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Loving

On paper, Loving is exactly the sort of movie that Oscar voters respond to: a historical love story about two regular people fighting for their mixed-race marriage in 1958, a battle that changed the country. But director Jeff Nichols eschews sentimentality and melodrama; as the New Yorker’s Anthony Lane put it, “the movie is restrained to a degree that will strike some viewers as exasperating, or even perverse, and that others will deem properly heroic.” It will find its partisans, and there is room in the Best Picture race, but the lack of sap — the film is steadfastly determined to be as undramatic as possible — means it’s no shoo-in.