Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)

I had found Rise of the Planet of the Apes "very Hollywood," by which I mean entertaining but geared toward the lowest common denominator. Of course, you have to expect a lot of simplicity in a story about apes with slightly enhanced brains who want to escape captivity. The sequel promised a rather different plot but had the same IMDb rating, so I decided to give it a try.

A detail I had missed at the end of Rise was the start of "simian flu." The opening herein might remind you uncomfortably of the COVID-19 pandemic, but this one is much worse, reducing the world's human population to the 0.2% who can resist it. The maybe hundreds of survivors in the San Francisco area hope to reach and restore a hydroelectric dam, which requires a handful of them to pass through the uplifted apes' claimed forest. Head chimp Caesar (Andy Serkis) is pretty patient, having been raised by kind humans and sensing a similar type in Malcolm (Jason Clarke), but paranoid tensions mount on both sides....

Mank (2020)

I was wrong: This 2020 Academy Best Picture nominee took even longer to come to fruition. Too bad the writer, Jack Fincher, father of director David, didn't live to see it. Anyway, once again, I gave it priority among the nominees only because of its availability.

We tend to think of Citizen Kane as exclusively an Orson Welles (Tom Burke) work, but Herman J. "Mank" Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) gets credit as a co-writer. Exactly how much credit he deserves is disputed, but in this telling, he writes the entire first draft. This is not easy for him to do in a timely fashion, because he has a drinking problem, a broken leg from a car crash, a half-estranged wife (Tuppence Middleton), the hostility of William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance) over this imminent unflattering depiction, and general unpopularity for not opposing the California gubernatorial run of Upton Sinclair (Bill Nye).

Darkest Hour (2017)

I'm not sure why I didn't watch this sooner. It looked like one of the more promising Academy Best Picture nominees of the year. Maybe on some level, I thought I already had too good an idea of what it offered, so I gave it a lower priority.

This window on the life of Winston Churchill (Gary Oldman) covers about a month in 1940, starting with the resignation of Neville Chamberlain (Ronald Pickup) and ending with Churchill's best-known speech, incidentally in connection with the retreat from Dunkirk. The main focus is on him contending with officials who would rather appease Hitler than keep fighting him, including Chamberlain and Lord Halifax (Stephen Dillane) -- who might be able to get Churchill deposed if they can prove that he won't consider peaceful options.