Critic’s Pick: GKids’ Oscar nominees screening at Laemmle Ahrya Fine Arts
If you care about feature animation, you know all about GKids. Since its founding in 2008, this small but smart distributor has gotten eight Oscar nominations, including two this year for “Boy and the World” and “When Marnie Was There.”
If you’re not familiar with the GKids universe, or if you are and want to enjoy it all over again, a retrospective of the company’s eight nominees starts today at the Laemmle Ahrya Fine Arts in Beverly Hills with screenings of “Boy” and Tomm Moore‘s marvelous Irish animated “The Secret of Kells.”
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Personal favorites, aside from “Kells,” include another work by Moore, “Song of the Sea,” and two Japanese classics, “Marnie” and “The Tale of Princess Kaguya.” If you can see them all, you won’t regret it.
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Movie recommendations from critic Kenneth Turan and other reviewers.
Sad, beautiful, the wittiest film of the year; directors Duke Johnson and Charlie Kaufman, using stop-motion animation and working from a script Kaufman originally wrote and staged a decade ago, transform the comedy of quiet desperation into an occasion for serious pleasure. (Michael Phillips) R.
Adam McKay, with the help of Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt, has made a very funny film about a very serious situation, 2008’s global financial collapse. (Kenneth Turan) R.
Steven Spielberg’s superior directing skills and fine acting from Tom Hanks and Mark Rylance do the trick in this espionage thriller about a successful insurance lawyer who has to defend a Soviet spy and then attempt to trade him to the Russians for one of ours. (Kenneth Turan) PG-13.
Impeccably directed by John Crowley, feelingly adapted by Nick Hornby from Colm Tóibín’s fine novel and blessed with heart-stopping work from star Saoirse Ronan and the rest of the cast, “Brooklyn” is about love and heartache, loneliness and intimacy, what home means and how we achieve it. (Kenneth Turan) PG-13.
Impeccably acted by Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara as two women in love, with an exquisite look captured by cinematographer Ed Lachman, “Carol” has been made under the complete and total control of Todd Haynes, a director who always knows what he’s doing. (Kenneth Turan) R.
In the hands of director Ryan Coogler and star Michael B. Jordan, what is nominally a spinoff of the celebrated “Rocky” series plays like a spiritual remake of the 1976 film that retells the original story in the kind of involving way one would not have thought possible. (Kenneth Turan) PG-13.
It is antic and unexpected as well as homiletic, rife with subversive elements, wacky critters and some of the most beautiful landscapes ever seen in a computer-animated feature. (Kenneth Turan) PG.
A droll Coen brothers tribute to and spoof of Hollywood past that amuses from beginning to end with its site specific re-creation of the studio system and the movies that made it famous. (Kenneth Turan) PG-13.
Brie Larson excels in a film able to give full weight to both sides of the emotional equation as it tells the story of a young woman imprisoned for years in a tiny shed and the young son who was born to her there and knows no other world. (Kenneth Turan) R.
The saga of how the Boston Globe won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for uncovering sexual abuse by Catholic priests, the film is mightily impressive not only because of the importance of the story it tells but also because of how much effort and skill went into bringing it to the screen. (Kenneth Turan) R.
Only good movies
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