Each week this column will highlight one winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture, progressing chronologically until all winners have been discussed. There will be a brief discussion of the film itself followed by a mention of what we wish won from the nominees in the given year (though in many cases there were…
Anatomy of a murderer by way of a trek through darkness, The Long Walk is a bleak, meditative horror film. It’s an intricate tale of the pain left behind by time, told from the perspective of a serial killer. A deeply emotional time travel story, this horror film from Laos should put the nation on…
Some tales are truly timeless. Adaptable to all eras, they can teach lessons that have been known to be important but remained unlearned throughout recorded history. Antigone, the Ancient Greek tragedy written by Sophocles, is one such story that, as with many of the Greek classics, to paraphrase Nietzsche, serves to lay out the fundamentals…
Portrait of a Lady on Fire left one of the biggest impacts on me that a film ever has. It has so much going for it; great cinematography, meticulous direction and screenwriting, and dedicated performances. The director, Céline Sciamma, broke away from her typical coming of age narratives and graduated to a different kind of…
It’s tough to make a truly standout courtroom drama. Most of the celebrated ones are from the 1950s and 1960s, like 12 Angry Men, To Kill a Mockingbird, Witness for the Prosecution, and Anatomy of a Murder (okay, that last one might not be as well known, but it absolutely should be!), and the surge…
At the end of Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, the characters lament that their world-saving victory will be unknown by the masses. Ben Stiller replies in a close-up, “we’ll know.” Something about that moment always stayed with me, and I still think about it ten years later (no, my ‘best of 2009’…
You have to admire Peter Strickland’s passion and adventurousness. After making one of the decade’s best films with 2014’s The Duke of Burgundy, an austere romantic drama, he returns with an oddity that defies easy classification. In Fabric can be most crudely described as a film about a killer dress, and it’s certainly enjoyable at…
There was a time when, to many, Michael Bay movies seemed like the worst things that could dominate a cinema. His fast-cutting, over-saturated films can be difficult to sit through purely from an aesthetic standpoint, and his contentedness to let the camera leer on explosions and women’s bodies, rather than engaging with any sort of…
Though his recent work has been maligned by many, a change from his earlier work which was released to widespread acclaim and two Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture, late-period Clint Eastwood has continued to deliver for me. It is true that the acting hasn’t been quite on par with the golden streak…
At the end of Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, four teenagers returned from a life-threatening video game where they all lived as characters in the game that were opposite versions of themselves and found they could set aside their differences and become a close-knit group of friends. They destroyed the game to ensure no one…
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