Ten Best season is irresistible to almost any confirmed movie buff, from the stuffiest of ivory-tower critics to the most omnivorous habitué of the multiplexes, arthouses, cable channels and video racks. Everybody has opinions, and the Ten Best ritual is a ready opportunity to put some kind of a frame around, impose some sort of structure upon, the experiences of a film year.
Winnowing out the year's 10 Best films usually entails lots of soul-searching and weighing of apples against oranges among a field of 25 or 30 variously satisfying movies. I found 25 or 30 films to esteem in 2004, but somehow the best of show were never in doubt. I'm not sure what that means or why it was so; I merely mention it. Here they are:
I found Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock an unmitigated joy. Some of the reasons why are subjective, so let’s get to the full disclosure.
After a Saturday that had p-patchers coining the expression, “After April hail comes May kale,”the sun came out — as did all the city luminaries — for the opening of Magnolia’s first p-patch at Magnolia Manor Park on April 14.
Then and now...
Ten Best season is irresistible to almost any confirmed movie buff, from the stuffiest of ivory-tower critics to the most omnivorous habitué of the multiplexes, arthouses, cable channels and video racks. Everybody has opinions, and the Ten Best ritual is a ready opportunity to put some kind of a frame around, impose some sort of structure upon, the experiences of a film year.
Oscar turned 10 at age 82. How The Hurt Locker and Avatar duked it out in an enlarged Best Picture race.
2008 was a thrilling year for presidential election politics, but it’s occasioned the most dispiriting and beside-the-point Academy Awards race in decades. What a neck-snapping switch from 2007, when the nominees for best picture were an honor roll of envelope-pushing excellence......
This has been a screwy movie year for me. Of the films that would end up on my Ten Best list, only two opened theatrically in the United States in the first half of 2005. As I put it recently to another editor, "You could say that film in 2005 was a matter of several days in September at the Toronto Film Festival." Whatever the reasons, there was a long, highlight-challenged stretch from the Seattle bow of 2004's best picture, Million Dollar Baby, in the first week of January 2005 and the diamond-dust storm of fine films that has swirled around us in the last four months of the year.
Notes Kathleen Murphy over at MSN.com/Movies: "2010 was a banner year for big, bad, beautiful movie moms. Medeas, madonnas, vampires and cannibals, and just plain screwed-up human beings...." Check it out at http://movies.msn.com/academy-awards/mommies-dearest/
Another sideways legacy of the ongoing "For the Love of Film (Noir) Blogathon." A barely teenage late-show encounter with this movie helped brand me a film noir crazy for life. This movie and The Woman in the Window and The Black Book...
Thirty years after its initial release, Citizen Kane may very well be the most talked-about movie in history....
A thing that bugs me about the vast majority of contemporary films is, they rarely give the feeling anyone cared much about framing them....
There is a moment early in Joe Dante's The Howling ('81) when the heroine, a TV reporter on the trail of a mad killer, steps into a phonebooth in a very dark corner of L.A. nighttown. As she checks in with the cops on the periphery of the hunt, she fails to notice that a man has appeared behind her, just outside the booth. He bulks there, sinister, back to her and to the camera, till she finishes her call and prepares to exit. Then she sees him, gasps, draws back. He turns, favors her with a what-the-hell,-lady? look. She edges out of the booth; he steps in. He was just a guy waiting to use the phone.
Some movies signal their earnestness so emphatically that it takes up all the oxygen and they suffocate.