Warrior

Director: Gavin O'Connor

2011 / 140min / DCP

Nolte received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his work in O’Connor’s genuinely heartbreaking masculine melodrama, featuring Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton as estranged MMA fighter brothers on a collision course track to meet in the octagon, and Nolte as their rueful recovering alcoholic father, who has a vested interest in not seeing his boys dismember one another. As precise in its depiction of complicated technical Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu techniques as it is in its treatment of the ironclad emotional boundaries of working-class American men and the effort of breaking them down, Warrior is a championship-caliber performance of blood, sweat, and tears sports drama.