Before the Oscars, YS Life lists the Must-Watch film nominees

In a year when the Oscar awards have focused on popular entertainment in its selection of Best Film nominees (Avatar: Way of Water and Top Gun Maverick), a few stand out for its poignant, relevant storytelling and compelling filmmaking. For instance, The Banshees of Inisherin (Disney+Hotstar) tackles friendship in a specific context that brings about a human tale that is charmingly simple yet moving. 

Here are YS Life’s picks of niche films that deserve to be watched, whether they win in the 95th Academy Awards or not.

Tar 

Oscars’ nominations: Best Actress, Best Film, and 4 more categories

Tar is a classic example of arthouse cinema making an impact on popular prestige movie awards in Hollywood. Slow and self-indulgent, it is made for the discerning viewer. It brings a riveting, complex performance by Cate Blanchett that compels you to mull over each scene. 

Director Todd Field has built a cold, stark world that Lydia Tar, a musical genius inhabits in her highly successful life. A rare winner of an Oscar, a Grammy, a Tony and an Emmy, Tar is the first woman to be chief conductor at Berlin Philharmonic. The film takes off with her rise as a professional star. We watch as she preps herself with deep breaths to face an audience on stage while she gives an interview. By her side is a loyal assistant, aspiring conductor Francesca and at home is her concert master and wife, Sharon ( Nina Hoss). Tar co-runs a fellowship to mentor female conductors, offering a glimpse of her dominance over her field. She will teach a class at The Juillard School before taking off for Berlin. 

Field has created a character that is blessed with genius but is cruel, manipulative and self-centred. She lacks empathy and minimises the role of gender in defining success, compartmentalising her choices to her maximum benefit. At Juilliard, when she pushes a student that identifies himself as black indigenous person of colour (BIPOC) Pan gender too far, her unravelling begins. 

At first, the film feels like a nuanced comment on cancel culture and #MeToo as Tar’s deliberate and systematic cruelty towards a fellowship mentee ends in tragedy. Her choice to give a solo unfairly to a young female cellist that she is attracted to further highlights her failings at work.  But it is much more than that. It uses sound to reflect the haunted, edgy state of mind of this super successful but morally dubious composer. A symbolic process of keeping it all together despite inner chaos catches up with her outer world when she gets ‘cancelled’ and has a visible fall from grace. No one could have portrayed Tar better than Blanchett, who reacts to situations with a frozen mask of contempt and replaces it with nervous vulnerability within seconds. It is a performance for the ages. 

The film’s usage of classical score—Mahler and Elgar—to show Tar’s growing obsessions and paranoia over her past actions is magnificent. Blanchett’s performance is definitely worth watching. 

Tar releases in theaters on March 10. 

Triangle of Sadness  

Oscars nominations: Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay and Best Director

Love to hate or gawp at the lifestyles of the uber-rich? Triangle of Sadness is a must watch for you. Cannes winner-director Ruben Ostlund brings a delightfully provocative and satirical drama about the ultra-rich being adrift on board a luxury yacht. 

Privileged people, not necessarily good, explain away their terrible means of procuring blinding wealth as they jostle for proximity with the politically powerful and socially well-connected. Some sell fertilisers while others make explosive devices to keep peace. 

Onboard a 250-million-dollar superyacht are eccentric guests that have milked the benefits of an economic order that rides on greed, war and rampant corruption. An eccentric and opinionated American captain steers the yacht with a well-trained staff of rarely seen cleaners, cooks, waiters and helpers. Living in the lap of luxury the super-rich still find grounds to make the most ridiculous demands, reflecting their oblivion and grating sense of entitlement. As the yacht ends up getting wrecked and a handful land on a remote island, their ability to survive is put to the test. Here only one survivor is equipped to cope with the challenges that nature brings; while the others basically fall apart. 

Triangle of Sadness features a cynical scene in a modelling agency where the brief for the designer label Balenciaga (itself amidst controversy for using children in a debatable ad campaign) is to look down upon the consumer without a smile. A starkly different brief from H&M. Satire at its most effective, this conveys an irrational sense of aspiration that plagues human behaviour in the age of hyper consumerism. The film underlines the fact that all it will take is a few tectonic level tremors to upend a class driven socio-economic global order and reign in chaos for the ultra-privileged. Their sense of entitlement comes under direct fire in the film’s humorous lens. Besides tackling gender divide and racial undertones, Triangle of Sadness stands out for its intelligent storytelling and parable of a global society in chaos. 

This film is currently playing in theatres in India. 

All Quiet on the Western Front 

Oscars nominations: Best Picture, and 8 more categories 

For an adaptation made in Hollywood twice (1930 and 1979), this German film from the book by Erich Maria Remarque is astonishingly powerful and convincing. Paul, a teenage boy joins the army with his school friends in patriotic fervour. The First World War is almost coming to an end and Germany is on the verge of devastating defeat, but for the naive young boys, this is an opportunity to serve their country while getting to travel to Paris. 

Director and co-writer Edward Berger has brought to life the shock and agony of unending bloodshed and the chaos of war in perfect true to life form. This is anti-war filmmaking in its most moving form. 

All Quiet on the Western Front becomes poignant and believable because of its credible performances from an ensemble cast, each capturing the horror of war in its different dimensions through the journey of their characters (Daniel Bruhl, Thibault de Montalembert and Aaron Hilmer). 

One of the most stark performances is that of newcomer Felix Kammerer as young Paul whose expression of horror and mud-caked face captures the film’s spirit.  The title All Quiet on the Western Front is ironic, given that the only quiet on this front was for dead soldiers. Stuck in the infernal hell of trench warfare, Paul is part of a futile and infuriating decision to make one final push for the fatherland’s honour an hour before an armistice is to be signed. 

Right from the opening scene when Paul is given the uniform of a dead soldier with his name tag still sewed on, this film wears a grim feel of death and futility. It’s a timely reminder of the pointlessness of war as we see one destroying Ukraine in Europe in real time. It’s serious cinema but it’s essential viewing. 

The film is currently streaming on Netflix. 

Besides these, Daniels’ (Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan) Everything Everywhere All at Once has swept the Oscars nominations with 11 nods, read our review here.