#50 — Mission: Impossible — Fallout (Christopher McQuarrie, 2018) In a cinematic era absolutely overrun with superheroes, how can a more conventional action movie titan keep up? Fictional demigods streak across the sky, routinely patching up the very fabric of … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 10s — Number Fifty
Right around ten years ago, I gave myself an ambitious but manageable task. In response to the torrent of lists tallying up the best films from the ten-year span that ended when 2009 gave way to 2010, I took my … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 10s — An Introduction
Officially, the new film featuring characters culled from DC Comics is called simply Birds of Prey. After a disappointing opening weekend at the box office, several theater chains have conspicuously revised their marquees and websites to affix the the name … Continue reading Now Playing — Birds of Prey
When Tom Hanks tells you to turn the lights back on, you turn the lights back on. After Parasite secured its historic win in the Best Picture category and the first producer delivered their acceptance speech, the show producers dimmed … Continue reading Parasite by the Oscar Lights
568. The Inmates, First Offence (1979) During the height of punk rock mayhem, in the latter half of the nineteen-seventies, performers took it as an imperative to adopt stage names that skewed toward the confrontationally putrid. That’s what makes it … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 1000, 1979 – 1989 — #568 to #565
I still love watching the Oscars by Karen Han To be simultaneously devoted to modern cinematic art and the Academy Awards is an invitation to perpetual heartbreak, and I type that as someone with fairly mainstream tastes (as opposed to … Continue reading Outside Reading — Oscars Eve edition
My usual intent with calling out a single song every Friday is to focus on brand new material, with a particular hope to introduce myself — and, if I can, others — to emerging artists. Although my research this week … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Bat for Lashes, “Boys of Summer”
With the annual Academy Awards ceremony mere days away and the sharing of my personal assessment of the previous year’s ten finest films duly completed, tradition holds that I put my pontificating about performance into the format of an Actors … Continue reading Twenty Performances, or Women and Chill Don First
The stories we tell ourselves shape our sense of history, and our sense of history shapes the stories we tell ourselves. Legacy is built from both what actually happened and what we wish had happened, what we convince ourselves is … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2019 — Number One
When it was announced that Greta Gerwig was following up her autobiographical triumph Lady Bird with a new adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, a classic novel that had been transferred to the screen many, man times before, it … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2019 — Number Two
Coffee for Two 