0
Haven't really seen any good films yet from this new year. If Burnham's Inside counts, then that'd be the best of them, although it has a few minor annoyances (I suspect that much of his angst was performative).
Since we're allowing for local release, I'll pretend I live in Boomfook, New Guinea and just watched last year's Oscar films this year (which is actually what I did anyway). I wasn't terribly impressed, generally. I think for my ballot, I filled in Judas for most of the slots, out of default. About a 6/10 film for me, but slightly better than some of the others, mostly on the circumstantial interest in the Fred Hampton story. Technically, the film felt like a TV movie, boiling all of the substance down into easily chewable trite tropes. The acting was decent anyway. The film was obviously being made as vicarious propaganda for today's social justice movements, making the similar inanity as 13th's suggestion that nothing has changed or improved in the past 50 years, and that the Civil Rights movement was a toothless distraction from the real revolution. We can excuse the Panthers' emulation of Maoism because it was impossible for outsiders to yet understand the full rot behind the Cultural Revolution, but it's inexcusable for anyone in the 21st century to claim ignorance.
I wouldn't quite put Nomadland in that same category, as it is definitely technically superior, but it falls into a similar kind of fashionable cynicism, however sympathetic it seems. It's also far superior to that other fashionably cynical social justice placebo that won McDormand an Oscar, Three Billboards Outside Podunkistan, Misery. That shouldn't be a hard bar, but here we are. I think that I need to see Zhao's earlier films to get a fair read on her style and perspective. Maybe I'm the cynical one here. Or maybe I'm prejudiced by seeing what has become overt and superficial Academy fawning and condescending back-patting. If I had seen Nomadland as a humble indie, rather than as a token Oscar front-runner, maybe it would have been more disarming.