The 2023 Sundance Film Festival is just around the corner, returning in-person and virtually for the first time since 2020. I will be attending this year’s festival in person and I cannot wait to go back to the snowy mountains of Park City, Utah. The Sundance Film Festival is my favorite film festival in the world. I have been attending the festival since 2011 and love it every single year I go. I love the…
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John M. Stahl’s 1934 melodrama Imitation of Life is the latest film to enter the Criterion Collection. The good folks at Criterion sent me a copy to check out. Adapted from Fannie Hurst’s 1933 novel of the same name, the film looks at the friendship between two struggling single mothers: Beatrice (Claudette Colbert) a working-class white woman, and Delilah {Louise Beavers), her Black housekeeper and closest friend. The two open up a successful pancake shop…
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It’s that time of the year again. Time to look at the very best movies of 2022. I’ve broken down what I think are the best movies from each genre, the best technical achievements, and the best actors and directors of the year, and now it’s time to look at what I think were the best movies of 2022. Overall, 2022 was a strong year for movies and it also felt like a normal movie…
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In my continued analysis of the best movies of 2022, here are my picks for the best performances in 2022. Every year this is the toughest list to make and every year I feel bad about leaving some performances off, but I think the performances I chose are all truly great and deserve all the recognition they get. Like previous years, I have broken the performances down by category, much like the Oscars, with Best…
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Continuing my look back at the best movies of 2022, I am now going to look at some of my favorite movie moments and movie scenes from the movies of 2022. Whether it was a masterclass scene of acting, a great line-reading, or a moment of pure entertainment, these were all scenes and moments from 2022 movies that I loved. There were a ton of movie moments that I loved in 2022, but this group…
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Continuing my look at the best movies of 2022, I am now going to look at the directors of 2022. With a great year of movies comes a great year of directing and that’s exactly what 2022 brought us. We got great films from legendary veterans like Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Michael Bay, Steven Soderbergh, George Miller, and Baz Luhrman, new films from exciting young artists like Jordan Peele, Ti West, the Daniels,…
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As we continue to look back at the best movies of 2022, we will now be looking at the best movies from each genre. I will be looking at the best foreign-language film, best comedy, and best action movie, along with other genres. Each category will have five “nominees” (a.k.a my personal top five) with my “winner” (my favorite) in bold, followed by short reasoning as to why I picked it the best. Here are…
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Continuing my look back at the best movies of 2022, I am now going to look at the best technical achievements of 2022. I will be looking at the best screenplays, cinematography, production design, song, and other technical categories like that. Like Best of the Genres, each category will have five “nominees” (a.k.a my personal top five) with my “winner” (my favorite) in bold, followed by short reasoning as to why I chose it as…
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What makes a family? Do we choose our families, or do they choose us? These questions, along with several others, loom large in Broker, the latest from Japanese master Hirokazu Kore-eda. On a stormy night, So-young (Ji-eun Lee) walks to a church to leave her baby in a box designated for abandoned babies. When the church gets an alert that a baby has been placed in the box, two men, Sang-hyeon (Song Kang-ho) and Dong-soo…
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You would think that after having made some of the most iconic and successful films of all time over the last fifty years, it would be a tough task to continue to impress the audience and try something new. That would be the case for most directors, but not Steven Spielberg, who is continuously pushing himself as a director. In 2021, he dove into the musical genre with his bright and lively vision of West…
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