Dir. Joseph Kosinski. Starring Tom Cruise, Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly Joseph Kosinski and Tom Cruise are a director-actor match made in Hell, and not in the fun Herzog-Kinski way. I imagine that the two of them plus Christopher McQuarrie and whichever other Tom Cruise pets helped make this film are probably even copacetic with each… Read More Top Gun: Maverick (2022)
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. To read the first half of this post, click here. 51) The Lost City of Z, directed by James Gray I like to use the example of… Read More Top Movies of the Decade (2010-2019) — 2016, Part 2
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. Mike Newell. Starring Lily James, Michiel Huisman, Katherine Parkinson The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society will, I hope, go down in history as the Saving Private Ryan of period romantic dramas. What both movies share is a tremendous sense that you should feel something and a complete inability to actually give us… Read More The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2018)
Dir. Richard Linklater. Starring Blake Jenner, Glen Powell, Temple Baker In my experience, there is no species of jock as endlessly arrogant as baseball players. I can’t adequately explain why that is despite having played some kind of baseball for nearly fifteen years. Part of it absolutely is in the highly individualized nature of the… Read More Everybody Wants Some!! (2016)
Seeing Things Secondhand 