The Cinematic Decade: My Top 25 of the 2000s (pt 5)

Coming down the home stretch of this series. For those just tuning in: Part one, part two, part three, and part four for your reading pleasure. 5. Knocked Up: Ben is a lovable stoner loser with no direction or genuine ambition; Alison is a career-oriented young woman who recently received an on-air promotion at E! … Continue reading →

The Cinematic Decade: My Top 25 of the 2000s (pt. 4)

I think there is a handful of people who hate this list. Unfortunately for them, a lot of them are losing their homes in a forest fire today. Entries 10-6: 10. Shaun of the Dead: How do you a tell when a movie’s truly great? Forty years ago, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead … Continue reading →

The Cinematic Decade: My Top 25 of the 2000s (pt. 3)

Third verse, same as the first, Jackie is a punk, Judy is a runt. Entries 15-11, let’s go: 15. Up: The aughts have been pretty good years for Pixar– the studio has put out seven films in ten years, and of those films only one has displayed a poverty of creativity and wit (Cars), while … Continue reading →

The Cinematic Decade: My Top 25 of the 2000s (pt. 2)

This installment: Entries 20-16. Starting with: 20. Persepolis:  Visually sumptuous in the face of its stripped-down aesthetic, Persepolis is the autobiographical tale of Marjane Satrapi’s life growing  up in Iran and coming of age in the late 1970s. Told with a soft, elegant cell animated style, the film follows Marjane from her happy childhood spent … Continue reading →

The Cinematic Decade: My Top 25 of the 2000s (pt. 1)

It’s close to the end of the year, and traditionally this is when people start compiling their year-end lists. But this isn’t just the end of the year, it’s the end of the decade. So on behalf of that, in addition to a top 10 of 2009, I’m putting together my top 25 of the … Continue reading →

A Useful Review: Fantastic Mr. Fox, 2009, dir. Wes Anderson

Hotbox. With his latest film, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson seems to have stumbled upon something truly revelatory in his career: The man was born to make movies using stop-motion animation. Anderson is a man obsessed with minutiae, the tiny details in a film that might seem trifling or inconsequential when looked at in a … Continue reading →

Revenge is Mine: Park Chan-wook’s Obsession (pt.1)

When did you first hear of Park Chan-wook? For those of my readership who haven’t heard this name, South Korean auteur Park technically began his career in film in 1992 with a movie called Moon is the Sun’s Dream. He followed up this entry– which was a critical and commercial failure– with a pair of … Continue reading →