Month: January 2019

The 2019 Sundance Film Festival kicks off this week and I could not be more excited.  This is my ninth year attending the festival, which is insane to think about.  Every festival showcases new and exciting voices, making way for the future of cinema.  Past festivals have given us the likes of Damien Chazelle, Ryan Coogler, and Debra Granik.  The festival shows hundreds of movies each year from every genre from all around the world. …

Well, we’re finally here.  The end of the 2018 movie year (I’m aware we’re almost half way through January, but you get it).  This final list will officially send 2018 off into the sunset.  Overall, 2018 was a really good year for movies, particularly the second half of the year.  I saw 203 films in 2018, a personal record, and with seeing that many movies, I was able to see more foreign films, documentaries, and…

Picking the best performances is a spoil of riches.  Every year, I could make a list of fifty performances that I loved.  Unfortunately, that’s not how the game works.  For this year, like I did last year, I have broken the performances down by category, much like the Oscars.  I will list the “nominees” and then pick a winner and go further in depth as to why they gave the best performance in their category. …

This is always the toughest list to make, but also my favorite to make.  Movies are comprised of many scenes and when you see as many movies as I do, that leads up to thousands of scenes I see in a year.  But these scenes are the ones that stuck with me the most throughout 2018.  Whether it was a scene that scared me, thrilled me, or one of just pure entertainment, these are the…

My picks for the films with the best technical aspects in 2018.

Every year, I take a look back at all the movies that I saw over the year, as well as think about major news headlines and stories that broke during the year, and I reflect.  What did we learn?  What did we see?  Is there a new trend brewing?  What shook cinema this year? Here are the things I learned and took away from the movie year that was 2018.          …