I guess this film about the Nat Turner slave rebellion has to qualify as the first Oscar buzzed movie of the year, since it was a longtime passion project from writer-director-star Nate Parker and won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. But tellingly, Parker chose Fox Searchlight to be the distributor after a bidding war with Netflix coming out the highest bidder, and then they went with a prime October 7th release date, so if you think this movie's not chasing Oscars you got another thing coming. To be honest, there was some lukewarm critical reaction to the movie itself when it debuted, but that will probably not matter in the end with this one. After the controversy of OscarSoWhite for the second year in a row, the truth is if this movie's even half decent there's no way it's getting ignored. So be on the lookout for it.
