You can find the introduction and index for this series here. Film Director Year Type The Village M. Night Shyamalan 2004 Narrative feature A Place of Our Own Stanley Nelson 2004 Documentary “Lazy Sunday” Jorma Taccone 2005 Short Man Push Cart Ramin Bahrani 2005 Narrative feature Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room Alex Gibney 2005… Read More 100 American Movies to Save: Preservation (2004-2010)
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: 1-10
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?
Yesterday afternoon, while cheerfully taking my zillionth Twitter constitutional, I found Katey Rich’s tweet in which she noted her involvement in an article for Vanity Fair which named, in the eyes of critics K. Austin Collins and Richard Lawson (and presumably some assists from the rest of VF’s movie staff), the twenty-five most influential movie… Read More Better than Vanity Fair’s 25 Most Influential Movie Scenes
Dir. Spike Lee. Starring Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, Jonathan Majors I’m on top of things! Spoilers! Golly! Watching this movie I got a feeling that reminded me of watching The Edge of Seventeen. In that movie, the teacher carts in a TV and the class starts watching Young Mr. Lincoln. It was at that moment that I… Read More Da 5 Bloods (2020)
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. 71) BlacKkKlansman, directed by Spike Lee There are not many scenes that are quite as funny… Read More Top 100 Movies of the Decade (2010-2019) — 2018, Part 2
Last year, my year-end review of the movies I watched still had the sheen of professional list-making on itl: I thought about it as, more or less, the fifty best movies I saw that year which I hadn’t seen before, but allowed for some leeway on that front to talk about the movies which I… Read More 2019 Year-End Review: Forty-Five Moments
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
1) The first thing I did, before I even began making predictions or thinking about how things might go, is check to see if any of these movies out for Best Picture had 11/2 odds. I speak, of course, of the 15% rule that The Ringer’s Kevin Clark frequently refers back to, which proclaims that any… Read More 91st Academy Awards: Quickly Scribbled Thoughts
Seeing Things Secondhand 