At the 96th Academy Awards, Diane Warren failed to win Best Original Song for the fifteenth time in fifteen tries. Shockingly, “The Fire Inside,” written for the movie about the guy who did not in fact come up with the idea for hot Cheetos, did not win. On the other hand, I’m willing to wager… Read More The Warren Index: Will They Win a Competitive Oscar Before Diane Warren?
Dir. Chloe Zhao. Starring Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Brian Tyree Henry Eternals is not good. It’s so not-good that I actually have a hard time knowing where to start with the not-goodness of it, a problem that typically reminds me of that whiny Rise of Skywalker review that I wrote a couple years ago. It’s… Read More Eternals (2021)
To see the entire list of my 100 top movies of last decade, or to find the landing page for the other years in this series, click here. My recollections of the 2017 movie season—the first one I followed with any real interest since I was blindsided with the double abominations of The Artist… Read More Top 100 Movies of the Decade (2010-2019) — 2017
One of the Grantland legacies I’m fond of, although I’m sure the idea didn’t start there, is the championship belt (RIP Grantland, long live Barnwell and Hyden). The purpose is to go year by year and create a list of who’s at the top of some field, which is a deceptively simple task, and one… Read More Anglophone Director Championship Belt, 1918-2018
Dir. Yann Demange. Starring Jack O’Connell, Sean Harris, David Wilmot If you think that more civilized discourse would go a long way to solving our political problems, if you are socially liberal and economically conservative, if you wistfully recall the dominion of uber-WASPs like George H.W. Bush, if you think “All Lives Matter” gets at… Read More ’71 (2014)
Dir. Yorgos Lanthimos. Starring Colin Farrell, Barry Keoghan, Nicole Kidman Spoilers below, for those who want to be surprised. There are two versions of the same story which don’t appear to us until late in the picture. They are fairly similar, as both acknowledge that the surgeon had had some alcohol in his system when… Read More The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)
Dir. Christopher Nolan. Starring Fionn Whitehead, Mark Rylance, Tom Hardy Spoilers follow Dunkirk is bent on undoing its emotional work through its structure. The movie is already bound, even at a week old, to reach Memento levels of discussion of its timeline. Three plots intersect over the course of the film. One focuses on a… Read More Dunkirk (2017)
Seeing Things Secondhand 