Movie Nation

We’ve long loved tales of surviving the apocalypse, whatever form doomsday takes — viral, nuclear, asteroid, aliens or zombies. But few stories built on theme embrace the dehumanizing fatalism of living on when everyone around you is dead better than “It Comes at Night.”

Trey Edward Shults’s thriller does what all such genre narratives do — show us the nuts and bolts of living on after civilization has collapsed. Then it shows us the psychological trauma  brought on by paranoia and violence, both of which you have to possess in an “us or them” life-and-death scenario.

We experience that through the eyes of Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), a teenager and only child of Paul (Joel Edgerton) and Sarah (Carmen Ejogo). They’ve escaped the contagion that wiped out the cities, taking refuge at Sarah’s father’s old farmhouse in the forest.

And when we meet them, Sarah is urging her father (David Pendleton) to let go.

“You don’t have to fight it.”

His breathing is labored. He’s covered in buboes (bubonic plague is never mentioned). And they’ve confined him to a DIY contamination containment room covered in plastic sheets.

Travis is about to lose his grandfather, right before his eyes. Adding to the trauma, he’s going to have to help dispose of the body after Dad carries out a mercy killing. Try to get a good night’s sleep after that.

So even though they have each other, the safety of isolation, a decent food supply, fresh water and solar powered battery chargers, there’s a price to pay for living on.

That becomes clearer when a man (Christopher Abbott) breaks into their plague-free fortress. Travis sees what his school teacher Dad is willing to do to keep them all safe. But with his son a constant reminder of the humanity they’re barely clinging to, Paul takes a chance.

He won’t leave the intruder he’s tied in the woods, waiting to die. He’ll trust the guy’s story — that he has a wife (Riley Keough) and child nearby, that all he wanted was food and water, that his family is disease free.

As is the way of such outpourings of compassion in the movies or “The Walking Dead,” we can guess how this will be rewarded.

Shults has concocted a nightmare within a nightmare, a test of nerves and a wary mystery. Every wrong move, every falsehood uncovered has Paul alarmed that he’s made the wrong choice. The violence, when it comes, is both sudden and shocking, and seemingly justifiable, once we’ve thought about it.

Edgerton (“Animal Kingdom,””Black Mass”) ably gets across Paul’s desperation, his eagerness to find hope and something closer to the old “normal” in the horror that is his family’s new existence. But he’s acquired the skills and the absolute zero-tolerance mindset of a man who knows their lives have no room for mistakes, no margin for error.

Harrison has to play a kid confused and scarred by this new normal, raised to be kind and generous, but also impulsive and reckless, a hormonal, curious teen who can’t help but notice the pretty wife that’s just been added to their compound, a night-stalking boy eavesdropping on frank adult conversations about their chances and their motives, curious about adult sex lives as well.

The story’s no frills minimalism leaves Ejogo (“Selma”) too little to play, and packages too much of what we see — disease, blood, betrayal and death — as the boy’s nightmares.

But “It Comes at Night” recalls the dystopian visions of earlier eras, when the big question facing those who have survived the opening salvo of nuclear Armageddon was not “How do we live on?” but “Why?”

MPAA Rating: R for violence, disturbing images, and language

Cast: Joel Edgerton, Kelvin Harrison, Jr., Carmen Ejogo, Christopher Abbott, Riley Keough

Credits:Written and directed by Trey Edward Shults. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:37

Scores of documentaries and features films touch on the Iraq War. And out of all them, maybe one moving scene– the funeral convoy of the “American Sniper.”

But show us a Marine and her dog, and on come the waterworks.

“Megan Leavey” is based on the true story of an aimless, working class screw-up who finally finds purpose and the ability to “bond” when the Corps assigns her to a war dog.

Megan, ably played by the diminutive Kate Mara, can’t hold a job, not one that requires interpersonal skills.

She drinks too much, disapproves of her feckless mom (Edie Falco) and the man mom cheated with (Will Patton).

“You don’t really connect with people,” Megan is told. And we can believe it.

Maybe shooting people is the answer. So she joins the Marines.

Director Gabriela Cowperthwaite, who did the world (SEA World, anyway) changing “Blackfish,” dispenses with the overly familiar boot camp/training sequence briskly, and with style.

In her prim, undersized uniform, Mara endures the “You look like a little toy soldier” jabs as if she’s earned them. And the Corps doesn’t alter her ability to drink too much and screw up too often.

But it’s the punishment that changes, cleaning out dog cages for those training with war dogs, the soldiers and their bomb-sniffing companions who are “in front of the ‘front lines,'” that gives Leavey purpose. She’s no good with people. Maybe a German shepherd is the answer.

The head of that unit, the “Gunny” in charge, is played by the actor/composer/singer Common in his best big screen role in years. He’s not interested in screw-ups.

“What’s your problem, Leavey? Why’re you here?”

He gives her the meanest dog in the lot, and perhaps the smartest, Rex. And in between barked commands, he gives this overmatched pixie the advice she needs to make this new relationship work.

“I can’t teach you to bond. Listen to him. Everything you feel goes down the leash.”

And as Leavey talks to the dog, they connect and get sent to Iraq.

Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy from the “Harry Potter” movies) ably portrays a veteran war dog handler and Ramon Rodriguez is the fellow handler who takes a romantic interest in Leavey.

The bomb-searching and combat scenes are handled with skill, though the “big” one has lapses in logic that might take you out of the movie.

And for all its cinema verite realism, there are moments when Mara, like her sister Rooney, a child of great wealth and privilege, needed another take or two to convince us that she’s working class. Little lady’s never picked up on Old Milwaukee can in her life.

Similarly, Bradley Whitford is sympathetic, but lacks the works-with-his-hands earthiness of a working class dad so proud of his daughter’s service.

But Mara delivers the movie’s emotional punches like a prize-fighter, utterly selling us on the notion that this cold, remote and guarded member of the working class walking wounded has found her true love in the one guy who needs her, sticks with her and saves her life.

Those scenes make “Megan Leavey” a story worth telling and a movie worth relishing, a weeper that earns its tears.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for war violence, language, suggestive material, and thematic elements

Cast: Kate Mara, Common, Edie Falco, Ramon Rodriguez, Tom Felton, Bradley Whitford, Will Patton

Credits: Directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite, script by Pamela Gray, Annie Mumolo, Tom Lovestedt . A — release.

Running time: 1:56

Over a decade ago, I hung around director Patty Jenkins on the set of “Monster” as she steered Charlize Theron to an Academy Award winning performance,  but also kept the likes of Christina Ricci and Bruce Dern happy as she worked with no budget, annoying producers and persistent British tabloid photographers determined to get model-turned-actress Theron, in character as serial killer Aileen Wuornos in a picture.

And this AM, years of doing little that’s made a splash since (TV shows, etc.), Jenkins wakes up having shattered the glass box office ceiling for female directors. Her “Wonder Woman” is headed to a $95 million opening weekend, based on huge numbers Thursday ($11 million) and a blockbuster Friday. With audience tracking scores showing this one is a hit with fangirls and fanboys alike, it could even exceed that number.

“Captain Underpants,” another well-reviewed opening, isn’t yet an animated brand for Dreamworks, and it seriously underwhelming — based on Friday’s numbers. A $25 million opening? Moms are taking their little girls to “Wonder Woman.”

“Baywatch” is in free fall, “Pirates of the Caribbean” will be close to $100 million after a couple of weeks Sunday night, “Guardians 2” is closing in on $350 and “Alien” is fading to black. 

I was lukewarm on “Wonder Woman,” a bit bored by the plot and effects. We’re all root-root-rooting for Warners and DC to make a game of it with Disney’s Marvel juggernaut, and but come on.

Got to Rotten Tomatoes. It’s like “Citizen Kane” inspired a sequel, by their metrics.

I watch the commercials for “Wonder Woman,” see all the blurbs — TV tossers, for the most part. Who are these swooners taking the vapors over a blessedly feminist but just fun enough and somewhat yawn-worthy formula comic book pic? Check out metacritic. A definite distaff bias — women reviewers, bless them, are fangirling the hell out of “their” movie. Along  with their head cheerleader, Stevie “Nicks” Persall.

Good for them. There are biases in the “ratings” for such middling fare as “Alien: Covenant,” nerds who grade movies in “their” genre on the curve. So female critics rave up Diana of the Amazons. Hope it makes a billion. It earned $11 million Thursday night alone, on its way to nearly $90 million.

Yeah, she’s clobbering Johnny Depp. Just pretend the assemble the motley military “team” material is like “Captain America” without any casting flair, and that you’ve never seen that lame “super bomber” finale before. Pretend real hard and Tinkerbelle won’t die.

“Captain Underpants” had Dreamworks/Fox’s panties in a bunch, a ridiculous after-it-opens embargo on reviews (That’s called “embargo abuse,” kids.). Why show it a week in advance if you’re scared of critics?

Nothing to sweat, decent to better-than-decent reviews dominate.

Little else is opening against these two big boys (big boy, big girl), but “Band Aid” is worth tracking down — rom-com about a feuding married couple who work out their beefs in song, and  “Aaron’s Blood” and “Vincent N Roxxy,” which I panned.

“Captain Underpants,” not being a franchise picture, will be lucky to clear $30, according to Box Office Mojo. 

Box Office Guru is lowballing the only cartoon in theaters (“Boss Baby” is losing its screens), predicting $24 million. I figure $40 is within reach.

The Guru is saying “Wonder Woman” is headed towards $103 million, vs. the Mojo’s $89. I’m guessing it’ll be in between.

All genre pictures pander, serving up conventions and cliches that faithful horror, romance, comic book or “Furious” fans relish and devour like comfort food.

So why not a European travelogue about a lonely wife “seeing” France for the first time? And who better to star than Diane Lane, of “Under the Tuscan Sun,” an actress whose later career often features her as a woman ignored, looking to “get her groove back?”

Eleanor Coppola, wife of Francis, director of “Hearts of Darkness,” the classic “The Making of” documentary about her husband’s “Apocalypse Now,” wrote and directed “Paris Can Wait,” which shamelessly panders to women of a certain age, easy chair Travel Channel/Food Network addicts whose ears perk up at the mere mention of four magical words.

“France.” “Frenchmen.” “Wine.” “Chocolate.”

It’s a dithering little nothing of a movie which takes Lane, as the wife of a workaholic film producer husband (Alec Baldwin, wasted here) from the Cote d’azur home of the Cannes Film Festival, to Paris, a distance of some 900 kilometers, or about 565 miles.

Anne is in Cannes with husband Michael, and Michael’s ever-ringing cell-phone, for the Film Festival. She dutifully takes care of his little life details (packing, etc.) while he deals with incessant calls about his latest film project.

No, he’s not listening when she sighs at being left alone in one of the most romantic corners of Europe, or complains of an earache. So when he jets off to Budapest, she balks. She’ll meet him in Paris when he’s done putting out film fires.

But she cannot take the train. Oh no no no. Michael’s colleague Jacques (Arnaud Viard) will DRIVE her. He insists. And even though Michael blinks at this impulsive decision — “He is FRENCH, remember!” — he acquiesces.

“You’ll be there by dinner time!”

As that wouldn’t make for much of movie, dinner times come and go as Jacques leads Anne on the trip of a lifetime, making memories — and photographs — instead of deadlines, really diving into France with an expert, and flirtatious tour guide.

Jacques knows, seemingly, everybody. He has been everywhere, eaten every restaurant’s specialty, tasted every wine.

He’s a “You MUST try” this, “Let m show you” that guide — the best kind, because he knows “the best market in France,” “the best Roman aqueduct,” “the best roses,” “the best view.”

And seeing France takes time. None of which is open apparent to Anne. But when he grabs her luggage to toss into his car she gets her first clue. It’s an early ’70s Peugot 504 Cabriolet (convertible). Yes, he’s rich so it’s been restored. But no, you don’t make 565 mile road trips in that without a few…unscheduled stops.

Jacques needs to take a break from driving “every hour.”

“Forty-two minutes,” she corrects.

There’s a cigarette to be smoked, and a radiator to be refilled. He is French, and so, alas, is his car.

But as they drive, the chatter and detours evolve from the birthplace of Cinema (Place Lumiere, Lyon) and the cathedral where Richard the Lionheart took up the cross for the Third Crusade (Vezelay Abbey in Burgundy) to “Are you happy…Is he faithful…What makes you dance in the street?”

As the wines, cheeses, assorted dishes and mad parade of chocolate delights arrive in this swank eatery or that riverside picnic, romance fills the air.

Or would, if these two had even a hint of chemistry and this script was anything more than a wan, under-developed tease.

Coppola takes Jacques’ life-lessons a little too much to heart, and “Paris Can Wait” ambles along, 90 minutes that feel like 150. The sights are lovely, the sentiments adorable.

But there’s no spark to it, and far too little wit. Viard, a French actor-director, gives barely a hint of the rogue this charming/disarming rogue Jacques is meant to be. He runs into women he knows, who remember him fondly, at every turn. “A trip with Jacques,” one says, is to be savored. Don’t be in such a hurry to get to Paris.

Often Jacques is communicating with waiters, sommeliers, mechanics and old girlfriends in French, and we experience this as Anne (whom he nickames Brulee, after the French dessert)  does. She is an American woman trapped in a foreign land with a take-charge French sexist, who orders for her, decides where they stop and picks out the hotels.

Which she can only counter with a raised eyebrow.

“Jacques, I am not French!”

Neither Jacques nor the film are overbearing. But for all the lovely, out-of-the-way sights, for all of Coppola’s and Viard’s (he’s a French actor/director) efforts, for all the reliable Lane’s charms, “Paris Can Wait” delivers too little on the promise of its alluring title.

Movies, life and love, Jacques says, “are like souffles — all about timing.” And Coppola’s is just…off. “Paris Can Wait” could have been a perfectly adorable wish-fulfillment fantasy for an over-40 audience. She just needed to wait until landing a more engaging leading man.

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic elements, smoking and some language

Cast: Diane Lane, Arnaud Viard ,Alec Baldwin

Credits: Written and directed by Eleanor Coppola. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time 1:32

Love Kenneth Branagh and all that, always impressed when a movie rounds up Dame Judi, Penelope Cruz, Willem Dafoe, Michelle Pfeiffer, Johnny Depp and…Josh Gad for the cast. Derek Jacobi, Branagh’s Hector Elizondo, is here.

But this looks like a lush TV movie, an HBO Original with great cinematography. If this isn’t the most exhausted, dated source material of the fall film season, why did they try to hip it up with Imagine Dragons on the soundtrack?

Adults sentenced to sitting through yet another animated film with their kids look for one thing in the experience — a hint of anarchy, a taste of Looney Tunes mayhem and wit.

Kids? They’re waiting for the pooped-my-pants, teacher humiliated in his tidy whiteys gags.

“Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie,” delivers both.  An endlessly inventive and anarchic Dreamworks romp based on the Dav Pilkey children’s books, it thrives on prankster pals, over-matched adults and a hand-drawn comic book hero’s ethos.

“Never underESTIMATE the power of UNDERwear!”

Kevin Hart, who has the perfect little-guy/high-pitched voice for animation, is George, and Thomas Middleditch (“Silicon Valley”) voices Harold, life-long elementary school pals who make up comic book superheroes, draw them into books, only to have the hated no-fun Principal Krupp (Ed Helms) confiscate them.

He’s the sort of martinet who revels in tormenting children, with “Hope Dies Here” stenciled on his desk. Naturally, George and Harold are always coming up with pranks to put him in his place.

One prank too many has Krupp looking at the nuclear option — busting up the pals. In desperation, George whips out his cereal box prize hypno-ring. And darned if Krupp doesn’t start to think he’s the superhero with the boys his trusty sidekicks — Captain Underpants.

This transformation entails stripping to his skivvies, improvising a cape and singing his theme song — “Tra-la-LAAAAaaaaa!”

Suffice it to say, every time he does this — and George can snap him out of it by just snapping his fingers — it’s a hoot.

Captain Underpants is a clueless rube — “I take to the SKY! Like an OSTRICH!”

But it’s all fun and games only until that moment when the lads kind of realize the lonely lovelorn man inside Krupp, and that anarchy is no way to ensure anybody gets an education. That, and a  guy with no real super powers has no business taking on a real threat — the super-villain (Nick Kroll) mad scientist who elbows his way into a job as science teacher.

The pacing is whiplash-quick, with every finger-snapping transition from Krupp to the Captain crackling with energy.

Adults will appreciate the one scene that breaks from the movie’s simple, flat animated style. George and Harold imagine a future where they’ve grown apart. This sequence isn’t animated. It’s performed by sock puppets in a model mall, with sticks moving the cloth arms, the works. It’s an adorable DIY moment in a sea of computer-animated children’s entertainment, and it’s as delightful as anything Dreamworks has ever put on the screen.

For kids, all that’s necessary to telling them this is a fight between Captain Underpants and Professor Poopypants. Paints a picture, doesn’t it?

That said, there are barely enough jokes to put this over, making one wonder if this “First Epic Movie” has anywhere funny to go in the future if indeed it has a future.

But the present, the first picture, will make you grin and have your eight-and-unders in stitches. I mean, a grown man, singing in his unflattering form-fitting underwear. Come on!

MPAA Rating: for mild rude humor throughout
Cast: The voices of Kevin Hart, Ed Helms, Kristen Schaal, Nick Kroll, Jordan Peele
Credits: Directed by David Soren, written by Nicholas Stoller, based on the Dav Pilkey books. A Dreamworks/20th Century Fox release.
Running time: 1:29

They meet by accident — literally.

Vincent (Emile Hirsch) is purposefully motoring across town in his vintage ’70s Chevelle, Roxxy (Zoey Kravitz) is in the car in front, T-boned at an intersection.

When the offending car empties and the enraged, “Where’s my MONEY b—ch!” driver starts beating on her, Vincent intervenes — or tries to. Much violence later, they’re off, two strangers on the road to rural Louisiana; her to lay low and get some cash together, him to pick up old family ties.

But violence tags along with them, as Vincent gets tangled up in local feuds involving his tough-talking, street patois-slinging punk of a brother, JC (Emory Cohen) and Roxxy is entangled in local biker boy jealousies with JC’s girlfriend (Zoey Deutch).

“Vincent N Roxxy” wears the indie film cliches of its rough-hewn road romance with pride. He is a man with secrets, cigarettes and stubble. She has a past, a dead brother and never met a belly-shirt she couldn’t rock.

Gary Michael Schultz’s picture starts cryptically, two aimless young people without a past — until we learn about it. And he provides Kravitz (“Big Little Lies”) with some flinty femme fatale one-liners.

“Is that what you do, drive around in your cool car, trying to help girls getting beat up?”

Well into their impulsive 700 mile road trip (to Zachary, Louisiana), “You got something you want to ask me, now?”

It’s a tale that sees the poetry in the ruins of an old drive-in theater, but would prefer to wallow in the escalating mayhem that ensues when dead end young men — of any race, of any hopeless ghetto — let their desperation and testosterone get the better of them.

There’s not much room for performance in all this. Cohen does that acting school rendition of small-town-punk thing, Hirsch tries to simmer and Kravitz brings a little heat and paranoia to Roxxy.

But you sense it’s all just a preamble for an orgy of blood and violence in the finale, a drawn-out/bleed-out revenge thriller that we all see coming an hour before it gets there.

MPAA Rating: R for brutal bloody violence, language throughout, some strong sexual content, nudity, and brief drug use

Cast:  Emile Hirsch, Zoe Kravitz, Zoey Deutch, Emory Cohen

Credits: Written and directed by Gary Michael  Schultz. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:41

In her origin story, a world at war throws bullets, bombs, poison gas and tanks (literally throws) at Wonder Woman. There’s hatred and slaughter enough to shock anyone.

And yet, she persists.

“The future is female,” the pundits keep telling us. And so Warner Brothers and the director of the movie that won Charlize Theron her Oscar give us a fun and capable distaff super heroine who will not be ordered around, will not accept the status quo and will not need rescuing by a man — even if the man is played by Captain Kirk.

Israeli model-turned-actress Gal Gadot may be rail-thin and runway ready, but as she proved in films such as the “Fast and Furious” franchise and “Keeping Up With the Joneses,” she can handle Hollywood fight choreography — at least in slow motion.

And she makes a naive and brave, exotic and seriously sexy Diana, Princess of the Amazons in “Wonder Woman.” 

The movie is a derivative hash of comic book picture plot points and origin story touchstones — half “Captain America: The First Avenger,” half “Thor.” But director Patty Jenkins, who did not get enough credit for “Monster,” keeps Gadot in frame and the tone light — as light as any comic book picture that tries to grapple with the futility of war amidst the most futile of all wars — World War I.

The introductory scenes, of little Diana (Emily Carey) growing up on the hidden island of Themyscira in greater Greece, are handled in brisk strokes — a warrior aunt (Robin Wright, fiercesome) training her, her mother the queen (Connie Nielsen) disapproving and “forbidding” it, time and again.

Strong women don’t take to being “forbidden.”

“Fighting doesn’t make you a hero”  she is taught. But it does come in handy when you’re being threatened and oppressed.

A pilot who has been spying on the Germans and Ottomans (Chris Pine) crashes into the sea offshore, and that’s where the adult Diana discovers men, and introduces the Great War to the women warriors of Greek myth.

Diana will accompany Steve Trevor back to “the Front,” where she’s sure Ares, the God of War, is causing all this slaughter and strife. He’s in disguise. But she will take “The God Killer” with her and end this bloodbath, as “It is our sacred duty to defend the world.”

The story’s tone is set by the casting of Pine and the playful banter he and Gadot exchange as he explains the “real” world to her. He represents all of humanity, or at least Western civilization. Is he an “average” example of the male of the species?

“I’m…above average.”

Diana meets his secretary (Lucy Davis) in glum, grey war-footing London, a woman who goes where he says, does what he desires and sees to his every need.

“Where I come from, we call that slavery.”

David Thewlis is a helpful government minister, Danny Huston the psychotic General Ludendorf who wants to stop this “Armistice” at all costs and Elena Anaya, in Phantom of the Opera guise, is Dr. Poison, who cooks up the gas that could continue the War Without End.

Hollywood hasn’t had the interest to budget a decent movie about the Great War since the 1960s save for “War Horse.” A couple of malnourished movies about the Turkish Armenian genocide this year have underscored that. But put a comic book character in it, and we get period-appropriate tanks, a vast trenched No Man’s Land and period appropriate airplanes like a Fokker Eindecker.

Being a comic book movie, we also get lots of period inappropriate tech — superbombers, superbombs, etc. And there’s the usual heaping helping of what I call “Bugs Bunny Physics” — impossible violations of the laws of motion, thermodynamics and the logic set up by the movie. The deadly gas is deadly when need be, survivable when that’s more convenient. Diana and Steve take a Greek coastal sailboat to Britain, dozing off in the Aegean, waking up as they sail under London’s Tower Bridge.

As a genre, these are silly movies that do not welcome over-thinking.

And they’ve saddled this leggy super-heroine with a slow-footed movie with plenty of screen time allotted for character development — maybe even romance — but also dead stretches and needless distractions.

But I love the fiercely feminist text — NOT subtext — here. And Gadot, who drew deafening applause upon introduction in the finale of the gloomy “Batman vs. Superman,” wears the breastplate and warrior skirt with style and purpose.

Check out the “new” “superhero landing” she and Jenkins cook up for the end of every wondrous leap, plunge or pivot.

And check out the message delivered here. The world’s in a scary place, with Western civilization under threat from without and within. Vanquishing a single supervillain won’t fix it.

What’s Wonder Woma’s answer? Don’t despair. Don’t turn away. Wonder Woman takes the blows, gets back up time and again and faces the ugliness head on.

“And yet,” as the saying goes, “she persisted.”

IMPAA Rating: PG-13 for sequences of violence and action, and some suggestive content

Cast: Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Danny Huston, Robin Wright, David Thewlis

Credits:Directed by Patty Jenkins, script by Allen Heinberg, based on the DC comic book. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 2:20

Finding something appropriate for international acting treasure Judi Dench, all but retired, with failing eyesight, cannot be easy. It’s got to be a role with stature and gravitas, a role worthy of her.

No more “Best Exotic Marigold Hotels,” oh no.

She’s played Queen Elizabeth I in her dotage, but Queen Victoria is a better fit. A reprise of “Mrs. Brown?”

Why not? “Victoria & Abdul” is a “true” story about the Empress of India’s late-life friendship with a servant from India, Abdul Karim (Ali Fazal). It features Michael Gambon, Olivia Williams, Simon Callow as Puccini and Eddie Izzard as Bertie, Prince of Wales. Look for “Victoria & Abdul” in September, at the beginning of awards season.