The character: John Hammond The actor: Richard Attenborough The movie: Jurassic Park (1993) For a guy who gets criticized for making sentimental movies without emotional depth, it’s interesting how few great villains there are in the Spielberg oeuvre. Apologies to the AFI, but the shark in Jaws is not a villain. The Indiana Jones movies… Read More Better than AFI’s Heroes and Villains: Villain #44
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: 61-70
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
As many of you were, I was inspired by the list released by Empire on Thanksgiving this year. It is, a little cheekily, titled “The 100 Greatest Movies,” and I say cheekily because there’s no way that the people publishing this can possibly imagine that these are, by any standard, the one hundred greatest movies.… Read More Top 100 Blockbusters of the Multiplex Era: Introduction
Several years ago I made a list in tiers of American directors. I will not share that list, because it is quite dumb, but I think my first three tiers still make sense as concepts. In the first tier went directors who could combine peak with longevity, who made brilliant movies consistently throughout a career… Read More Steven Spielberg Meta-Analysis
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
The following is part of an overview of the top 100 American narrative fiction feature films, from my perspective. For an introduction to the project and an index of other entries in the series, click here. For a list of more than 800 films which I considered for the top 450 and my eligibility qualifications, click here.… Read More Better than AFI’s Top 100: 75-71
Dir. Steven Spielberg. Starring Sam Neill, Richard Attenborough, Laura Dern As a general rule, I don’t make a habit of seeing blockbusters in theaters. Most of them don’t really interest me, and I am in deep superhero-movie fatigue; the concept of the Marvel Universe painstakingly coming to film after film after film, an idea that… Read More Jurassic Park (1993)
Seeing Things Secondhand 