Jake Gittes

FYC: Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay (I think? It was expanded from a short), Ensemble, Supporting Actress, Cinematography, Soundtrack

January *A Star Is Born (1954) - 10/10 *Aloha, Bobby and Rose (1975) - 7/10 *Prince of Darkness (1987) - 6/10 *Kiki's Delivery Service (1989) - 9/10 Under the Cherry Moon (1986) - 7/10 Walker (1987) - 6/10 The Grapes of Wrath (1940) - 8/10 *Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) - 7/10 Rifkin's Festival (2020) - 5/10 *Bound (1996) - 8/10 *All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) - 7.5/10 (10 for the war sequences, 5 for all the monologuing) *The Blue Angel (1930) - 7/10 *People on Sunday (1930) - 6/10 *His Girl Friday (1940) - 8/10 *Ms .45 (1981) - 7/10 *Breathless (1960) - 9/10 [up from 8] The Big Risk (1960) - 7/10 Shoot the Piano Player (1960) - 7/10 The Sign of Leo (1962) - 7/10 The Suitor (1962) - 6/10 Suzanne's Career (1963) - 7/10 The Soft Skin (1964) - 7/10 *The Band Wagon (1953) - 8/10 *Mulholland Dr. (2001) - 10/10 [fourth viewing, first on the big screen; always adored it but it may have shot up into my top 10 after last night] *rewatches

You never did add these in the main post btw. Also, what are the criterions for overlooked feature this time? There were more of those last year than non-overlooked ones.

Preliminary ballot doubling as FYC. Hope it can be of use to anyone looking to beef up their own. Should be largely the same in the end, but I do have yet to catch up with The Climb, Promising Young Woman, One Night in Miami, News of the World out of what's become available recently.

It's excel, insisting he knows better than studios and filmmakers what they should/are gonna do is like his whole personality here.

This century? Pretty much.

Come to think of it, Argo too would've stopped at about 6x without the awards season bump (it was 19/110 as of early January 2013). So if you wanna ignore that too, then it's The Ring, which came out two weeks before Halloween, and before that The Others.

Either Hidden Figures, which got a Best Picture nod a week or two after it expanded wide, or, if you don't wanna count that, Argo.

What if Joker, but... Batman

keoghan and farrell means this is now canonically taking place in the killing of the sacred deer universe.

No one is surprised The Batman is dark. That's the point. There's nothing unexpected about the tone here. And that's tiresome.

Gamer.

Most live action superhero media has pretty much spent over a decade now bludgeoning audiences into accepting worlds that just look like our normal gray boring world, in which these goofy-ass costumed fighters, super-beings, aliens or whoever are then simply plonked and that's it. Good way to have your cake and eat it too, encourage people to think they're watching something grounded and weighty and (in terms of setting) recognizable without requiring any effort that goes into watching something that actually is those things. And the more they do it, the more insecure it comes across. The end of the trailer is the issue in a nutshell - ok, here we have a Batman who methodically beats a goon into a pulp, real impressive shit, but why do I suspect this isn't gonna have enough courage of its convictions to show us what the result of that looks like?

Finally a dark and gritty Batman movie.

It's one of the weirdest, horniest, most blissfully silly yet sneakily smart movies to come out of classic Hollywood. It's got fireballs, sex dreams, crazy dance routines, Gene Kelly in very short shorts, Judy Garland owning dudes, and more. If any of that sounds good to y'all, you best join in.

The only opinions that are real are the same as all the other ones

Just a complete fucking disaster

Your third favorite film of the decade, though, so it must have done something right

"Coverage" is broader than a review. You can give the movie a positive review as a self-contained work and also be publicly critical of the decision to release it, if you're so inclined. I doubt many reviewers will be noticeably swayed in one direction or the other, and besides it's not exactly hard to see it when someone starts reviewing external circumstances rather than the movie itself, in which case it's just as easy to ignore that person and save your attention for whoever is not falling into that trap.

All hail our wily bearded old dirtbag king.

I never said corporate greed is only restricted to studios. But in these circumstances, after all of Nolan's big talk about helping theaters in dire need, WB using the crisis to grab an abnormally high share of the grosses for itself is a spit in the face, the exact opposite of what they ought to be doing if they want to at least make it look like they care.