The nominees for the 90th Academy Awards were announced earlier this morning, and while there were a few surprises here and there, it would be difficult to argue that any of the films up for Best Picture don’t deserve the distinction. All of the category’s nominees have been making waves this awards season, and they are among the best-reviewed films of the year. With that in mind, here are all of the 2018 Best Picture nominees ranked by Tomatometer!
(Photo by Universal Pictures)
Horror and comedy have made for fine bedfellows on occasion over the years — and the horror genre has also made plenty of room for hard-hitting social commentary, too. But it takes a certain amount of chutzpah for a filmmaker to try blending all three at once, and first-time filmmaker Jordan Peele was definitely taking a big gamble when he brought his ambitious hybrid Get Out to theaters in early 2017. The story of an unsuspecting young African-American man (Daniel Kaluuya) whose trip to the countryside to meet his white girlfriend’s (Allison Williams) well-to-do parents (Catherine Keener and Bradley Whitford) quickly veers into a darkly funny, racially tinged horror show, it arrived at the perfect moment for a wildly entertaining movie that also happened to pack a thought-provoking punch as a look at modern race relations in America — and critics were among the first, and loudest, to praise the year’s first runaway hit. “Peele succeeds where sometimes even more experienced filmmakers fail,” wrote Stephanie Zacharek for Time. “He’s made an agile entertainment whose social and cultural observations are woven so tightly into the fabric that you’re laughing even as you’re thinking, and vice-versa.”
Where to watch it: Amazon, FandangoNOW, iTunes, Google Play
(Photo by A24)
There’s no shortage of coming-of-age movies. But it’s far too uncommon to see one that empathetically depicts the turning corners of adolescence from a female perspective — which is just one reason Lady Bird proved such a critic’s darling in 2017. Written and directed by Greta Gerwig, this Saoirse Ronan-led dramedy finds its young title character at a crossroads — and at odds with her mother (Laurie Metcalf), a nurse struggling to keep the family afloat after Lady Bird’s father (Tracy Letts) loses his job. A ’90s-set period piece that struck a current chord for a variety of reasons, it established Gerwig as a triple threat to watch while proving one of cinema’s most well-trodden genres still had fresh stories to tell. Calling it “A sweet, deeply personal portrayal of female adolescence that’s more attuned to the bonds between best girlfriends than casual flings with boys,” Time Out’s Tomris Laffly wrote, “writer-director Greta Gerwig’s beautiful Lady Bird flutters with the attractively loose rhythms of youth.”
Where to watch it: In Theaters
