Production companies and movie studios may have laid low during Super Bowl week, but the Eagles victory in Minneapolis means more folks will be watching movies again. Along with a suite of stories set overseas, Up To Date's indie, foreign and documentary Film Critics suggest seeing some superb short films this weekend. Given the length of the Super Bowl broadcast, it may be just what you need to recalibrate your attention span.
Steve Walker
Happy End, R
- Isabelle Huppert stars in Austrian provocateur Michael Haneke's latest film, an intricate drama where a construction site accident, an overdose, and suicidal ideation figure in a family's struggle to maintain its status.
2018 Oscar-nominated short films: Animation
- Among the players cropping up in this year's nominees are classic fairy tale heroines like Red Riding Hood, a schoolyard bully, and a group of frogs and toads living in an ornate villa bearing macabre hints at something rotten.
Call Me by Your Name, R
- Timothée Chalamet gives a break-out performance as a gifted, multi-lingual, sexually-fluid teenager who, over six weeks of an Italian summer, falls in love with his father's graduate student, a charismatic American played by Armie Hammer.
Cynthia Haines
2018 Oscar-nominated short films: Animated
- This year, the Academy is recognizing animated shorts that include Kobe Bryant's paean to basketball, a film based on at 150-word poem, and delightfully-realistic jaunt with the amphibious denizens of an absent owner's garden.
2018 Oscar-nominated short films: Live action
- From the true tale of an armed twenty-something bringing a gun to an elementary school to a tense treatment of the tragedy of Emmett Till, these films will grab you quick and leave you wanting more.
Darkest Hour, PG-13
- With the fate of western Europe in the balance, newly-appointed Prime Minister Winston Churchill, played by Gary Oldman, must decide whether to negotiate with the rapidly expanding Third Reich or unite his countrymen and take up arms.
