2016 was a spectacular year for horror films, giving us a number of smart, violent, scary films unlike any we had seen before. If Get Out is any indication of the horror movies we are going to get in 2017, we are in for an even better year. Get Out is a wildly original, incredibly smart, genuinely scary, and twistedly funny horror film with an uncomfortable amount of realism. In Get Out, Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a black…
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Taking a look at the acting categories from this year’s Academy Awards, here are my picks for the best performances from this year’s Best Actor nominees. CASEY AFFLECK BEST PERFORMANCE – MANCHESTER BY THE SEA (Kenneth Lonergan, 2016) I love Casey Affleck more than most people. After a spectacular 2007, starring in films like Gone Baby Gone and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (which was almost my pick here), he was a…
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Continuing to look at the best performances from this year’s Oscar nominated actors, here are my picks for the best performances from this year’s Best Actress nominees. ISABELLE HUPPERT (Nominated for Elle) BEST PERFORMANCE – ELLE (Paul Verhoeven, 2016) Look, I understand Isabelle Huppert is an international icon with over 100 films to her name as an actress. But, before Elle, I had only seen her in I Heart Huckabees (2004) and briefly in Amour (2012), which has since forced…
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Before going in to Fifty Shades Darker, I had only seen about twenty minutes of the first film, Fifty Shades of Grey (2015). I turned the movie off because, well, it was awful. I was fortunate enough to watch Grey at home, that way, I could turn it off or leave if I hated it. Not so much luck with Darker, where I actually went to a theater, paid money, and sat in said theater for two hours and…
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Continuing to look at 2017’s nominated actors, I am now going to list my favorite performances from this year’s Best Supporting Actor category. We’ve got three fresh faces in this group, a Hollywood legend, and one of the finest and most unique actors in the game today. Check out my picks for the best performances from this year’s Best Supporting Actor nominees. MAHERSHALA ALI (Nominated for Moonlight) BEST PERFORMANCE – MOONLIGHT (Barry Jenkins, 2016) Mahershala…
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Continuing Oscar week, I am now going to break down each acting category and list the best performances from each nominated actor. I will first break down the Best Supporting Actress category, which is loaded with established veterans and a breakout star of 2016. Here are my picks for the best performances from the 2017 Best Supporting Actress nominees. VIOLA DAVIS (Nominated for Fences) BEST PERFORMANCE – DOUBT (John Patrick Shanley, 2008) Viola Davis is…
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The 2017 Academy Awards air in less than a week and this year’s pack of movies is as good as ever. Three nominees landed in my personal Top 10, and four more would have cracked my Top 25. This whole week I will be doing a lot of Oscar-themed lists and to kick it off I am going to do a list ranking the Oscar 2017 Best Picture nominees. I can say that every…
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The whole movie of Fist Fight revolves around a fight between funny guy Charlie Day and tough guy Ice Cube, two men who couldn’t be more opposite. We know that this brawl is going to occur at the end of the movie, so how does the movie survive until then? First, it needs compelling characters that we care about. It also needs a strong second act filled with actions and development that keep the movie afloat until the big…
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A Cure for Wellness is one of the most original horror movies I have see in a long, long time. This is an incredibly ambitious and ballsy film that really pushes the psychological thriller genre to another level, though not without its flaws. A Cure for Wellness is about an ambitious young executive named Lockhart (Dane DeHaan), who is sent to retrieve his company’s CEO from an idyllic but mysterious “wellness center” at a remote…
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Much like The LEGO Movie (2014), everything in The LEGO Batman Movie is awesome. This is easily the best Batman movie since The Dark Knight (2008), and this is a true Batman movie. It understands Batman lore, brings in classic characters, mocks or pays homage to past Batman films, and delivers in terms of story, comedy, and action. In The LEGO Batman Movie, The Joker (Zach Galifianakis) and all the legendary villains of Gotham, like The Riddler, Bane, Catwoman, Poison Ivy, and…
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