SHE KILLED TONIGHT........CAN SOMEONE PLEASE PUT MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD IN A MAJOR MOVIE??

All About Nina (2018)     No mincing words........if Mary Elizabeth Winstead's performance here had been in a movie that caught the public eye, she would have blown away the competition for a Best Actress Academy Award.........

                    Seriously, nothing those five nominated women did last year, including the winner Olivia Coleman, comes within striking distance of Winstead's work here.........

                    Playing a stand up comedian with a lifetime of horrific emotional damage, she grabs hold of this scruffy little independent movie like a hungry lioness tearing at a too-small piece of meat......

                    And therein the lies the tragedy........that this blistering, take-no-prisoners performance sits in the middle of an all too typical shot-on-a-cellphone-in-20-days film festival entry.......

                    Which is not to deny that "All About Nina" has the usual sporadic surprising pleasures that pop up in independent films.........some sharp exchanges of dialogue between supporting characters, a few witty observations of the quirks of human behavior......

                    But it also carries the detriments of indies.......slapdash plotting, painfully amateur craftsmanship in the filmmaking and wildly unstable screenwriting..........(most apparent in the creation of Winstead's new boyfriend played by Common, a unbelievable tarnished-angel character who comes off more as a script's fanciful ideal than a real human....)

                   I'd advise everyone to look past or just ignore that peripheral crap and behold Winstead's amazing turn as Nina Geld, a struggling comic on the verge of breaking through by nabbing a coveted spot on 'Comedy Prime', a West Coast TV show modeled after 'Saturday Night Live'........

                    Winstead superbly captures a raw wound of a character........the desperation, casual alcoholism, the joyless, loveless sex with abusive men.......all of her dysfunction spewing out in her ferocious on-stage monologues.. ....

                     So to hell with last year's female Oscar group.........you want to see the Best Actress performance of 2018?  Search no farther.......right here.

                     For the movie itself, 2 stars (**).......for Mary Elizabeth Winstead by herself, 5 stars (*****), a true FIND OF FINDS piece of work.