Best Movies

The 2024 Sundance Film Festival is here! 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 atmosphere, the focus and love of cinema throughout the festival, and of course, the movies. I love the diversity of films at the festival. I love discovering new, talented filmmakers, actors, and creatives throughout the festival and…

2023 is officially over and now it is time for my picks for the best movies of 2023. 2023 was a truly great year for cinema. Theaters were packed, we got great movies from great directors, saw new filmmakers emerge, and for me personally, I had an absolute blast. As I mentioned in my Best Director of 2023 piece, this year was loaded with films from some of my all-time favorite filmmakers; Martin Scorsese, Christopher…

In my continued analysis of the best movies of 2023, here are my picks for the best performances of 2023. Every year this is the toughest list to make and every year I feel bad about leaving some performances off. While I loved performances by Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Taraji P. Henson, Natalie Portman, Abby Rider Fortson, Alma Pöysti, Adam Driver, and Aaron Pierre, among many others, I think the performances I chose are…

Continuing my look at the best movies of 2023, I am now going to make my pick for the best director of 2023. 2023 was a great year for movies and one of my favorite aspects of it was how many of my favorite directors made movies. We got great films from legendary veterans like Martin Scorsese, Christopher Nolan, Alexander Payne, Todd Haynes, David Fincher, M. Night Shyamalan, Kelly Reichardt, Ben Affleck, Wes Anderson, and…

Continuing my look back at the best movies of 2023, I will now look at some of my favorite movie moments and scenes from the movies of 2023. Whether it was a masterclass scene of acting, a great line-reading, or a thrilling piece of action, these were all scenes and moments from 2023 movies that I loved. There were a ton of options to choose from, but this group of movie moments and scenes are…

Continuing to look back at the best movies of 2023, we will now be looking at the best movies from each genre. I will be looking at my favorite foreign-language films, comedies, action movies, and a few other genres and categories. 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 my picks…

The 2023 cinematic year is officially over; now, it is time to look back at the best movies, performances, and achievements of the year. I am going to start by looking at the best technical achievements of 2023. I will be looking at the best screenplays, cinematography, production design, score, and other technical categories. Each category will have five “nominees” (a.k.a my personal top five) with my “winner” (my favorite) in bold, followed by short…

Cauleen Smith’s Drylongso recently got a Blu-ray release from the Criterion Collection.  A definitive film of 1990s DIY filmmaking, Drylongso is an incisive look at racial injustice within a lovingly handmade buddy movie/murder mystery/romance. Alarmed by the rate at which the young Black men around her are dying, a brash Oakland, California, art student Pica (Toby Smith) attempts to preserve their existence in Polaroid snapshots, along the way forging a friendship with a woman in…

The 2023 Chicago International Film Festival kicks off this week and it is a film festival that I truly love. This was the first festival that I ever attended back in 2008 and it is one I have attended every year since. It is a great film festival that does not get the love and attention of some higher-profile festivals but deserves to be mentioned as one of the best film festivals in North America….