6. Another Round (2020)
After Leonardo DiCaprio was rumored to star, recent reports suggest that American comedian Chris Rock will soon try his hand at mounting an English-language remake of this 2020 Scandinavian drama directed by Thomas Vinterberg, in which a group of middle-aged high-school teachers go on a micro-dosed drinking bender as a social experiment to see how each of them react to upholding a constant low level of intoxication throughout the day.
It’s hard to be strongly enthusiastic about the prospect of yet another Hollywood cash-grab that will face an uphill battle in trying to measure up with the original, winner of the Academy Award for Best International Film, which is held together by a finely tuned script and knockout performances by Mads Mikkelsen and Thomas Bo Larsen. You don’t need to be tipsy to enjoy this witty and insightful meditation on self-destructive masculinity and midlife crisis, but the story is guaranteed to hit closer to home for viewers who’ve ever been tempted to reach for a drink in overwhelming times.
“Another Round” was blatantly overlooked in a historically weak Best Picture lineup, but the film’s now-iconic final scene is reason enough to add it to your streaming queue.
7. Decision to Leave (2022)
There is always more than meets the eye in Park Chan-wook’s sensual, slippery, and wildly unpredictable crime procedural, in which a young detective (Park Hae-il) stumbles onto what could be a potential murder only to fall head over heels with his prime suspect — an irresistible, two-timing femme fatale played by the uber-talented Chinese bombshell Tang Wei.
Few expected the same director who’d earned his name and reputation with testosterone-heavy, censor-rattling tales of violence and cruel twists of fate to concoct one of the most achingly romantic and melancholy films in recent memory. But in striking out into more serious territory and dipping his toes into Hitchcockian tropes, that’s exactly what the Korean maestro delivered back in 2022.
The “Oldboy” filmmaker earned best director honors at Cannes and racked up nominations left and right at the Globes and BAFTAs, which had film buffs dreaming of a surprise Best Picture nod. But somehow, the official Oscar submission for South Korea and one of the splashiest premieres at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival went unrecognized in all categories, including Best International Film. Oh well, we’ll just treasure Tang Wei’s stunning performance and move on.
8. Uncut Gems (2019)
In the lead-up to the 92nd Academy Awards, Adam Sandler joked that if he didn’t receive a Best Actor nod for “Uncut Gems”, he would go out and make a movie that was “bad on purpose just to make you all pay.” So, if you had the misfortune of sitting through “Murder Mystery” or any other of his god-awful Netflix originals lately, blame it on Academy voters as neither the Sandman nor the Safdie brothers quite managed to get over the hump and earn a slot in the acting and directing lineups.
The veteran comedy actor ascended to new heights of performance playing Howard Ratner, a compulsive Jewish jeweler in New York City’s Diamond District who finds himself between a rock and a hard place after going on a self-destructive gambling spree in a desperate attempt to pay back all his debts. At once relentlessly distressing and riotously funny, Sandler’s live-wire performance will surely go down in history as one of the most memorable turns of the 2010s decade and neck-and-neck with “Punch-Drunk Love” as the actor’s finest hour.
Granted, the 2019 Best Picture race was loaded — keep in mind that Tarantino, Scorsese, Gerwig, and Bong Joon-ho all came swinging for the fences that year — but it is pretty much agreed upon now that “Uncut Gems” deserved to be on the shortlist over a bunch of weaker contenders (ahem, “Jojo Rabbit”, ahem, “Joker”.)
9. Babylon (2022)
Expectations were sky high for the splashy comeback of American wunderkind Damien Chazelle — a sprawling, three-plus-hour historical epic recounting the transition from silent films to talkies in 1920s Hollywood through the eyes of an ambitious outsider (Diego Calva), a budding starlet (Margot Robbie) and an over-the-hill leading man (Brad Pitt). However, despite a hefty $80 million price tag and enough star power to light up Tinseltown, “Babylon” barely made a dent at the box office and quickly flamed out of Best Picture contention even though many considered it a dark-horse contender with enough juice to go all the way.
Chazelle recently made headlines when he said that he won’t be surprised if he has trouble convincing any studio to give him a similar budget after his last film fell way short of expectations in terms of accolades and box-office receipts. Warts and all, we just can’t help but admire the sheer bravado and passion that went into his uneven but captivating love letter to cinema, which the Academy could have just as easily given its flowers to had it not arrived so soon on the heels of similarly targeted auteur fare like “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”, “Licorice Pizza”, and “The Fabelmans”.
10. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
For an institution that ostensibly prides itself in being progressive and unbiased, the ‘one country, one entry’ rule that establishes that only one film per national body can be officially submitted for consideration to the Academy is blatantly elitist and old-fashioned — a vestige of a different time in showbiz. In 2019, Modern French iconoclast Céline Sciamma appeared to be in pole position to be nominated in multiple categories including Best Picture for her riveting sapphic period romance about an 18th-century female painter (Noémie Merlant) smitten with the highborn woman she has been commissioned to make a wedding portrait of (Adèle Haenel).
Widely considered to be one of the toasts of the 2019 Cannes Film Festival and one of the best-reviewed movies of the entire 2010s decade, “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” found itself completely iced out of a Best International Film race that it probably deserved to win outright, as France decided to go with the umpteenth adaptation of “Les Misérables” as its Oscar entry. Ending on a high note with a crushing ending for the ages that will tear you apart and rip your heart to shreds, this film is destined to age like fine wine.