‘2024 Oscar Nominated Short Films: Live Action’ Review: A Spoonful of ‘Sugar’ Helps the Medicine Go Down

variety.com:

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic If the Academy judged features by the same standards that they do live action shorts, the best picture ballot would be full of starry, quasi-political issue movies: well-meaning but manipulative films like “Father Stu” and “The Janes.” In this category, it’s the message that matters to Oscar voters, which makes this year’s “2024 Oscar Nominated Short Films: Live Action” program (available in theaters and on demand from ShortsTV) one of the most frustrating lineups in recent memory.

Or it would, if not for the presence of one genuinely brilliant, liberatingly unserious nominee among them. That would be “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” the best of several delightful Roald Dahl adaptations director Wes Anderson cooked up for Netflix … but we’ll come to that in due time.

The theatrical program actually opens with a far inferior Netflix short, “The After,” a risibly manipulative portrait of grief and finding the strength to move on in which every note feels contrived. “Selma” star David Oyelowo plays a businessman with his priorities in the wrong place.

He’s distracted by work calls when a senseless tragedy befalls his wife and daughter in the background (such incidents do happen, but not in the hokey way photographer-turned-helmer Misan Harriman stages it). “The After” then skips forward a year to find the white-collar success story now working as a ride-share driver, wincing at every reminder of the life he took for granted.