Tag: best of

Screening Room: Best Movies of 2024

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - Awards, Film - NewLeave a comment

My year-end movie review was published at Eyes Wide Open:

The weirdest aspect to moviegoing in 2024 was just how weird it wasn’t. That doesn’t mean COVID and streaming haven’t reshaped the industry, likely forever. But with a few standouts, things have settled into a familiar pattern. Audiences flocked to cinematic comfort fare that gave a safe return on investment. Everybody knows what they’re getting with Despicable Me 4 or Venom: The Last Dance. Nearly every movie that earned over $100 million this year was a sequel (incredibly, they’re still making Bad Boys and Planet of the Apes movies). The IP mining shows no signs of stopping. The commercial failure of the unusually subversive Joker: Folie à Deux, an acidic burn-the-bridges takedown of fan culture, suggests that derivative and repetitive will be the assumption going forward…

Screening Room: Best Movies of 2022

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - Awards, Film - NewLeave a comment

Now that 2023 is almost upon us, it is time to start catching up on all the great movies of 2022. It’s always a good way to spend a cold January.

My year-end roundup is at Eyes Wide Open:

Assuming the future still contains books, when one is written about what moviegoing was like in 2022, it will have a hard time finding a theme. Think pieces on the state of Hollywood (including several penned by this critic) over the past few years often bemoaned the industry’s caution and overreliance on industrially producing sequels to safe IP. The concern grew that, post-pandemic, theaters and audiences would stick to the familiar. To a degree that did happen, with even supposed arthouse theaters showing Wakanda Forever. But as the year closes with the usual late-December crush of award contenders muscling into crowded release schedules, fears of a movie landscape dominated only by superhero flicks with quarter-billion-dollar budgets have not quite panned out…

I break down the ten best movies of the year (some of which are pictured above), and also list some honorable mentions and disappointments.

Screening Room: Best Movies of 2019

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - Awards, Film - NewLeave a comment

‘Parasite’ (NEON)

Now that the holidays are upon us, it is time to do the truly important things, such as catching up on all the movies of the last year. No, it is not crucial to run out and see the latest Star Wars (you can already figure out pretty much everything that’s going to happen). And yes, it is worth braving the snow and the crowds to go see a movie with other people rather than streaming Game of Thrones again. There’s a lot of great things out there.

My year-end wrap-up of the 15 best movies of 2019 was published at Eyes Wide Open. It’s a diverse mix, with everything from Hitchcockian Korean horror-comedy to wartime drama, teen comedy, and a shockingly great Adam Sandler movie. Plus: Adam Driver sings Sondheim. Like I said, there’s a lot to see.

Reader’s Corner: Best Books of 2013

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Best-of lists are particularly absurd when it comes to books, with thousands of titles being released in 2013 alone and easily hundreds of them most likely being worth forking over $25 for. But nevertheless it’s helpful to pull notable ones out of the stacks of new releases; otherwise where would you even get started?

To that end, I published a piece over at PopMatters with short writeups on my 15 favorite books of 2013. It’s a good collection with something for everybody, fantasy to military history, graphic novels to current affairs, Thomas Pynchon to Scientology. You can read it here.

Best Movies of 2013: First Take

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - Festivals, Film - NewLeave a comment

bestfilmtv2013-films

Since it’s a brand new year already featuring its own share of miserable, do-I-have-to-go-out-there? weather, what better time to sit back and figure out what exactly was the year that was? Film-wise, that is.

I contributed to a few of those lists at different websites this month. Over at PopMatters, you can see their gargantuan Top 35 films list here; they’ve also produced similar lists broken out into DVDs and foreign/indie films. I also contributed to their sections on the year’s worst films, and best female and male performances.

Sarah Polley's 'Stories We Tell'
Sarah Polley’s ‘Stories We Tell’

Also, the writers for Film Racket published their own individual Top 10 lists here. My list is something of a first draft that I’ll be going back over and redoing for the publication (hopefully later this month) of the new edition of Eyes Wide Open 2013: The Year’s 25 Greatest Movies (and 5 Worst). Here’s the short version:

  1. Stories We Tell
  2. 12 Years a Slave
  3. Gravity
  4. Before Midnight
  5. Fruitvale Station
  6. A Touch of Sin
  7. August: Osage County
  8. Gimme the Loot
  9. Room 237
  10. Captain Phillips