TRAVIS BYRAM'S MOVIE REVIEWS

There's no witty opener to be found here. I want to be as straightforward and honest about Luca Guadagnino's Call Me by Your Name as Call Me by Your Name was straightforward and honest with me. This is the most piercingly honest depiction of first/falling in/romantic love I have seen in a very long time, perhaps of all time. If I would have postponed my top five list of 2017, this would have surely made the mark. The premise is so simple it begs you to question its gimmick: maybe they're on Mars the whole time? There is nothing deceiving about this film, and its pureness in relation to its characters is what makes it one of the better I've seen in the past decade. Oliver (Armie Hammer) comes to stay with Mr. Perlman (Michael Stuhlbarg) as a research assistant for a summer in northern Italy in 1983, along with Perlman's wife Annella (Amira Casar) and son Elio (now Oscar-nominee Timothée Chalamet). The relationship begins: and that's the movie. Spread out leisur...

Strong Oscar contenders for Best Picture this year are "Precious," "Hurt Locker," "Up in the Air" and "Avatar." I've only seen "Avatar" and it's absolutely fantastic I can tell you. "Invictus" SHOULD win Best Actor for Freeman, it was a great movie on how Mandella brought a racially divded nation together. Also "Up" was great, better than last year's "WALL-E" in my opinion, a nearly flawless movie with Dug, the talking d- "SQUIRELL....."...what was I saying? I have a goal to see all the Best Picture movies that have won, (81 as of this post) and I'm saving the grittier ones ("Departed," "Platoon," "Crash") for when I'm older so I can appreciate it better. Coming back to 2009 Oscars, in reality, "Hurt Locker" will probably take it, a movie no one's ever seen or heard of in school. But who hasn't heard of/seen "Up" or ...