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?
Movie Year Director Actor Actor Ranking The Fly 1986 David Cronenberg Jeff Goldblum Geena Davis 4 Common Threads 1989 Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman 16 Somewhere in Time 1980 Jeannot Szwarc Christopher Reeve Jane Seymour 70 Man Hunt 1941 Fritz Lang Walter Pidgeon Joan Bennett 71 Invasion of the Body Snatchers 1978 Philip Kaufman Donald… Read More Better than AFI’s 100 Passions: Premature Death Cliché
Dir. Robert Altman. Starring Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, Sally Kellerman One could sit around with a couple cocktails and some jazz in the background and have a very pleasant debate about which genre the swell matters more in. Does the swell matter more in drama, where a series of events pile on top of one… Read More M*A*S*H (1970)
For a brief introduction and a running list of movies covered in this project, click here 10) Don’t Look Now (1973), directed by Nicolas Roeg As a mystery in English, I’m not sure there’s another picture that compares to Don’t Look Now until Mulholland Drive, and even then those two movies take such different approaches to solving mysteries that… Read More Better than BFI’s Top 100: 10-8
For a brief introduction and a running list of movies covered in this project, click here. 80) The Last Emperor (1987), directed by Bernardo Bertolucci Nothing says communism like a dull color palette: one hundred and fifty shades of gray, dead blues, dried puke greens, dried snot yellows, orange that’s been out in the sun too long,… Read More Better than BFI’s Top 100: 80-76
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: 85-81
Dir. Robert Redford. Starring Timothy Hutton, Donald Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore For a movie which places several of its most important scenes in therapy—a movie which is obsessive about getting Conrad (Hutton) to say what it is that’s been eating him up—it’s shocking that no one is willing to tell Beth (Moore), in plain English,… Read More Ordinary People (1980)
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) Groundhog Day (1993), directed by Harold Ramis “What if a man… Read More 100 Exceptional American Movies in 10 Genres: Speculative, 5-1
Seeing Things Secondhand 