Robert Redford, A House of Dynamite, Foreign Oscar Race — Screen Talk
Much like “Screen Talk” podcast co-host Ryan Lattanzio felt after leaving Kathryn Bigelow’s nuclear missile thriller “A House of Dynamite” at Venice — which he rave-reviewed — Anne Thompson left a recent L.A. screening of the movie with her heart pounding in her chest.
Written by Noah Oppenheim, Bigelow’s real-time thriller about the banalities and actualities of a fictional-in-premise-only nuclear attack on the United States is Netflix’s best horse in the race at the Oscars this year. The film stars Rebecca Ferguson, Jared Harris, Idris Elba, Jonah Hauer-King, Anthony Ramos, Moses Ingram, Tracy Letts, and more — and while its ensemble will likely be left out of acting categories, the movie will play well to Oscar voters and audiences when it drops on Netflix in October. The streamer will give this gripping and intense film — which is a cautionary letter about the nuclear stockpile across the world — a theatrical, qualifying play in theaters starting October 10.
On this week’s “Screen Talk” episode, we also remember the great Robert Redford, the filmmaker and actor and Sundance founder who died at home in Utah at the age of 89 on Tuesday. We each pick our favorite Redford movies: While Anne argues that “Out of Africa,” the 1985 Best Picture-winning romance he directed and starred in with Meryl Streep, has aged better than Alan J. Pakula’s timely (!) journalism thriller “All the President’s Men” from 1976, Ryan advocates for “The Way We Were” as a career-best Redford performance. He starred in that Sydney Pollack-directed film as a WASP opposite Barbra Streisand as a Marxist Jewish woman. From college on, they never could make their relationship work. But Pollack knew how to make commercial appeal and filmmaking artistry work at the same time.
We also discuss the latest, headline-dominating news that Jimmy Kimmel has been pulled from late-night airing by ABC after he made allegedly erroneous comments about conservative activist Charlie Kirk. What does it mean for free speech on television? It’s not looking good. Much like the situation with Stephen Colbert getting axed from airwaves amid the Paramount-Skydance merger, there’s another combination of mega broadcasting forces at play here: Nexstar, America’s largest local TV broadcasting group, is amid a merger with similarly local-TV-operating Tegna. Both are in the FCC’s pocket, which is in turn in President Trump’s pocket.
This week’s “Screen Talk” also breaks down the major players in the Best International Feature Oscar race. France, due to its production stake in the film, has officially submitted Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’Or-winner “It Was Just an Accident” for the Academy Award. The country stands a good chance at a nomination, and possibly a win, after years of being snubbed. France could have won this year for “Emilia Pérez” until, well, we know what happened there. Other strong contenders include “The President’s Cake” from Iraq (a Sony Pictures Classics release), Norway’s “Sentimental Value” (Neon), and Brazil’s “The Secret Agent” (also Neon), though this is a category that is ever hard to predict. The deadline for submissions is October 1.
Listen to the podcast in this week’s episode below.
