After a stellar, stylish start that saw Regina King stride through the 93rd Academy Awards’ new home at Union Station — captured in cinematic 2.35:1 letterbox — the 2021 Oscars slowed down, backed up, and eventually collapsed under its own weight. Credit to the producers (including Soderbergh, Jesse Collins, and Stacey Sher) for sticking to their guns, whether it was the intimate aesthetics, uninterrupted speeches, or emphasis on storytelling (this year’s theme was “Stories Matter”), but their clear vision of what an Oscars ceremony should look like didn’t mesh with what makes for an entertaining evening for audiences at home or, in the end, a sweet celebration for those in attendance....

“Next morning, patrol goes out to take a look and there’s hardly anything left — just blood and shredded clothing,” he says. “And no satchel. Did someone come and take it? Maybe. Was it there in the first place?” Del trails off, not able to speak the answer he’s feared for some time. “But you’re under threat, and you start defending yourself, and you just keep on going — past the time the threat’s moved on,” he says....

“Just when I started batting ideas around with the producer [Brigham Taylor], I really tried to rethink, I tried to kind of take it from scratch,” he said. “There [were] never any illusions that like this was going to be my movie and, by the way, at no point was I attached as a director. It was always very clearly this was going to be a writing job, where I tried to just take the existing thing and do a kind of update on it....

“As We See It” follows three twenty-somethings living on the spectrum. Jack (Rick Glassman) is a highly intelligent web designer struggling for financially stability after his father (Joe Mantegna) reveals he has cancer. Harrison (Albert Rutecki) is kindhearted but can’t quite leave the trio’s Los Angeles apartment. And Violet (Sue Ann Pien) desperately wants a boyfriend, but tends to assume attention equals love and marriage. They’re guided through life’s social situations with the help of home healthcare aid and burgeoning doctor, Mandy (Sosie Bacon)....

“A Hero,” which won the Grand Prix at Cannes last year and was shortlisted for the 2022 International Feature Oscar, follows divorced father Rahim (Amir Jadidi), who is on leave from debtor’s prison. When he stumbles upon a bag of money that turns out to be worth less than he thought, he decides to return the money in hopes of rehabbing his public image as an ex-convict. But according to The Hollywood Reporter, one of Farhadi’s former students, Azadeh Masihzadeh, is now suing Farhadi on the premise that he stole the concept from a documentary titled “All Winners, All Losers” that she made in his film class....

The brilliance of “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn,” Romanian director Radu Jude’s astonishing Berlinale Golden Bear-winning satire, comes from a most unusual combination by jamming together two very different kind of movies that shouldn’t work in harmony, but end up making perfect sense. The filmmaker’s bold approach suggests what might happen if someone spliced a late-period Jean-Luc Godard essay film into the middle of “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” with such mesmerizing results that you just have to roll with it....

Cumberbatch went full Method actor for the role, learning how to castrate a bull and to play the banjo, refusing to speak to co-stars like Dunst on set, and choosing not to bathe so he could wear the stink of his character at all times. But one Method choice led to a bit of a downturn in his health. The actor got nicotine poisoning more than once due to the amount of cigarettes he was smoking as Phil....