Welcome to the Rileys MIFF Review by Cinema Autopsy's Thomas Caldwell

Thomas Caldwell - "I went to see Welcome to the Rileys mainly because of James Gandolfini and he certainly gives a fine performance as a man who is still coming to terms with the death of his teenage daughter. He befriends and takes is upon himself to look after an underage stripper played by Kristen Stewart, in a role even grittier than the one she played in The Runaways. When Melissa Leo’s character enters the narrative more substantially, the film gets even more interesting as it explores the situation of a middle-class America couple wanting to ‘save’ an underprivileged teenager. Welcome to the Rileys has some similarities to The Blind Side, as both films explore a similar scenario, but Welcome to the Rileys is more complex, less conservative, less offensive and an overall far superior film."

For more of Thomas Caldwell's Melbourne Film Festival Diary, please visit: Cinema Autopsy

"Welcome to the Rileys" A 2010 Oscar Minor Awards Nominee.

The vision for The Times-Picayune's annual -- and only slightly tongue-in-cheek -- midyear movie awards, dubbed the Oscar Minors, is and always has been fairly straightforward: Because the Academy Awards tend to fete films released in the last four or five months of the year, we'd create our own awards for those poor, forgotten early-year releases.

Slated for early July, they would cover all movies released in the first half of the year, and they would be designed to recognize those notable performances that, by virtue of their release dates, are likely to get lost in the Oscar shuffle. Plus, it gives us the opportunity to run the words "Oscar Minor Winners" in huge type across the top of a newspaper page once a year. LOL. We kill us. This year, because of newspaper-y logistics I won't trouble you with, the Oscar Minors have slid almost a full month down the calendar. And, brother, is that ever a good thing.

Given the glaring lack of in-theater quality through the first half of 2010, if they had run as initially planned on July 3rd, it would have been one short awards ceremony, indeed.

But, my, what a difference a month makes. Every week for the past three weeks or so we've gotten a stinker or two -- but we've also gotten some bona fide contenders, some of which might even stick around to stake a claim in the real late-year awards season.

So without further ado, here are our annual Oscar Minor Winners. You'll notice the categories don't exactly match up with the Academy Awards' categories - mostly because there aren't necessarily an abundance of worthy candidates in certain races yet. But that's all part of the fun.

BEST HOLLYWOOD SOUTH RELEASE

The nominees: "Cyrus," "Jonah Hex," "Middle of Nowhere," "Youth in Revolt"

Yeesh. Production activity is still humming along, but the release calendar saw so few made-in-Louisiana productions hit theaters in the first half of 2010 that I was forced to include a direct-to-DVD release ("Middle of Nowhere," shot in Baton Rouge); a movie that was shot in Los Angeles, but by a couple of New Orleans boys ("Cyrus," from Mark and Jay Duplass); and a movie that came to the state only for its Shreveport reshoots ("Youth in Revolt"). Don't worry though -- things pick up in the second half of the year with "The Expendables," "Secretariat," "Legendary," "The Last Exorcism" and "Welcome to the Rileys" all on the release calendar.

And the Oscar Minor Winner is: "Cyrus"

See Full List Of Nominees & Winners : HERE