When Sight and Sound released their 2022 poll in December, the rush wore off within a couple days for me. I was impatient. I’m still impatient, because I want the vote counts for all of these movies to be released, and when that happens I’m sure I’ll write about that too. But a lot of… Read More Ten Thoughts on the Other 164 Movies in the 2022 Sight and Sound Poll
You can find the full list of the top 100 blockbusters since 1972 here, as well as an index for other posts in this series. I could understand why, if you were adapting Jurassic Park, you might decide to drop “Mr. DNA.” There are other ways to do this plot exposition, maybe by giving B.D. Wong… Read More Top 100 Blockbusters of the Multiplex Era: Tech Messiah
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
The difference between the Academy Awards in 1932 and 2018 is as stark as the difference between baseball in 1932 and baseball now: it’s obviously the same sport just at a glance, but it could hardly be more different in terms of execution, style, and personae. How can one compare the first ceremony, which honored… Read More The 90th Academy Awards and the Possibility of Another Grand Hotel
Dir. Jordan Peele. Starring Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Lil Rel Howery What I love about the shot above, when Chris (Kaluuya) is meeting his girlfriend’s family for the first time, is the distance. Peele comes back to distance again and again in this movie (more on that later), but this is an early instance of… Read More Get Out (2017)
The Hollywood Reporter recently published a Todd McCarthy article wondering, basically, about sequel fatigue. The summer, he notes, movies like Transformers: The Last Knight, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, and Cars 3 have each sputtered at the American box office. This is our fifth Transformers movie since 2007, our fifth Pirates movie since 2003, and… Read More The American Blockbuster Bubble
Seeing Things Secondhand 