Oscars 2009: Best Picture Nominees

The 81st Annual Academy Awards show is Sunday, Feb. 22. We've compiled a list of film summaries and reviews for each of the five Best Picture nominees. Which one will win? Comment below. For the entire list of 2009 Oscar nominees visit: www.oscar.com

Best Actress Nominees

Best Actor Nominees

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THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON (Paramount Pictures)

SUMMARY: Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt) is born an old man in 1918 New Orleans and ages in reverse and, in so doing, becomes intimately familiar with the natures of love and death.

REVIEW: "Benjamin Button" is a lovely film, one with images to savor like chocolate on the tongue. Claudio Miranda's photography finds beauty not only in sunrises over Lake Pontchartrain, human-scaled New Orleans neighborhoods or dark Soviet Murmansk streets, but in the exquisite cheekbones of Cate Blanchett and Swinton and the swirl of a gorgeous red dress on a dancer's body.

The film plays with both the audience's mind and heart. Its storyline may lack smoothness, but it reminds us that ignoring the mercurial element we call time affects the appreciation of the life before us. -- Carl Hoover, Waco Tribune-Herald

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MILK (Focus Features)

SUMMARY: In San Francisco, Harvey Milk becomes the first openly gay man elected to a notable U.S. public office, before being assassinated by Dan White in 1978.

REVIEW: Sean Penn's Harvey Milk is everything that Sean Penn the real-world political troublemaker often is not: strangely modest but savvy about how others view him, shrewd about compromises that help his cause and disarmingly funny.

Penn brings the man to life and deserves all the year-end accolades he will get, but "Milk" is also very much a group portrait, in which an unlikely bunch of activists coalesces around its leader's energy but takes on a friction-fueled life of its own. -- John DeFore, Austin American Statesman

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SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE (Fox Searchlight)

SUMMARY: Flashbacks reveal how a poor youth came to be a prize-winning contestant on one of India's most-popular game shows.

REVIEW: Director Danny Boyle locates the comedy bubbling below the grime, which is one of his great filmmaking gifts. The movie's message is simple and digestible, and so generous that it can infect even the peevish out there. (It won audience awards at the Toronto and Austin film festivals.) It does something that's harder to do than you'd think - turning feel-good predictability into exhilaration.

Based on the novel "Q&A" by Vikas Swarup, "Slumdog Millionaire" was adapted by Simon Beaufoy, who, as the writer of "The Full Monty," knows from tales of happy triumphalism. -- Chris Garcia, Austin American Statesman

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FROST/NIXON (Universal Pictures)

SUMMARY: An on-air battle of wits ensues when former President Richard Nixon selects British TV personality David Frost for an exclusive post-Watergate interview.

REVIEW: The film features the two actors who starred on Broadway, and their performances remain the most compelling reason to see it. If Frank Langella earns more immediate respect from Americans who can readily appreciate his ability to channel Nixon, Michael Sheen's David Frost, however unfamiliar to us, is also impressive.

Based on the gripping play by Peter Morgan, it is easily a high point in the career of filmmaker Ron Howard, Both men receive generous, if not equal, attention from the screenplay, adapted by Morgan himself. -- John DeFore, Austin American Statesman

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THE READER (The Weinstein Company)

SUMMARY: In postwar Germany, a teenager has a love affair with an older woman who is hiding a terrible secret.

REVIEW: One of a spate of recent films occurring either during or in the shadow of World War II, "The Reader" is the least straightforward. Despite being shot in English, like the rest, with a Hollywood-friendly cast, it also displays, albeit indirectly, the deepest interest in the war's ramifications for the nations that fought it.

Filmmaker Stephen Daldry muddles his adaptation of Bernhard Schlink's best-selling novel, seeming to share with many of the book's fans an uncertainty about where the real emphasis should be. -- John DeFore, Austin-American Statesman

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