With the major film festivals in Toronto, Venice, and Telluride behind us, the season for awards-caliber movies is officially underway and it’s shaping up to be one of the most exciting ones in recent memory. From contemporary family dramas to period biopics to sci-fi romances, here are the most likely contenders for the 2013 season.
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It is only mid-September, and there are a lot of movies yet to open this year, but 2013 is shaping up to be one of the most exciting years for movies in recent memory.
Of course, it often feels that way this time of year. As autumn approaches, the loud and expensive summer fare has been (mostly) stored away in favor of the kind of mature, human-scaled stories that end up getting nominated for and winning critics awards, guild awards, Golden Globes, BAFTAs, Indie Spirits, and — eventually, inevitably — Oscars.
When the season formally kicks off with a triumvirate of international film festivals (Telluride, Venice, and Toronto), there is an abiding hope that the crop of movies for that year's awards season will not only be good, but great, the sort of richly realized cinematic storytelling that will still hold us in its grip decades from now.
Alas, that rarely happens. Usually, we partake of movies that are merely really good — well crafted, thoughtfully executed, and destined to fade from memory in just a few years. It's a lucky thing if you see one film in a year that feels For the Ages, but at this year's Toronto Film Festival, I saw two movies that were unlike anything I'd had seen before, movies that I know I will be thinking about and talking about for years to come.
This year's awards season will contain contemporary family dramas and hard-boiled crime thrillers, period biopics and rousing war dramedies, black-and-white character studies and sci-fi romances. Obviously some of these films will fall short of expectations, but here are 31 live-action feature films that could be contenders within this year's awards season, and the major categories that could be in play (for Oscars or otherwise) for each of them.
The Weinstein Company
