Excerpt: Casablanca, the 1943 Best Picture Oscar winner. was not very popular at time of release; it was decades later (in the 1960s) that the feature became a cult movie and Bogart became Bogey the International star
Excerpt: A sentimental piece of WWII propaganda, William Wyler’s Mrs. Miniver swept the 1942 Oscar Awards, include Best Picture and Best Actress to Greer Garson
Excerpt: Lacking artistic freedom, Pabst may have decided that the best thing he could do would be to smuggle some subversive material into his films, right under the censor’s nose, as some American directors managed to do in the 1950s.
Excerpt: The basic premise of Pat and Mike is very simple—does your significant other (or intended significant other) bring out the best in you? Or does that individual expect you to tamp down the best aspects of yourself, in order to fit into his or her already existing world?
Excerpt: The final solution—most certainly a reversal of fortune—manages to bring the film over the finish line with a final dance and stare from Ollie that offers the hope of a better life ahead.
Excerpt: Carl Reiner has died at age 98 after a warm, inviting comedy career as a writer, director, and actor that stretched from the earliest days of television to political barbs on Twitter. He was a talented and sometimes innovative director with a sketch comedy writer’s gift for affectionate but telling satire.
Excerpt: “Good Trouble” is what Lewis, who proudly recounts having been arrested forty times during the civil rights era and five more during his years in Congress, calls fighting for what’s right. As Porter shows us, it has been the 79 year-old’s defining characteristic.
Excerpt: The arc of John Lewis’s fight for equality and justice is long and shows no signs of slowing down. Director Dawn Porter shows the methods may have changed from the ’60s, but the results are the same – some enjoy rights callously denied to others.
Excerpt: Director Rod Lurie (“The Contender”), a West Point graduate and veteran, pays homage to Bravo Troop 3-61, who would be outnumbered by a factor of over four to one in a position best described as ‘fish in a barrel’ in one of the worst battles of the Afghan War.
Excerpt: The Outpost feels like a war movie classic while simultaneously employing innovative ideas. The visceral performances are unique and combined with the absurdity of COP Keating’s situation, it will leave you with a lasting impression.
Excerpt: Gone With the Wind swept the 1939 Oscars, becoming one of the most popular movies ever made. Is the movie racist? kitsch? influential? enjoyable?
Excerpt: The actual production value of the film is its only saving grace. Gone with the Wind is unquestionably a work of art made with considerable talent and quality, but the film is vile and insidious in how it depicts race, the Civil War, and slavery in the Old South.
Excerpt: Politics, both within and without determined why John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley won the 1941 Best Picture Oscar and why Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane was snubbed
Excerpt: Rebecca, the Best Picture Oscar of 1940 is the only Hitchcock movie to win the top award and only one of few thrillers to achieve that (the genre not prestigious enough among Academy voters)
Excerpt: So, leave a little bit of buffer room for surprise, for humanity, for unexpected things to come out. I think that that’s the magic of what is possible with filmmaking.
Excerpt: Gil Junger talked about the pleasures of ignoring the show business adage about never working with children or dogs and how the film is a love letter inspired by his own experience of re-connection to his family.
Excerpt: It’s really important to me that the dog isn’t just staring at its’ trainer the whole time. I told Gabriel he would have to learn to become a trainer as well.
Excerpt: Brian Welsh’s timely film celebrates civil disobedience through a coming-of-age lens at a time when authoritarianism is on the rise and the youngest generation is at the forefront of the human rights battle… The moving, central heartbeat of “Beats” is how Welsh lets us see Spanner through Johnno’s eyes.
Excerpt: Beats captures the highs and lows, the simultaneous hope and desolation, and, most of all, the wild, anarchic freedom of youth and having no idea what you’re doing, but plowing full speed ahead, consequences be damned.
Excerpt: Mixing the high stakes, small town politics of “Welcome to Mooseport” with the farmland morals (and sucker punch twist) of …“Promised Land”…“Irresistible” is just too been-there-done-that to have much relevance.
Excerpt: If you love cinematic strangeness, Japanese-style, then you’ll be hooked from the moment “the Strangling Monster” flips his head to restore the combover that’s slipped out of place as he tosses the top half of a skyscraper into a nearby river.
Excerpt: It Happened One Night. the 1934 Best Picture Oscar winner, was the first film to get awards in all five top categories, including Best Actor and Best Actress for Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert
Excerpt: The first of three big screen versions of The Mutiny on the Bounty, th 1935 Best Picture Oscar, is still the most compelling, largely due to the superb acting of Charles Laughton and Clark Gable
Excerpt: Frank Capra became the most acclaimed filmmaker of the Depression era, when You Can’t Take It With You won the 1938 Best Picture Oscar and he received his third Best Director Oscar
Excerpt: First time feature director Shannon Murphy turns an Australian stage play (adapted by its author Rita Kalnejais) into a dramedy about embracing life with strong subtexts about psychiatry versus art therapy and prescribed versus recreational drug abuse.
Excerpt: It’s a messy existence that mirrors the unpredictability of life and yet the filmmakers never chastise their characters or moralize their actions.
Excerpt: …like “Paranormal Activity” crossed with Ty West’s “Innkeepers” with writer Todd Klick adding a psychological twist… This one’s claim of having been based on true events is also more valid than most.
Excerpt: Brutal, necessary watch for all who want to understand why America operates with impunity re its horrendous treatment of Black people. Incisive and shocking, moreso now than when it debuted in 2016.
Excerpt: Showgirls, in all its figurative and literal naked glory, is tacky, tawdry, sleazy and at times flat-out bonkers. Despite its awfulness, I can see why so many enjoy its almost gleeful brazenness.
Excerpt: Victor and Victoria is a marvelous comedy which never lets you forget that you are viewing a created object (not the least because much of the dialogue is sung, making this film something of an operetta) and which thus has no need to adhere to the dictates of naturalism.
