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…
This week on Staff Selects we honor the legendary Italian composer Ennio Morricone whose worked stretched from Leone to Carpenter to Pasolini to Tarantino and to hundreds of others in between. For A Few Dollars More There are six cinematic musical scores that will go down in history as instantly recognisable: The Godfather, Jaws, Star…
Picture it: you live in 1970s New York City. You work all day on Wall Street and spend your weekends at Studio 54 and the other disco clubs, but what to do at night? Go to the movies, of course, and in this decade, the choices are unlike anything your parents used to watch. If…
2019 was a very interesting year in film for me, sure it was filled with late masterworks from the likes of Martin Scorsese, Bong Joon-ho, and Quentin Tarantino, and a few indie/foreign films that caught me by surprise like An Elephant Sitting Still and The Death of Dick Long, but it was also one of…
Everything has led to this, and the time has finally come. I’m a major Star Wars fan, and have been since elementary school. However, I feel that I’ve always been critical of the series. I never look forward to watching the prequels, though I don’t turn them off at first glance and I’m not even…
In 2007, the American Film Institute revised their previous 1998 list of the 100 best American films of all time. This column will explore my thoughts on 35 films I’ve selected from this list, mostly following along with the Unspooled Podcast, which inspired my journey to complete the AFI Top 100. You can also follow…
Rian Johnson’s work is typically layered and complex, weaving various plot threads and character arcs into films that can barely contain their own dense narrative. His addition to the massively homogenized Star Wars franchise is the boldest, densest entry since The Empire Strikes Back, even accounting for the disastrous idiosyncrasies of The Phantom Menace. Knives…
Cinema Etc. 