Cooking on hot

Much has been made of how 2021’s awards race will be like no other, given the pandemic put paid to so many studio movies. This year, surely, the Academy will see more of the quality work that’s routinely delivered in many independent pictures that don’t have the marketing budget to attract blanket attention, and we’ll likely see a more varied Best Picture shortlist than ever before.

And the smallest film of the lot might just be the Best Picture front-runner... Penned in six days, shot in monochrome in two weeks under strict Covid-19 guidelines and set entirely in one house over a single night, is a two-hander starring John David Washington and Zendaya as the title characters, a film director and his girlfriend. We meet them as they return home from the premiere of Malcolm’s debut, and no sooner have the drinks been poured than they’re embroiled in a venomous argument sparked by his forgetting to thank her in