To see a plethora of actual footage from MLK Jr’s life, this film is worth the watch. It doesn’t offer much new if you are well versed in his life, his mission, and the times he lived, but hearing his words in his own voice is powerful. The celebrity interstitials are sometimes a bit jarring and pulling from the flow of the narrative, but it is nice to see many famous faces join in the cause.
Oscar Nomination: Best Documentary, Features
Directed by Louis Kahn’s son Nathaniel, this film is essentially two separate stories. The first is a tour of the architect’s works, which is intriguing in its own right for this rather light fan of architecture . The second is the director’s attempt to come to terms with his father’s personal life and general absenteeism as a parent. Filled with interviews with an array of renowned architects and acquaintances of Kahn, the film is weaker for trying to meld these two disparate bits together, but for me was still worth it to be exposed to Kahn’s work.
Oscar Nomination: Best Documentary, Features
As a pioneering documentary film, Nanook is an incredible anthropological record of the Inuit people, who were already more modernized than shown in this somewhat staged film. While there are bits of questionable othering and dumbing down of the subjects, making the film as a definite product of its time, it painstakingly shows various mechanisms as to how native cultures survived so long in the frozen far North.