Here's Where to Watch All of This Year's Best Picture Nominees (2023)

In a normal year, you’d normally have to move between rentals, streaming, and theaters to check out all of the Best Picture nominees. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, theaters have pretty much been shut down since last March, which means most movies quickly moved to streaming even if it was a Premium VOD experience that cost $20 to rent. If we can look for a silver lining, that means that 2021 nominees are pretty easy to track down for the most part. If you’re looking to play catch-up before the winners are announced on April 25th, here’s where to find each nominee as well as an excerpt from our reviews.

The Father

This is one of two nominees still playing only in theaters. The film currently expanded to 865 cinemas nationwide, and if you’ve received your COVID-19 vaccination, you should make time for Florian Zeller’s moving, empathetic portrayal of a man (Anthony Hopkins) slowly falling prey to Alzheimer’s. From my review:

The skill and craft of The Father is that Zeller never needs to “upend” reality or move towards the fantastical. Instead, he understands that to properly view the world from Anthony’s perspective is to purposefully confuse the audience based on facts they already have. So, for example, in one scene we meet Anne and she’s played by Olivia Colman, so we’ll grasp his confusion when Anne returns later and she’s played by Olivia Williams. The basic facts—Anthony has a daughter named Anne who checks in on him—are the same, but he can no longer recognize his daughter, but pretends that everything is okay because he knows if he starts accusing her of being someone else, they’ll think he’s mad. Anthony is forced to play along with his own dementia in order to hide the depths of his illness.

Judas and the Black Messiah

(Video) Stephen Recaps The Best Picture Nominees

This is the other nominee that’s only in theaters at the moment. It was on HBO Max for its first 31 days of release, but now it has moved to theaters only. It will likely return to HBO Max in a few months, but for now, if you want to see it, you’ll have to go to a theater that’s playing it. If you’ve been vaccinated, it’s absolutely worth the effort. From my review:

Judas and the Black Messiah could be considered a piece of civil rights history, but really it’s a war movie and it explores how soldiers and civilians see themselves in that war. I saw the film a week ago, and it’s still kicking around in my brain because I’ve never seen anything quite like it with regards to how it tries to find the dramatic tension between factions and individuals against an American landscape. We’re so used to our heroes and villains that it takes a movie like Judas and the Black Messiah to look past individual actors and see how they belong to a larger struggle that began before they were born and will sadly continue after they’ve perished.

Mank

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Mank picked up the most nominations this year with 10 including not only Best Picture, but also Best Director (David Fincher), Best Actor (Gary Oldman), and Best Supporting Actress (Amanda Seyfried). The story of the screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz and his motivation for writing Citizen Kane is both a love letter to the Golden Age of Hollywood as well as a biting critique of our political moment. From my review:

As one would expect with a Fincher movie, there’s no flaw to be found with the craftsmanship. The cinematography is gorgeous, and those with HDR on their TVs will be stunned by the black-and-white photography within the first five minutes. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have delivered another incredible score for Fincher (their fourth for the director since The Social Network), evoking the music of the era while never sliding into parody or pale imitation. The 1930s-40s influences are unmistakable, but they help bolster the boozy attitude of its wayward protagonist. Special credit also goes to Fincher’s longtime editor Kirk Baxter, who not only weaves the timelines together beautifully, but also handles complicated crowd scenes with maximum efficiency.

Mank is streaming on Netflix.

Minari

Lee Isaac Chung crafted an incredible immigrant story pulled from his own childhood with this story of a family that moves to Arkansas so that the father (Oscar-nominee Steven Yeun) can fulfill his dream of becoming a farmer. It’s a beautiful, honest story of the American Dream filled with personal touches that breath life into this lovely narrative. From my review:

What makes Minari so vibrant is how Chung captures the highs and lows of a family while retaining the power of both. When Minari is funny, it’s really sharp and feels like Chung relating stories from his childhood. But when the film is tough, it plays to the honest difficulties in Jacob and Monica’s relationship. It’s a strange thing to try and tell the story from the perspective of both an adult and a child, but Chung makes it work. It never feels awkward to go from David squaring off against Grandma to Jacob and Monica having tough conversations about what they want out of life. By approaching the film from both perspectives, Chung strikes a balance that makes the story feel fully realized. It’s not solely the idyllic childhood stories of young David nor is it only the story of marital troubles between Jacob and Monica.

Minari is a PVOD rental, so it costs $19.99 on Apple, Amazon, Vudu, et al., but it’s well worth the price.

RELATED:Oscar Nominations 2021: Full List of This Year's Academy Awards Nominations

Nomadland

My favorite film of 2020, Nomadland is a enrapturing elegy about American life in the wreckage of the Great Recession, and it’s arguably the frontrunner to win Best Picture at the Oscars. Director Chloé Zhao (also a frontrunner to win Best Director) brings a deep well empathy for her characters, and while Frances McDormand grounds the picture beautifully, she’s surrounded by real-life nomads who help provide the picture with its authenticity. It’s not a movie that romanticizes poverty, but rather one that celebrates life even with all of its hardships. From my review:

At first glimpse, Nomadland seems like a melancholy reflection on a dead America where homeless people scrape out a few bucks working at an Amazon shipping facility before going to sleep in their vans. The film’s genius is in deciding to shatter the paradigm of the American Dream completely to argue that the Dream doesn’t get to serve as a metric of a life well lived. As Fern tells one of her former students, she’s “houseless, not homeless.” Fern and her fellow nomads have consciously chosen to reject a system that leaves them behind, refusing to play by the rules of a rigged game. That doesn’t mean that their lives are easy; a flat tire can be catastrophic and it’s not like it’s fun to put on a paper hat and work at a restaurant for minimum wage, not to mention the risks of life without health care. But the freedom these people possess (and here it should be noted that with its white cast, Nomadland elides what freedom means based on race since it’s not like Fern has to worry about being pulled over based on the color of her skin, so her “freedom” is a part of her white privilege) is alluring. No one in Nomadland asks for our pity; if anything, they probably pity those who are still chasing the American Dream.

Nomadland is currently streaming on Hulu.

Promising Young Woman

I saw Promising Young Woman at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, and I’ve never really been able to shake it. Emerald Fennell’s acerbic, unforgiving strike against rape culture is like being hit with a bucket of cold water, but that’s the urgency of the wake-up call. The film is bound to be divisive, especially with its ending, but you can’t deny the stellar craft nor Carey Mulligan’s Oscar-worthy lead performance. From my review:

What's so damn great about Cassie as a character is that at the outset of the movie, you think it's just going to be Carey Mulligan wrecking shit, and honestly, that would not be the worst film ever—just two hours of Carey Mulligan ruining predatory men. But Fennell has far more ambition than that and while Promising Young Woman may be heightened in its direction, it's never fantastical. Fennell wants you to be shocked out of complacency, but never questioning the reality presented. This is not he said/she said. Cassie demands to be heard through her aggressive actions, but Mulligan always lets us see the toll. This isn't a superhero story. Cassie is a real person consumed by vengeance, and while we can revel in her victories, Mulligan never lets us forget that this is not Batman. This is tragedy tempered only by the darkest of comedy.

You can buy Promising Young Woman on Blu-ray or digital, or you can rent the film for $5.99 from Amazon, Vudu, et al.

Darius Marder’s drama makes brilliant use of sound and its lead performance as Riz Ahmed stars as a rock drummer quickly going deaf and afraid to lose the life and love (Olivia Cooke) he once had. Grounded by Ahmed’s brilliant performance, Sound of Metal isn’t simply a requiem for what’s being lost, but also asks the hard questions about what we live for and how we can accept drastic change when it challenges our identity. From my review:

Sound of Metal is the first film I’ve ever seen where closed captioning functions as an artistic choice. To better put you in the mindset of Ruben and those in the deaf community, Marder presents the film as a deaf person would see it. It’s not just subtitles, but also descriptions of the audio. And yet the way the film uses sound is incredible, not simply cutting it out, but rather muffling it, distorting it, cutting between the way Ruben experiences his hearing loss and an objective, third-person perspective of the audio. Rather than directly telling the audience, “This is what it would be like to lose your hearing,” cutting back and forth between Ruben’s perspective and the objective soundscape conveys the pull of Ruben’s old life and his reluctance to accept his new one with hearing loss.

Sound of Metal is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

The Trial of the Chicago 7

The Trial of the Chicago 7 is a tricky film, and arguably one not best suited to the wheelhouse of an institutionalist like writer/director Aaron Sorkin. The film follows the trial of activists who were charged with inciting violence during the 1968 Democratic Convention, but Sorkin is interested exploring how different protest movements work while also commenting on judicial overreach of 2020’s political system that seeks to stifle dissent. From my review:

Chicago 7 is Sorkin’s first courtroom drama since his breakthrough A Few Good Men, and his new film almost plays like a rebuke of that story. Whereas in that fictionalized courtroom of A Few Good Men a small group of determined lawyers could get to the truth (which, it turns out, they could in fact handle), in the real events that inspired Chicago 7, there’s no justice to be found. Once Chicago 7 gets into a rhythm, it reveals itself as a stone-faced farce. As Americans, we like to see courtrooms as institutions designed to uphold the law, and the law is the foundation of America. When you remove the fairness of that institution, America doesn’t seem to matter very much. The trial becomes a crucible for the freedom to protest and America fails that test because…well, Sorkin has a little more trouble with that.

The Trial of the Chicago 7 is streaming on Netflix.

KEEP READING:The 7 Biggest Oscar Snubs and Surprises From This Year’s Nominations