Oscar Predictions
March 13 — Happy Friday, and most importantly, happy Oscars weekend! The Academy Awards air this Sunday on ABC and Hulu at 7 p.m., and, much like Ayo Edebiri, you best believe that I am SEATED. This year’s slate was a tough one predictions-wise, but I did my best. Click here to see who I think is going to win big on Sunday.
Without further ado … Action!
🎟️ If you’re a member of the Atlanta Film Society, you have until Sunday to apply to sit in while Roger and James Deakins teach a class for Georgia State students. Find more details here.
🏳️⚧️ Collin Kelley recently interviewed trans actor Scott Turner Schofield about his one-man show turned movie, “Becoming a Man in 127 EASY Steps,” which is screening at 7 Stages Theatre on March 15.
📽️ Universal Pictures has announced that it will lengthen its theatrical window, putting movies exclusively in theaters for five weekends in 2026 and seven weekends in 2027.
🍿 SXWS started yesterday. The Austin film festival will see the premieres of movies like Boots Riley’s “I Love Boosters” and the sequel to 2019’s “Ready or Not,” gamely called “Ready or Not 2: Here I Come.”
🖥️ YouTube has officially surpassed Disney to become the world’s biggest media company, according to financial research firm MoffettNathanson.
This newsletter includes conversations with two local filmmakers – one of whom is Oscar nominated this weekend – and reviews of the new films “Undertone” and “Reminders of Him.” Plus, what’s playing in theaters this week, a new edition of Spotlight, and some reading and listening recommendations for your lunch break.
Thanks for reading!
Sammie
🚈 MARTA bus routes change April 18! NextGen Bus Network is a smarter, faster, better system of bus routes to get you around the region. Find a map for your new route and more info here. SPONSOR MESSAGE
Christalyn Hampton talks Oscar-nominated short ‘The Devil Is Busy’
🏥 When Christalyn Hampton found out her film, “The Devil Is Busy,” was nominated for Best Documentary Short Film at the 98th Academy Awards, she screamed.
Awards weren’t something the Atlanta local was thinking about while making the film, which she co-directed with Geeta Gandbhir (also the director of the Oscar-nominated documentary feature “The Perfect Neighbor”). So, getting short-listed and later nominated for the industry’s biggest honor was a huge surprise.
Hampton has worked in the industry as a producer for years, but this is her first time directing. “The Devil Is Busy” tracks a day in the life of Tracii, the head of security at the Feminist Center for Reproductive Liberation, an Atlanta abortion clinic, as she deals with clients, protestors, and the general anxiety of helping women get reproductive healthcare in the wake of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court decision that took away American women’s right to abortion.
🤰 I spoke with Hampton before this weekend’s awards ceremony. Check out our conversation here.
Pictures at an Exhibition & Symphonie fantastique
SPONSORED BY ATLANTA SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
🎼 The Atlanta Symphony Orchestrapresents Delta Classical Concerts that transport you beyond Symphony Hall – take an artistic stroll in the crowd-favorite, Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, or a wild adventure in Berlioz’s surreal Symphonie fantastique and percussive Roman Carnival Overture.
The Orchestra takes you on a ride through Kodály’s Dances of Galánta and Rachmaninoff’s galloping First Symphony, and welcomes violinists Isabelle Faust, Jennifer Koh, and pianist Bertrand Chamayou in concertos from Bartók (Violin Concerto No. 2), Philip Glass (Violin Concerto No. 1), and Saint-Saëns (Concerto No. 5, “Egyptian”).
✨ Visit the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra this March and April in concerts where virtuosic music and imagination run wild.
Filmmaker Adelin Gasana talks new documentary, ‘Brannu: The Urban Horseman’
🐴 Atlanta documentarian Adelin Gasana first heard about Brandon “Brannu” Fulton through his friend, now producing partner, Julia Griggs. Griggs learned about Fulton – also known as Atlanta’s “Urban Cowboy” – when she saw him riding his horse down the Beltline.
Griggs was drawn to Fulton’s story – he’s been trying to build a ranch in South Fulton amid legal issues and more – and initially brought it to Gasana thinking it could make a good news segment. But the first time Gasana stepped onto Fulton’s property, he knew this had to be a full-fledged feature documentary.
That documentary, directed by Gasana and produced by Griggs, is “Brannu: The Urban Horseman,” which is set to screen at Georgia Tech on March 18. On March 19, it will play at the Atlanta Documentary Film Festival.
📽️ Ahead of those screenings, I spoke with Gasana about making the film. You can check out that interview here.
‘Reminders of Him’ is a mixed, melodramatic bag
WEEKLY FILM REVIEW
⛰️ There is a long, storied history to melodrama that stretches back centuries – “Wuthering Heights,” Douglas Sirk movies, you name it.
The definition of melodrama necessitates exaggeration and excitement, sweeping emotions and grand gestures. But I’ve always found that melodrama works best when those emotions are rooted in something a little more grounded. In Sirk’s masterpiece “All That Heaven Allows,” Cary Scott (Jane Wyman) always feels like a real person – her reality may be a heightened one, but it is reality nonetheless.
“Reminders of Him,” Vanessa Caswill’s adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s novel of the same name, falls neatly into the melodrama category. It’s not nearly as good as something like “All That Heaven Allows,” (truthfully, what is?) but it has a similarly grounded bent. Even in the face of a frankly pretty bonkers premise.
🐦⬛ Read my full review here.
‘Undertone’ has a scary gimmick, but can’t deliver on theme
WEEKLY FILM REVIEW
🎙️ “Undertone” has been billed as the scariest movie you’ll ever hear, and that’s not a marketing promise that falls short – the sound design hits the mark. But that gimmick isn’t enough to sustain a host of other issues.
“Undertone,” written and directed by Ian Tuason, follows Evy (Nina Kiri), a podcaster who moves back home to play caretaker to her devoutly religious and dying mother (Michèle Duquet). On her paranormal-centric podcast, she plays the role of professional skeptic as her co-host Justin (Adam DiMarco, although we only hear his voice) tries to convince her that everything from ghosts to the devil walk among us. But when an anonymous email sends Evy and Justin recordings of a married couple experiencing some sort of haunting in their home, Evy starts to have similar experiences.
Undertone” is a movie built on a gimmick guaranteed to scare you out of your wits, but it’s also attempting to make a larger comment about religious anxiety, about guilt, about mothers and their children. In trying to be both high-brow and scrappy, it loses steam in both lanes, and the commentary it attempts to make is so barely there that it feels maddening and more than a little careless.
At the Movies!
If you’re looking for a movie to see in theaters this week, here’s what you’ve got to look forward to!
Movies releasing this weekend:
🚗 “Reminders of Him”
🎧 “Undertone”
🌾 “Seeds”
📄 “BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions”
Special Events:
🐢 “TMNT II: Secret of the Ooze” 35th Anniversary @ The Plaza (Friday-Tuesday)
✂️ WABE Cinema Social “Frida” (pictured) @ The Plaza (Saturday)
🧲 “Donkey Skin” @ The Plaza (Saturday-Thursday)
🇮🇳 “Days and Nights in the Forest” in 4K @ The Plaza (Sunday-Thursday)
👶 “Labyrinth” @ The Plaza (Sunday-Thursday)
🌃 “After Hours” @ The Tara (Saturday-Tuesday)
💪 Cineprov Riffs “Maximum Overdrive” @ The Tara (Saturday)
🚈 MARTA bus routes change April 18! NextGen Bus Network is a smarter, faster, better system of bus routes to get you around the region. Find a map for your new route and more info here. SPONSOR MESSAGE
Spotlight: Mohammad Ali Elyasmehr in ‘It Was Just an Accident’
👰 The cast of “It Was Just an Accident,” Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s revenge thriller about a group of people deciding whether or not to kill the man who tortured them in prison, hasn’t gotten their due this awards season. Today, I want to talk about Mohammad Ali Elyasmehr.
In the film, Elyasmehr plays Hamid – a hot-headed, angry man intent on exacting his revenge on the person who ruined his life. He also gives the funniest performance in the movie. That’s sort of the magic trick of “It Was Just an Accident” – it forces you to sit with very real, very raw pain, and then turns around and makes you laugh. And it does it without breaking a sweat.
Hamid sits at the heart of that tension. His anger is often played for laughs (he’s never met an insult he didn’t like), but he also wields it sharply, like a weapon. There’s a dejected quality to Hamid that causes him to lash out, a sense that any goodness or warmth he had to offer has run dry.
The way Elyasmehr plays anger feels more like a kaleidoscope than a laser beam, hundreds of different emotions underpinning his rage, changing all the time. It’s all in service of masking Hamid’s pain. Elyasmehr hardly ever lets even a sliver of that pain peek out, but it’s always there – in the way he punches first and asks questions later, in the slight waver of his voice. Every choice he makes is so precise, letting you into the character’s sense of abandonment on a visual level.
Lights, Camera, Action!
🕶️ Ahead of the Oscars this weekend, the podcast “Critical Darlings” discussed the last movie in their Best Picture lineup – and the frontrunner at that – “One Battle After Another.” Sidebars include Oscar narratives, Leonardo DiCaprio’s relationship with the Academy, and predictions. Check it out here.
💻 I enjoyed this New Yorker piece from Alex Barasch about the recent influence of YouTube on horror movies. Horror has long been one of the most reliable genres when it comes to getting butts into seats at theaters, and now, Hollywood is banking on YouTube creators to back that up.
🚀 If you, like me, cried when Harrison Ford received a Life Achievement Award at the Actor Awards, then have I got an interview for you! Ford recently appeared on the podcast “Fresh Air” and spoke to Terry Gross about his career from “Star Wars” onward. Take a listen here.
🖊️ Today’s Scene was edited by Julie E. Bloemeke.