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January 22nd, 2015

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The annual media circus that is the Academy Awards is now in full swing following the announcement of the nominations last week. It’s reassuring to see mediocrity isn’t everywhere – there are some genuinely deserving films on the table with Boyhood receiving nine nominations, Ida and Leviathan up for best foreign film and CitizenFour in the running for best documentary … but seriously, no Lego Movie? 

Birdman, in which a middle-aged actor’s career anxieties take centre stage on Broadway, also has the Academy all of a flutter – with nine nominations. You can read our review this issue and then decide whether it’s worth all the fuss when it arrives in Danish cinemas this week. Also on general release are Clint Eastwood’s solidly crafted, two-hour-plus army recruitment campaign American Sniper and the troubled production Seventh Son, which sheepishly arrives two years later than slated and stars Julianne Moore as a witch hunted by Jeff Bridges’ medieval ghostbuster.

Elsewhere (and I would urge you to look elsewhere) Cinemateket continues its retrospective of Ida director Pawel Pavlowski with the intimate drama My Summer Of Love (2004) at 16:45 on Sunday. 

Saturday will also see the start of a program for the coming month dedicated to the Holocaust, which includes dramas, documentaries and debates. Shoah (1985) by Claude Lanzman, whose first part shows on Saturday at 13:45, is a nine-hour documentary (with English subs) widely regarded as the one of the best, most comprehensive documents of modern history. It contains no archive footage and instead features interviews of former Nazis, survivors and witnesses. The film holds a rating of 99 on Metacritic. See dfi.dk/Filmhuset for the full program.

If you make it through that, you’ll no doubt need a pick-me-up. Huset has the solution with A Day at the Races. The classic Marx Brothers film is screening during a ‘Swing Night’ event on Wednesday at 19:00 featuring live music and drinks. See huset-kbh.dk for details.