows Hanks' titular captain discussing his family's financial woes with his wife (Catherine Keener). The second is set in Somalia, where the threats and demands of local warlords set the villains on their piratic course. From this point on, Greengrass draws forced parallels between Phillips and the lead pirate, Muse (Barkhad Abdi). Both are reluctant leaders charged with squabbling underlings, both trying to provide for their families in dangerous waters. Without falling back on heavy-handed pronouncements about globalization and the speed of progress (and certainly not delivered by Tom Hanks in a jarring Vermont accent), the Danish film A Hijacking told a similar story much more compellingly, allowing suspense to permeate scenes of endless waiting, both at sea and in corporate boardrooms. Greengrass, in a headlong rush towards Navy SEAL heroics, simply doesn't trust his audience enough to allow the pace or his frenetic camera to sit still for a moment.

—Shaun Brady

Philomena 

City Paper grade: B

It's usually easy to tell when a movie is dinging its own awards-season bell, but in the case of genteel director Stephen Frears' latest, that bell has been replaced with a gong. Philomena, based on British writer Martin Sixsmith's 2009 nonfiction heartbreaker, is not exactly subtle in this regard — cynics might diagnose the twinkle in Judi Dench's eye as the covetous glare off an Oscar statuette. But only the most heartless will find zero emotion in this true story bolstered by earnest performances. In the early '50s, when Irish teenager Philomena Lee (played later in life by Dench) finds herself with child, she turns to a remote convent, where her sin is shrouded. For decades, she hides knowledge of the baby, who was given up for adoption against her wishes, quietly searching for him with no luck. Then she becomes acquainted with sneering journalist Sixsmith (Steve Coogan), recently sacked from a cushy position, and convinces him to organize a new investigation. What transpires is essentially a parent-friendly road-trip film, with Sixsmith's jaded atheism going round for round with his subject's simple tastes and guilt-soaked faith. While criss crossing the gorgeous Irish countryside to butter up bitter nuns for clues, they have the one-on-one time to break bread over multiple subjects, most of them rooted in deep religious differences. Traveling to America to follow up on a pro-mising lead furthers the fish-out-of-water antics, dropping folksy Philomena into ordinary situations she finds extraordinary. These are the moments Frears lays it on thickest, coaxing Dench to kick Philomena's adage output into overdrive. Still, it's difficult to discredit the genuine warmth the director develops between this broken mother and her reluctant surrogate son. It's a sentimental affair, but it can't be called insincere.

—Drew Lazor

City Paper grade: B+

Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) loves Samantha (Scarlett Johansson). Their romance develops slowly at first; they're from different worlds, and he's still wounded from his failed marriage. But as they get to know each other better, there's no question that their love is real. Would now be a good time to mention that Samantha is a computer program?

To be more precise, Samantha is an operating system, introduced into a future Los Angeles where human interaction is waning. Theodore, a former alt-weekly writer, works for a company called BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com, where he dictates mock-personal correspondence to a computer that then prints it out in a facsimile of human script. There are parents and children, husbands and wives, whose whole lives are built on his letters. But IRL contact is tougher for Theodore — at least until Samantha comes along.

Her, whose setting is a placeless fusion of the real L.A. and Shanghai, presents itself as a movie about technology, but writer-director Spike Jonze isn't overly concerned with the sci- in his sci-fi romance, or the fact that Samantha is a computer product who, in theory, would be source-code-bound to obey Theodore's commands. What interests Jonze is love, and how — or whether — it survives the way that relationships allow people to change, sometimes in incompatible directions. Johansson's voice-only performance places Samantha as a girl-next-door type, developing unfamiliar emotional needs and then disguising them with jokes; you don't need to see her eyes to picture her waiting for the right response. It's a magnificently designed film, shot in smoggy pastels with the (human) characters in collarless retro-chic shirts. But it's also more intellectualized than it could have been, as if Jonze is waiting for the audience to meet him halfway as well.

—Sam Adams