Denizens of the Internet rank things all day every day and I too must do my part. And so, since it’s an even year I go through the many films I’ve seen and rank my fifty favorites. I’ve done some version of this sorting for about 35 years, but since much of that has been offline, it does nothing for the algorithm. And so, in honor of Georges Méliès, possible patron saint of films fantastical,…
It’s time once again for TCM’s annual remembrance of film folk we’ve lost over the past year. I’ve taken to posting this every year, though there’s always the question of whether to wait until the new year or no (they generally release a first edition right around Yule and often tweak it early in January). In any case, there’s plenty of faces you’ll recognize. Like last year, here’s an annotated with links in case you…
I’m still not sure what movies I’ll be able to see in theaters in the last two weeks of the year, but as for selections next summer, DC is clearly bringing a Gunn to a superhero knife fight: Come on. You thought “oh yeah, this is Gunn” the moment you saw Supes whistle… because you knew Krypto was going to appear. So yeah, it looks promising enough to check out in theaters… something I can’t…
Like many a cinemaniac, I watch a lot of movies and, much to the confusion of friends and family, I will watch movies that are not only clearly bad, but are not of the so-bad-it’s-good variety. Why do I do this to myself? Well, if it’s a version of the Robin Hood legend or Treasure Island (see also my post last week), then I gotta see how they treat the story. Some folklore and pop…
Given my name and the fact that I’m a cinemaniac, it should come as no surprise that I enjoy seeing Vikings on the big screen. I mean, all seven or nine of my regular readers know I like to post about Vikings. And my brother and I have a particular love of the Rohirrim from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (whose film versions aforementioned readers may recall are always somewhere in my list of 50…
Earlier this week, I did a post about the what we’ve gained in the public domain as of January 1st, “Public Domain Day” becoming something I post on. Thinking of annual posts, I meant to do this last month, so here goes: TCM does a great montage of folks we’ve lost in the previous year (see examples from 2022, 2021, 2020, and 2019 for the most recent entries). This time around, I decided to do…
Apart from contemplating whether to see any component of Barbenheimer in the theaters, I didn’t have anything I was planning to see until my kids announced they were unanimous in wanting to see the latest Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film aka “Wait, there’s another TMNT movie?!?” This was a surprise because, to the best of my knowledge and theirs, they have not seen any previous TMNT movie. They also have not been around long enough…
Finding time to read, or catch up with films, seems all the more difficult these days, so I pored over this list from various critics at The Guardian, who apparently are annoyed at the increasing length of films and heft of novels and have a slew of suggestions of how to get all the artsy goodness you want in a smaller package. I haven’t seen all the films nor read all the novels listed. In…
Thinking of my biennial “Favorite Films” post this past December, it’s clear from last night’s Oscars, I’m not the only one who was bowled over by the bagel that is Everything Everywhere All at Once. It’s definitely due a rewatch… but actually, I’m here to point out a recent article by Gabriella Paiella for GQ about how my top pick, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, was made and is now an…
It’s that time of [even] year where I reflect on the many films I’ve seen and perform that most Internet of activities: ranking them. I mean, I’ve done an offline sort of my favorite films for about 30 years, but the past 10 year online have been right at home here on the Intertubes. You can see my previous entries here (including how I do the sort by pairwise comparison). This year, the total of…