The Oscars are almost upon us, and all the buzz surrounding recent movies is finally going to come to a head. Lady Bird turned heads last fall for its run as the best-reviewed film ever on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes; Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri has proved both stunningly unexpected and stunningly controversial; and Call Me By Your Name has received praise for its intimate presentation of a 1980s gay romance in Italy.
One of the few Big Picture nominees that I actually haven’t heard that much about, surprisingly, is Darkest Hour. Darkest Hour stars Gary Oldman — a longtime seasoned actor, who may be recently remembered for his role as Sirius Black in the Harry Potter franchise — as Winston Churchill during his early days as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. It promises to resemble both a character study of Churchill himself as well as a document of many of the political conversations behind World War II and the spread of Nazi Germany. This will be an interesting angle because one of the other big films this year, Dunkirk, portrays the other side of those conversations: the actual military conflict.
Darkest Hour looks to be a serious and impressive political drama, and I look forward to seeing whether it will live up to its peers. It is currently showing at the Quality 16 in Ann Arbor.
