Oscars: Every Best Picture Nominee Of The 2010s - Ranked Worst To Best
74. Lincoln
If there's a prime example of a prestige, oscar-bait film, it's Steven Spielberg's Lincoln. Take a beloved real-life person from history, get an incredible actor to portray them and a steady pair of hands behind the camera, and watch as you ride your way to endless Oscar nominations and appearances in secondary-school history classes for the rest of time. Oh, and make sure the film itself is at least two-and-a-half-hours long. And grey.
That might be writing the film off a bit too much - it's competent, tells an important story, and is clearly fuelled by real talent. But there feels like an ulterior motive behind each element, and it lacks the heart a story like this should have.
JB
73. War Horse
Adapted from the phenomenally successful stage play by Steven Spielberg, War Horse is just as you'd expect from the master story-teller: it hits all of the necessary emotional beats, the character dynamics are its biggest strength and there are some set-pieces that only he could pull off.
It's still hard to shake the nagging suspicion that the material isn't quite up to Spielberg's level and at times you can really see where he struggled to pull something out of it. Which is why it's curiously dull in places alongside some truly breathtaking looking sequences: almost - rather fatally - like he was drawn to making it for parts of the material but not all of it.
SG
72. Philomena
There's a sequence in the wonderful The Trip in which Steve Coogan laments his lack of success in big movies, which came some three years before he wrote and co-starred in this delightful (if comparatively slight) comedy/drama about a woman's quest to find a child she was forced to give up for adoption as a young, single mother.
The story is ostensibly a two character play that sees them Judy Dench's Phil and Coogan's journalist Martin Sixsmith following breadcrumbs to find her long lost son, only to discover a web of institutional corruption in the church. But this is no mirror of something like Spotlight - it's an achingly personal story of profound tragedy that soars on Dench's performance and Coogan's strong, funny/sad writing.
SG
71. Darkest Hour
A lot like Lincoln, Darkest Hour's aims are obvious. it suffers from many of the same problems - more of an "important" film than a good one - but the real reason it places so low is for that awful, revisionist-history, totally-fabricated scene on a train towards the end. Whatever genuine drama, whatever genuine authenticity, the film had been building, it breaks in that two-minute period.
Unlike Lincoln, however, there is a genuine creative spark which pokes its head through just enough to elevate it. Some of the photography can be striking, really evoking the claustrophobia and isolation of organising a war from the confines of a bunker, while the set design and costumes are undeniably lavish and authentic.
JB