Viola Davis

Film critics and awards pundits have been talking about Oscar frontrunners for months now, but it’s that time of the year when all that prognostication finally matters. This week marked the beginning of awards season with the Gotham Awards, the National Board of Review’s list of winners and yesterday’s New York Film Critics’ Circle picks. It’s still too early to tell who and what will win the gold come Oscar night, but when it comes to predictions, we’ve got you covered.

Has the word “Oscar” been thrown around enough lately in regards to Denzel Washington and Viola Davis’s Fences? No? We can keep saying it some more? Good. The latest trailer for the film, adapted from August Wilson’s play and directed by Washington himself, shows off the kind of vibrant acting that these two won Tonys for in the first place.

What’s in a poster? It might seem simple enough — photograph the stars in a flattering light, find an inoffensive font, call it a day and crack open a cold one — but ad executives don’t get paid what I assume is a million dollars an hour for nothing. (Everyone on Mad Men ended up so rich, and that was at 1968 rates!) Careful consideration from the designers makes each poster into a fully-analyzable text packed with unspoken meaning, and the new one-sheet for Denzel Washington’s upcoming drama Fences is no exce

Steve McQueen won an Oscar for 12 Years a Slave, 2013’s Best Picture, and then he pretty much vanished. He’s done a couple little things here and there, but no significant follow-up. That project finally seems to be materializing, as Variety reports that McQueen is working on a film called Widows and he’s lined up an Oscar nominee as one of his big stars: Viola Davis, she of Suicide Squad and How to Get Away With Murder and the upcoming Fences, which looks like it could be an Academy Award contender as well.

The Oscar season chatter may only just be kicking off, but trust me, you’ll be hearing that “O” word a lot when it comes to Denzel Washington’s ‘Fences.’

If you liked the scene in Batman v Superman where Bruce Wayne watched YouTube videos about the future members of the Justice League, you'll love Suicide Squad. Instead of just one scene of plot-stopping fan service, Suicide Squad delivers an entire first act of soul-deadening exposition. The movie spends nearly 30 story-free minutes with a Machiavellian bureaucrat while she sits in a restaurant discussing a top secret personnel file. Here is Deadshot, the world’s greatest assassin; this is Harley Quinn, the Joker’s psychotic girlfriend. Oh, and have you heard about Captain Boomerang? And on and on and on.

The trailers for Suicide Squad have done a fairly good job of letting each member of Task Force X shine, though they have leaned a bit more heavily on Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn and Jared Leto’s Joker — at least they know their target audience. But these new clips help us get to know some of the other major characters from David Ayer’s DC super-villain ensemble, like Will Smith’s Deadshot and Viola Davis’ Amanda Waller.

Suicide Squad is one of our most anticipated films of the summer — mostly because after a few months of watching heroes save the world in big blockbusters, it’ll be fun to see a team of villains swoop in to shake things up. If Amanda Waller is to be believed in these new TV spots, these guys (and a couple of ladies) are the worst of the worst, but maybe that’s what we need right now.

Turn back the clock to 2010, and the hottest ticket on Broadway is a revival of August Wilson’s Pulitzer-winning play Fences, a poignant and daring meditation on race relations in America with a focus on the hardships of the black experience. It has all the necessary qualifications for a bona fide Broadway smash: a handsome pedigree of awards and acclaim (the production took the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play in 2010), urgent social significance, and some Hollywood talent slumming it on the boards in between film projects. Denzel Washington and Viola Davis starred as the married couple at the heart of Fences, winning raves and a Tony apiece, and created a rare sensation that dazzled audiences for thirteen weeks and then vanished.

Captain America: Civil War isn’t the only major superhero film that wrapped principal production this week — Bryan Singer completed his primary work on X-Men: Apocalypse, and David Ayer also finished the principal work on Suicide Squad. To celebrate, Ayer grabbed (almost) the entire cast along with much of the crew for one big photo.