For each movie in the top 100, I’ve written a question to answer. (It would get very, very boring for me to have to write some variation on “boy howdy, you’ll never believe how good this movie is” one hundred more times.) There’s no exact sentence or word count I’m holding myself to here, but… Read More Top 250 American Movies: 41-50
Steven Hyden introduced his five-albums test more than a decade ago as a third way to judge a band, short of its popularity or its critical acclaim. While this one is not meant to stand on its own—for example, he’s not sure that either Bob Dylan nor the Rolling Stones had made five great albums… Read More The Five-Movies Test or: Which Director Has Had the Best Stretch of Consecutive Feature-Length Films in English?
The following is from my series of Oscar Best Picture rankings, as well as my strongly worded suggestions for what should have won from among the nominees. For an introduction to the project, click here. For a way to vote on some Oscar-related ideas, click here. If I’ve written a review on any of the… Read More Better than the Oscars: 70-66
Another week, another conversation. The latest conversation in our series considers what it means for a band or a director, specifically, to age. How do we reevaluate them? What do we look for? Do they fade away entirely? What is their (gulp) legacy? What follows is a lightly edited conversation in lieu of a podcast.… Read More Baumann and Burch Conversations, #5: How Media Changes As It Ages
The following is from my series of Oscar Best Picture rankings, as well as my strongly worded suggestions for what should have won from among the nominees. For an introduction to the project, click here. For a way to vote on some Oscar-related ideas, click here. If I’ve written a review on any of the… Read More Better than the Oscars: 90-86
You can read up on the basis for this series here, and also find links to other posts in the series. Movies I’ve reviewed on this site have a link in the title which you can follow to read my full review. 5) Fantasia (1940), directed by (deep breath) Samuel Armstrong, James Algar, Bill Roberts, Paul… Read More 100 Exceptional American Movies in 10 Genres: Sprawling, 5-1
The following is part of an overview of the top 100 American narrative fiction feature films, from my perspective. For an introduction to the project and an index of other entries in the series, click here. For a list of more than 800 films which I considered for the top 450 and my eligibility qualifications, click here.… Read More Better than AFI’s Top 100: 70-66
Dir. Ang Lee. Starring Suraj Sharma, Irrfan Khan, Rafe Spall Put everything else about the movie down for a second, because I promise we’ll get to it, but we have to begin with Suraj Sharma. In his first ever film appearance, Sharma was, before he even turned twenty, asked to be the only corporeal thing… Read More Life of Pi (2012)
Before going into straight review territory on this blog, I used to spend a lot more of my time making lists; I blame Buzzfeed for taking the joy out of the format. But recently, while I was reading Ben Lindbergh’s recent post at The Ringer about whether or not a movie should be remade, I… Read More Remakes I’m Asking For
Dir. Ang Lee. Starring Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams More than a decade later, Brokeback Mountain is undoubtedly the best American movie of 2005 and, purely from back of the napkin work, probably one of the best American movies of the aughts. It’s a movie of striking bravery simply for the topic at hand; in 2005,… Read More Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Seeing Things Secondhand 