I’ll be straight up with it: this year’s Best Picture nominees are not great. In fact, this is arguably the worst Best Picture line-up of the decade and one of the very worst of the century (the only year I could think that is worse than this one is 2009, the year Slumdog Millionaire took the world by storm and the final year for only five Best Picture nominees). But, these are the nominees that we…
Read More
Alita: Battle Angel is a movie that chooses style over substance, which isn’t always a bad thing. I don’t mind a good piece of mindless entertainment. I love the Fast and Furious franchise, I love a good amount of Michael Bay films, and the Marvel movies don’t exactly get the mental-wheels turning, but they’re awesome. Why do I love these films so much? They’re fun! They are a blast of entertainment, filled with glorious…
Read More
Over the last two weeks, I had been attending the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Throughout the festival, you are constantly hearing about movies that played at the festival. You hear about potential award winners, surprise sleepers, and complete disasters. You also ignore all movies that are released in regular theaters during the festival because they’re either last year roll-over films that we’d already seen or the January garbage that generally comes out….
Read More
The 2019 Sundance Film Festival is officially in the books. I saw 25 movies this festival and overall it was a pretty good year. There were some duds, but there were a number of great movies from exciting new filmmakers and great performances from some of our best actors and actresses working today. Here are my picks for the best movies and performances of the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. BEST MOVIES…
Read More
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. …
Read More
The 2019 Oscar nominations were announced this morning and, as usual, it didn’t go the way people thought. There were surprises, snubs, and a few that most predicted. Overall, the nominations are fine and almost exactly how I figured they would go, save for a few things. There were some nominations that I loved, some that I hated, and some that literally had me scratching my head. Here are those picks. …
Read More
This Oscar season is absolutely insane. This is a wide open race and the toughest to predict in sometime (though it is reminiscent of 2015). I think the nominees are pretty set, save for a few surprises here and there, but who is going to win is a complete mystery. Maybe the nominations will tell us something, maybe they’ll make it more confusing. I’m expecting some crazy surprises, but for now, here are my 2019…
Read More
Glass is the final chapter in the unexpected superhero trilogy from M. Night Shyamalan, following 2001’s Unbreakable and 2017’s Split. The fact that this trilogy exists is one of cinema’s great surprises, as nobody expected Split to be part of the Unbreakable universe. With Unbreakable focusing on the rise of our protagonist, David Dunn (Bruce Willis), and Split focusing on the birth of our villain, The Horde (James McAvoy), the two are now pitted against each other thanks to Mr. Glass (Samuel L. Jackson). The…
Read More
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…
Read More
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. …
Read More