It’s hard to view the past year in the news business as anything other than testy and tumultuous.
12.12.2022 - 22:39 / deadline.com
In military parlance, the term retrograde can mean several things, among them withdrawal from a war zone, “where all or part of a deployed force voluntarily disengages from the enemy.”
The U.S. exit from the Vietnam War constituted a retrograde action, a chaotic process documented in Rory Kennedy’s Oscar-nominated film Last Days of Vietnam. A much more recent example came last year in Afghanistan, when U.S. forces were pulled from the battlefield after nearly 20 years of combat. The final months of America’s military intervention there—and what happened after the withdrawal—are documented in Retrograde, the new film from Matthew Heineman.
Retrograde began streaming on Disney+ and Hulu over the weekend, after premiering on the National Geographic Channel on Thursday. It qualified for Oscar consideration with a limited theatrical release last month in New York, L.A. and other cities. Retrograde is the latest Oscar-contending documentary for the filmmaker, who launched his directing career in 2009.
“The bedrock of what I do is intimacy and access,” says Heineman, noted for his award-winning work in Cartel Land, City of Ghosts and The First Wave. The intimacy and access in Retrograde resulted from a tenacious effort to embed with U.S. Army Special Forces, better known as the Green Berets.
“Five or six years ago, I was pondering a somewhat clichéd question of why do we fight wars and began exploring different routes to examine that with the military–first with the Army Rangers, and then I got connected with my producing partner, Caitlin McNally. And she had a relationship with the Green Berets,” Heineman explains. “So, we ended up following that path. But it took years, really, to get permission both within the Green Beret
It’s hard to view the past year in the news business as anything other than testy and tumultuous.
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Disney swept the animation category with three nominations last Oscar season, culminating in a win for Encanto. This year, Netflix is coming on strong with more than a few contenders, including Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio. DreamWorks Animation is back with a few contenders of its own, while Apple, A24 and GKIDS are seeking their first Oscar win for Best Animated Feature. With only five nominations available, who will go on to compete for the prize?
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A camera pans slowly around a modestly comfortable living room. Here is the kitchen corner, with its microwave, coffee machine and jars of newly preserved tomatoes. Here are the inherited cabinets, one full of the best china, one full of books. And now, here is a wall that doesn’t exist any more. Torn plaster and broken wood frames a vast portal to the rolling steppes. There is a single road across those grasslands. It leads to Russia.
Shares rocketed higher in early trading as new data showed inflation slowed more than expected last month after a string of aggressive interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve meant to tamp down an overheated economy.
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The PGA Awards announced its nominees for Outstanding Producer of Documentary Motion Pictures today, a list noted for a number of snubs and surprises.
Strange as it may seem, the Oscar for Best International Feature tends to go to movies that are universal rather than geographically specific. Last year’s winner Drive My Car spoke more about mankind’s default setting to loneliness than it did about the specifics of relationship dynamics in modern Japan, just as the Danish drunks in 2021’s Another Round got hammered in a way that was relatable to boozers in every country from Albania to Zambia. Maybe the Academy feels that real life is better left to docs, but a 2015 win for the harrowing Second World War drama Son of Saul suggests that the door is always open. And after a year that saw the whole world reeling from Vladmir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, this might be one of those years that addresses the fact.