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
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?
Dir. Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman It’s about as simple as a documentary gets. A few ambient shots of something like birds flying or a sunset, occasional home movies, more photographs, pans across quilt squares, some footage of people reading names, talking heads. I use this a lot, but I don’t think I’ve ever meant… Read More Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989)
Seeing Things Secondhand 