By Ken Chanko
With the arrival of the Labor Day Weekend, superhero sequels and other big-budget formula fare recede on Hollywood’s release schedules, replaced by tempting scatterings of Oscar bait.
If you look at the Oscar nominees for Best Picture last year — or pretty much any year over recent decades — you’ll see that almost all the nominated films had release dates within the final four months of the calendar year.
This year looks to be no different. Most Oscar prognosticators believe that only one film released so far this year — Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” — has a real shot to be among the eight to ten Best Picture nominees.
Here’s my personal list of the ten films due out soon after Labor Day through the end of the year that I most want to see, based on the talent involved, word-of-mouth from film industry folks with whom I’m still in touch, and my own idiosyncratic gut instincts. Odds are half of these ten will be getting Academy Award attention when nominations are announced early next year.
