Just days out from this year’s Oscars, you can find all but two of this year’s nominees for Best Picture and other major awards streaming on your TV in the U.S. and in most other places in the free world. Some are also available on Blu-ray.

The two not yet available are A Complete Unknown which comes to digital in late March and Blu-ray on April 1 and the Brazilian I’m Still Here.

Here are my takes on three of them:

The Brutalist, which started out winning major critics’ awards for Best Picture has faltered a little as it has subsequently lost major awards to Anora and Conclave but is still a major contender.

The film’s title refers to a type of grand architecture that its protagonist specializes in. It also refers to the brutal nature of the protagonist as he goes nearly mad in his quest for perfection. Adrien Brody, in his most challenging role, plays the Hungarian Jewish architect who survives the Holocaust with a dream of coming to America that he achieves in the film’s opening scene.

Not knowing the fate of his wife in the Holocaust, he has come to America without her. Upon his arrival, he is informed by his cousin (Alessandro Nivola) that she is alive as is his sister’s daughter who is taking care of her now that she has become an invalid. It will be years before his wife (Felicity Jones) and niece (Raffey Cassidy) make it to America. In the meantime, Brody lives a humble existence eating in soup kitchens, sleeping in shelters, and shoveling coal to eke out a living in post-war Philadelphia. He is saved from all that by a wealthy industrialist (Guy Pearce) who first met him when he did a job for his son (Joe Alwyn) that he did not appreciate. Having thrown Brody out on his ear, he is remorseful after reading up on him and his work pre-incarceration and seeks him out for a major building project.

The relationship between the architect and his employer is far from a bed of roses as Brody clashes with everyone is his quest for perfection. Pearce, as the personification of the post-World War II WASP, uses a silvery high-toned voice that is eerily close to the voice John Huston employed in Chinatown, masking the evil lying just below the surface.

The first half of the three-and-a-half-hour film is the better half as it concentrates on the majesty of the architecture Brody’s character puts into place. The second half concentrates more on the relationship between Brody and the at-long-last arrival of his wife. She is played by an equally brilliant Jones as a physically weak but intellectually strong college educated woman, an immediate adversary to Pearce.

The film is structured such that the three main characters dominate every scene while the rest of the cast is rendered insignificant. Still there are some who stand out, most notably Cassidy as the niece, Isaach de Bankolé as Brody’s Black friend and co-worker, and Zephan Hanson Amissah as Bankolé’s teenage son.

After the second half of the film comes to a shocking conclusion, there is an epilogue in which the meaning of Brody’s character’s life is sort of explained as he is honored for his lifetime of architectural achievements. It kind of rings false with its assertion that it is not the journey as we’ve been told, but the destination that counts.

It’s a film that I respect and admire. Brady Corbet’s direction is strong, but his screenplay meanders and is often confusing.

Another film that started out winning major awards but has not fared as well as Oscar season wears on, is Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths despite a career-best performance by Marianne Jean-Baptiste.

Jean-Baptiste rose to fame as a successful young Black optometrist establishes contact with her biological mother — a lonely white factory worker living in poverty in East London played by Brenda Blethyn. Both she and Blethyn were nominated for Oscars, Blethyn for Best Actress and Jean-Baptiste for Best Supporting Actress. She later became a beloved TV star of the long-running series, Without a Trace which ran for seven seasons from 2002-2009.

Long in the U.S., she returned to the U.K. to play Pansy, the middle-aged London wife and mother suffering from depression who flies off the handle at every perceived offense. Why she wasn’t nominated for an Oscar for this brilliant work remains one of the mysteries of this Oscar year.

What caused Pansy to snap isn’t made clear, but we understand the woman whose depression is out of control. While the ending is not what we may want or need, it’s true to life.

The film’s comic highlights are the supermarket and parking lot scenes which are reminiscent of similar scenes in Terms of Endearment and Fried Green Tomatoes, receptively, but the film isn’t really a comedy. It’s a tragedy that doesn’t end with the woman getting the help she would in a traditional film. Her relationship with her husband and son is toxic. Neither she nor her husband can help their son who is seemingly wasting his life away.

The son is an even more tragic figure than either of his parents. He needed to get away from that house but can’t move any more than either of his parents can. The performances of David Webber as her husband, Tuwaine Barrett as their son, Jonathan Livingstone as her husband’s workmate and Michele Austin as her sister are also first-rate but the scenes with the sister without Pansy just seem like filler. They do nothing for the film’s main narrative.

The Oscar race may be between Demi Moore and Mikey Madison, but the early critics got this one right. Marianne Jean-Baptiste gave the year’s best performance by a leading actress by a mile.

Nominated for 4 Oscars for Cinematography, Production Design, Makeup and Hairstyling, and Costume Design, Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu is a clever update of the Dracula legend which changes the familiar story just enough to make it interesting.
It opens with a dream sequence in which bride-to-be Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) dreams that her marriage will be to Death, not Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), the estate agent that she does marry.

Hoult is the estate agent who sells the crumbling castle to Count Orlok aka Nosferatu (Bill Skarsgard). Orlok, still controlling Ellen through dreams, threatens the deaths of her friend Anna (Ellen Corin) and her children unless Ellen divorces Thomas and marries him.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Anna’s husband Friedrich and Willem Defoe as the disgraced, wise old scientist Von Franz, complete the film’s principal cast. All six are excellent.

Happy Viewing.