2021 Golden Globe nominations: Where to watch film nominees - Los Angeles Times
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Where to watch all the 2021 Golden Globe-nominated films. You’re welcome

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It’s that time of year again, when moviegoers flock to theaters to squeeze in screenings of as many nominated films as possible ahead of the Golden Globes, the Screen Actors Guild Awards and the Oscars.

But this year, flocking to movie theaters isn’t an option for everyone, as cinemas across the country remain closed a year into the COVID-19 pandemic. Many cinephiles now have no choice but to view the 2021 awards darlings via streaming platforms ranging from Netflix to Disney+.

On Wednesday morning, the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. unveiled the season’s first batch of nominees leading up to the 78th annual Golden Globe Awards later this month. For your convenience, we’ve listed where you can watch each Golden Globe-nominated film and see what nominations it scored.

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Also below, check out what Times critics thought of the nominees ahead of the Golden Globes ceremony, which airs Feb. 28 on NBC.

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‘Another Round’

Where to watch: Video-on-demand (VOD)
Nominated for: Best picture (foreign language)
What we said: “‘Another Round’ itself often moves and swings like a piece of music: Staccato in its rhythms and symphonic in structure, it’s awash in Scarlatti and Schubert, bar tunes and patriotic songs, and climaxes with a jubilant blast of Danish pop/R&B.”

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‘Borat Subsequent Moviefilm’

Where to watch: Amazon Prime Video
Nominated for: Best picture (musical/comedy), lead actress (musical/comedy) and lead actor (musical/comedy)
What we said: “... as Borat’s latest misadventures exist to remind us, we live in a world gone mad, and compliance seems antithetical to his gleefully anarchic spirit.”

With Wednesday’s announcement of the nominees for the 78th Golden Globes, the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. marked the start of an awards season like no other.

Feb. 3, 2021

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‘The Croods: A New Age’

Where to watch: VOD
Nominated for: Best picture (animated)
What we said: “It’s a blend of smart, irreverent humor coupled with eye-popping, neon-Technicolor animation that moves fast and furiously across the screen.”

5

‘Emma’

Where to watch: HBO Max
Nominated for: Lead actress (musical/comedy)
What we said: “No one wrote about [romantic love] with a keener understanding, both comic and sympathetic, than [Jane] Austen, and any film that is true to her spirit, as this latest ‘Emma’ is, will have no trouble making us happy.”

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6

‘The Father’

Where to watch: In select theaters (L.A. and New York) Feb. 26, in wide release March 12 and VOD starting March 26
Nominated for: Best picture (drama), lead actor (drama), supporting actress and screenplay
What we said: ”... the rigorous interiority of ‘The Father’ compels your attention: If narrative cinema is largely predicated on the illusion of seamlessness, there’s something apt about the way [director Florian] Zeller both upholds and shatters that illusion, bridging the narrative gap across a series of jarring discontinuities.”

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‘French Exit’

Where to watch: In theaters Feb. 12
Nominated for: Lead actress (musical/comedy)
What we said: “As she has grown older, slipping in and out of the spotlight at her discretion, [Michelle] Pfeiffer has become a more enigmatic performer, capable of the combination of glamour and grit that made her a star, but with added underpinnings of sadness and the unexpected, of a life lived.”

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‘Hamilton’

Where to watch: Disney+
Nominated for: Best picture (musical/comedy), lead actor (musical/comedy)
What we said: “We live in a contradictory moment, and ‘Hamilton’ — a joyous synthesis of popular culture and people’s history, a utopian vision of equality set in profoundly unequal times — is nothing if not animated by its own contradictions.”

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9

‘Hillbilly Elegy’

Where to watch: Netflix
Nominated for: Supporting actress
What we said: “The faintly scolding, moralizing tone of [J.D.] Vance’s prose has largely evaporated, only to be replaced by the hectoring profanities of Amy Adams and Glenn Close, two Hollywood royals who have subjected themselves to one of the industry’s most time-honored traditions: deglamorization in service of a dubious artistic cause.”

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‘I Care a Lot’

Where to watch: Netflix starting Feb. 19
Nominated for: Lead actress (musical/comedy)
What we said: “... ‘I Care a Lot’ is pretty much a one-woman show for [Rosamund] Pike, who works in a constricted emotional range but a boundless physical one.”

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‘Judas and the Black Messiah’

Where to watch: HBO Max (available for 31 days) and in theaters Feb. 12
Nominated for: Supporting actor, song
What we said: “‘Judas and the Black Messiah’ is too honest to offer reassurances or solutions, but if nothing else, its tribute to Fred Hampton does warrant the final word: ‘America’s on fire right now, and until that fire is extinguished, don’t nothing else mean a damn thing.’”

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‘La Llorona’

Where to watch: VOD
Nominated for: Best picture (foreign language)
What we said: “With this film, [Jayro] Bustamante creates a Llorona full of self-assertion and intent, an indigenous woman assuredly facing the source of her pain.”

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‘The Life Ahead’

Where to watch: Netflix
Nominated for: Best picture (foreign language), song
What we said: “... the chance to bask in Sophia Loren’s formidable glow is a pleasure not many movies can claim to offer, so with that in mind, plan your own ‘Life Ahead’ of movie-watching accordingly.”

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14

‘The Little Things’

Where to watch: HBO Max as of Jan. 29 (available for 31 days)
Nominated for: Supporting actor
What we said: “... while [John Lee] Hancock’s movie may look at first like a hollow retread, I’d describe it as more of an unhollow retread, a movie in which even the hoariest-looking conventions have an undertow of real feeling.”

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‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’

Where to watch: Netflix
Nominated for: Lead actress (drama), lead actor (drama)
What we said: “Most of all, there is the late Chadwick Boseman, giving a furiously inventive screen performance that also happens to be his last. It’s one spellbinding final reminder of what we’ve lost, and of how easily God, to invoke one of [August] Wilson’s unseen major characters, can giveth and taketh away.”

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‘Mank’

Where to watch: Netflix
Nominated for: Best picture (drama), lead actor (drama), supporting actress, director, screenplay and score
What we said: “A basic familiarity with ‘Citizen Kane,’ or at least an ability to tell Orson Welles from H.G. Wells, should suffice, and if that’s asking a lot of an idle Netflix surfer, well, tough: In this dense, luxuriant cinephile swoon of a movie, you either sink or swim.”

17

‘The Mauritanian’

Where to watch: In theaters Feb. 12
Nominated for: Lead actor (drama), supporting actress
What we said: “... ‘The Mauritanian’ is a moral muddle as well as a narrative one, and it leaves you wondering why our empathy for [Mohamedou Ould] Slahi has to be so mediated, negotiated and rationalized in the first place.”

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18

‘The Midnight Sky’

Where to watch: Netflix
Nominated for: Score
What we said: “The film’s themes of extinction and survival are worthy of thoughtful treatment, something that eludes the ambitious movie as it succumbs to a schematic and sentimental telling that overreaches for a grand gesture and obscures the more meaningful ideas.”

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‘Minari’

Where to watch: In theaters Feb. 12 and on VOD Feb. 26
Nominated for: Best picture (foreign language)
What we said: “‘Minari’ in its entirety feels like a balm right now, a gentle, truthful and tender story of family filled with kind people trying to love one another the best they can.”

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‘Music’

Where to watch: Select IMAX theaters exclusively on Feb. 10 and VOD Feb.12
Nominated for: Best picture (musical/comedy), lead actress (musical/comedy)
What we said: “The film earned rather unexpected nominations for best picture (musical or comedy) and lead actress for [Kate] Hudson from the Golden Globes, but this is Hudson’s most memorable work since her ballyhooed turn in “Almost Famous.”

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‘News of the World’

Where to watch: VOD
Nominated for: Supporting actress, score
What we said: “With its gorgeous wheat-toned landscapes and its salutary nods to pictures such as ‘The Searchers,’ ‘True Grit’ and ‘Paper Moon,’ ‘News of the World’ finds its maker navigating the conventions of the western and the road movie with relative ease.”

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22

‘Nomadland’

Where to watch: Hulu and in theaters Feb. 19
Nominated for: Best picture (drama), lead actress (drama), director and screenplay
What we said: “Fluid, inventive and even playful in ways that belie its generally somber tone, ‘Nomadland’ exists at that blurry juncture where fiction and nonfiction meet — a well-traveled zone that is nonetheless still rife with artistic possibilities.”

23

‘On the Rocks’

Where to watch: Apple TV+
Nominated for: Supporting actor
What we said: “In addition to being an intimate, generally lighthearted comedy of family ties and wayward eyes, then, ‘On the Rocks’ is an accidental time capsule of pre-pandemic life, set in a New York that might have looked idyllic even if the movie had been released last year.”

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‘One Night in Miami ...’

Where to watch: Amazon Prime Video
Nominated for: Supporting actor, director and song
What we said: “The wit and the compassion of ‘One Night in Miami ... ‘ lie in its refusal of easy answers, which is to say its recognition that the answers are different for everyone, as you can see from the passion and ambivalence with which each man regards his particular cultural sphere.”

25

‘Onward’

Where to watch: Disney+
Nominated for: Best picture (animated)
What we said: “The result may sound like an incongruous pileup of genres on paper — picture an ancient storybook quest, a rowdy ’80s-flavored buddy comedy and an out-and-out male weepie in a noisy three-way collision — but there are glimmers of real enchantment and honest feeling amid the rubble.”

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26

‘Over the Moon’

Where to watch: Netflix
Nominated for: Best picture (animated)
What we said: “‘Over the Moon’ may hail from beyond the Disney umbrella, but it nonetheless bears a recognizable corporate imprint, from its abundance of cute animal sidekicks and so-so original songs to its strategic exploration of grief as both premise and theme.”

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‘Palm Springs’

Where to watch: Hulu
Nominated for: Best picture (musical/comedy) and lead actor (musical/comedy)
What we said: “At times I found myself wondering if this stretch of Coachella Valley desert were being presented as some sort of inverted Eden, where it’s Adam who exposes Eve to the curse of eye-opening, shame-inducing knowledge — and where Eve effectively spends the movie trying to find her way out of that (man-)cave.”

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‘The Personal History of David Copperfield’

Where to watch: VOD
Nominated for: Lead actor (musical/comedy)
What we said: “Whether you think of him as Daisy or Doady, David or Dev [Patel], this young man’s ardent pursuit of his own craft gives him an implicit kinship with [Armando] Iannucci, [Charles] Dickens and an entire grand tradition of self-determination through art.”

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‘Pieces of a Woman’

Where to watch: Netflix
Nominated for: Lead actress (drama)
What we said: “While this remarkable actor can unleash hell with the best of them, [Vanessa Kirby’s] most eloquent gestures here are her quietest, whether she’s staring distractedly into the middle distance or deflecting her mom’s affectionate gesture, as if it were a slap in the face.”

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‘The Prom’

Where to watch: Netflix
Nominated for: Best picture (musical/comedy), lead actor (musical/comedy)
What we said: “‘The Prom’ sometimes seems of a piece with the shopping mall settings that are central to the film. But what’s being glamorously sold is an embrace of difference.”

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‘Promising Young Woman’

Where to watch: VOD
Nominated for: Best picture (drama), lead actress (drama), director and screenplay
What we said: “It seeks to merge Cassie’s pain and our pleasure, then paper over the cracks with sharp tonal pivots, slick globs of style and, most of all, [Carey] Mulligan herself, with her remarkable ability to project both steeliness and vulnerability.”

32

‘Soul’

Where to watch: Disney+
Nominated for: Best picture (animated), score
What we said: “Like an ethereal cousin to [codirector Pete Docter’s] triumphant ‘Inside Out,’ ‘Soul’ is another playful exercise in metaphysical world building, a door-slamming farce staged between the portals of consciousness. It reminds us that ordinary lives can be the stuff of extraordinary adventure.”

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‘Sound of Metal’

Where to watch: Amazon Prime Video
Nominated for: Lead actor (drama)
What we said: “It’s conventional, but it also breaks ground: Angsty addiction dramas may be overrepresented in the movies, but sensitive, lived-in portraits of Deaf culture and community have always been in short supply.”

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34

‘Tenet’

Where to watch: VOD
Nominated for: Score
What we said: “It’s basically espionage adventure, but with a science fiction backbone: [Christopher] Nolan ups the ante on ‘Mission: Impossible’ by making the impossibility not just physical but quantum physical. And he goes about it expertly, bullishly and with giddily perverse intent to bewilder.”

35

‘The Trial of the Chicago 7’

Where to watch: Netflix
Nominated for: Best picture (drama), supporting actor, director, screenplay and song
What we said: “... even if ‘The Trial of the Chicago 7’ qualifies as catnip for Oscar voters — it’s a juicy courtroom drama, a sweeping ’60s panorama, an epic of liberal hand wringing and an all-you-can-eat actors’ buffet rolled into one — it also, to its credit, rarely exaggerates its own topicality.”

36

‘Two of Us’

Where to watch: VOD Feb. 5
Nominated for: Best picture (foreign language)
What we said: “In depicting the fallout of a life lived in secret, what emerges — movingly, even suspensefully — is one of the more unpredictable portraits in recent memory of true love’s ability to overcome anything.”

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‘The United States vs. Billie Holiday’

Where to watch: Hulu starting Feb. 26
Nominated for: Lead actress (drama), song
What we said: “Within the confines of a straight-ahead, handsomely designed and photographed biopic beats the heart of a more adventurous presentation of Holiday’s tragic life.”

38

‘Wolfwalkers’

Where to watch: Apple TV+
Nominated for: Best picture (animated)
What we said: “It is the type of stirring entertainment that delivers both the thrill of the moment and the kind of sophisticated ideas that can lead to discussion and even debate long after viewing.”

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Times film editor Geoff Berkshire contributed to this report.

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