Oscar weekend is here. It's here! And almost every major streaming service has at least one movie in contention this time around. We've gone through Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+ to find some nominees you might want to check out before Sunday night's ceremony. |
Here's one of the 50 best movies on Netflix |
 | | From left, Chadwick Boseman, Colman Domingo, Viola Davis, Michael Potts and Glynn Turman in "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom."David Lee/Netflix, via Associated Press |
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'Ma Rainey's Black Bottom' |
The acclaimed stage director George C. Wolfe brings August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize winner to the screen, quite faithfully — which is just fine, as a play this good requires little in the way of "opening up," so rich are the characters and so loaded is the dialogue. The setting is a Chicago music studio in 1927, where the "Mother of the Blues" Ma Rainey (Viola Davis) and her band are meeting to record several of her hits, though that business is frequently disrupted by the tensions within the group over matters both personal and artistic. Davis is superb as Rainey, chewing up her lines and spitting them out with contempt at anyone who crosses her, and Chadwick Boseman, who died in 2020 and won a posthumous Golden Globe best actor award for his performance, is electrifying as the showy sideman, Levee, a boiling pot of charisma, flash and barely concealed rage. A.O. Scott calls the film "a powerful and pungent reminder of the necessity of art." |
Have a Hulu subscription? Here are two nominees! |
 | | Mads Mikkelsen in "Another Round."Henrik Ohsten/Samuel Goldwyn Films |
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The front-runner for this year's best international feature Oscar — and a surprise nominee for best director as well — stars Mads Mikkelsen as a burned-out high school teacher who finds that he and his friends are simultaneously tumbling into their midlife crises. Their solution: an experiment in carefully controlled day-drinking, which they believe will loosen up their inhibitions and make their lives exciting again. It sounds like the premise for a 1990s Jim Carrey movie, but the director Thomas Vinterberg's innate sense of cinematic naturalism keeps the picture grounded in emotional truth. Our critic deemed it "a sweet, strangely modest tragicomedy about the pleasures of (mostly banal) excess." |
Frances McDormand builds another nuanced, sometimes prickly performance — this time as a widow who roams America living "the van life," working temporary and seasonal jobs, making just enough to get by and keep moving. The director Chloé Zhao uses real people who live that life in supporting roles, crafting the picture as something of a snapshot of this subculture; by its end, it feels as though you know how this scene works and how these lives are lived. But within that, "Nomadland" is a sensitive and intelligent meditation on solitude, mortality (and thus, on grief and loss) and making the best of what's left. A.O. Scott called it "patient, compassionate and open." |
Amazon Prime Video doesn't make it easy to find stuff. Luckily, we have done the work for you. |
 | | Riz Ahmed in "Sound of Metal."Amazon Studios |
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Riz Ahmed is devastatingly good as Ruben, a hard rock drummer whose entire life — his music, his relationship, his self-image — is upended by a sudden case of extreme hearing loss, in this wrenching drama from the writer and director Darius Marder. A former addict in danger of relapse, Ruben enters a school for the deaf, where he must confront not only his new condition, but the jitteriness that predates it. His sense of solitude, even with others, quickly transforms to self-consciousness, then self-doubt, then self-destruction, and "Sound of Metal" is ultimately less about finding a silver bullet cure than finding the stillness within oneself. Marder works in a quiet, observational style, skillfully avoiding every cliché he approaches, taking turns both satisfying and moving. Our critic praised the film's "distinctive style." |
Disney+ has all the Pixar movies. Like this one. |
 | | Jamie Foxx voices the character Joe Gardner, right, in "Soul."Disney/Pixar |
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Death isn't usually negotiable, but when Joe Gardner (voiced by Jamie Foxx), a middle-school music teacher, falls down a manhole shortly after booking his first big gig as a jazz pianist, he is willing to defy the laws of heaven to realize his dream. Although this touching and whimsical Pixar movie gets into the bureaucratic intricacies of the afterlife, "Soul" is most affecting as a tribute to the small, myriad pleasures of New York City. A.O. Scott called it "a new chapter in Pixar's expansion of realism." |
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