"Solo" Redeems the Disney Wars – An Unexpected Appreciation

A radically traditional neo-noir cartoon romp, Solo: A Star Wars Story is simply the best film to bear the series’ name since Revenge of the Sith.

Alien: Covenant – A Litany of Reasons Why It Is Just the Worst

Ridley’s latest disaster affirms what Rogue One taught: movies need no longer innovate or make sense to garner widespread praise. In fact, they shouldn’t do either.

100-something Movies You Should See If You Like Movies: T-Z

And here we are, folks.  This is the sixth and final installment in an alphabetical rundown of movies the Author would recommend to anyone who enjoys all kinds of movies.  We will be issuing periodic updates to this list in the future but at a significantly lower rate because I don’t get paid to write about these and whenever I do I inhibit myself from completing stuff I’m actually required to do.  If you want to support TAF’s ongoing efforts to seek out and highlight excellence in cinema, please like, subscribe, share, and donate to our Patreon at – oh, never mind.  Sometime after December 18th I’ll try to post a roundup of all the 2015 films I saw, good and bad, Star Wars and not-Star Wars, as well as my year-end thoughts on America’s brewing intellectual race war.  Aside from movies, I’d also like to do some much shorter series on games, music, television, and literature (one of these would be harder than the rest), and the feedback we get on this post will probably determine which artistic medium we tackle next.

As always, links to the other sections are appended at the bottom, and if there’s a film you hold in high regard, do go ahead and leave any suggestions in the comments.

Taps –

Taps is a relic from the 80s about a military school revolt that quickly escalates into a standoff with the military itself. Everyone seems to think it’s a liberal antiwar screed and it’s been a while since I’ve seen it, but I thought all the characters got a fair shake from the script. Watch it cause it’s thought-provoking and features a bunch of really young stars at the top of their game. Tom Cruise plays a crazy person and Sean Penn plays a caricature of himself.

Teeth –

“Even the PG-13 has heavy making out.” Teeth is a movie that probably doesn’t deserve to be on any professional Top X Movies List, but fortunately for Teeth, deserving’s got nothing to do with this list. I could describe the premise of this movie to my readers, but if I did, my synopsis would only mortify the lot of you out of giving it a shot. Suffice it to say that Teeth is a satire of Purity Culture in contemporary Christianity, a set of practices and youth group platitudes that aren’t entirely extra-Biblical or even wrong but which all too often supplant any other theological topics and sometimes make kids more liable to consider premarital sex than they would be if their mentors trusted them to do the right thing without incessant, obnoxious prodding. For young and hitherto exhausted Christians who received the purity talk some 50 times or more in high school and are already in on the joke, Teeth makes a really funny mockery of contemporary Christian culture’s overzealous worries about “unclean thoughts/deeds” and the absurd lengths our teachers go to to make sure kids aren’t having any. For those who haven’t heard the No Sex Before Marriage lecture quite as many times as your own Author, Teeth will probably come across as an offensive, neo-Feminist diatribe against religious traditions written by a proudly irreligious gay guy. It will strike them as that kind of movie because it actually is that kind of movie.

Maybe it’s nothing more than that kind of movie, but either way you view it, it’s undeniably engrossing and two believers would be hard pressed not to have a good debate afterwards about its worldview. Concerning Mere Christianity or the immorality of premarital sex, I’ve never tried to obscure what I believe is true and righteous, but at the same time I think there’s something, for lack of a better word, lame about a supposedly Christian college of 18-22 year-olds where sexuality is so stigmatized that almost no undergrad is romantically pursuing another young person, which, morality aside, is just the natural thing to be doing at that age and should be expected at any such institution. Purity or Modesty Culture honorably aims to arm young believers against temptations to sin, but as an unfortunate byproduct it also ends up arming them against godly, committed relationships rooted in a moral and temperate acceptance of their sexual being.

Since I’ve summarized the thematic point of the film, you may no longer feel obligated to watch it. It’s kind of really gross and cringeworthy, especially for males, and the length at which I’ve written about it isn’t meant to imply that it’s superior to the other titles listed. On a note completely unrelated to the preceding rant, Teeth ends with a song called Bomp Shooby Dooby Bomp.

The Terminator –

The original Terminator has a couple glaring problems: as satisfying as it is to see a stoic and invincible Arnold Schwarzenegger marching through a police station and gunning down thirty guys with a weapon in each hand, in actuality he wouldn’t be able to obtain a fully automatic Uzi rifle from a gun store, nor would he be able to shoot the storekeeper in the chest because he left some shotgun shells on the counter. Silly James Cameron. At least you can say you made a really fun and well-paced action movie, minus the awful-looking stop-motion Terminator puppet. What are you gonna do if you don’t have hundreds of millions of dollars to blow on pretty, blue aliens or the evil machines that are wrecking their ecosystem?

The Thing –

Much like The Fly, this 30-year-old classic remains top of the line in credible and disgusting effects work without a hint of CGI, but it also tells a tense and compact story tinged with political themes of paranoia and the way in which fear of the unseen enemy disintegrates trust between comrades.

Thirst (u1) –

A few words I would use to describe Thirst: humorous, violent, playful, seductive, erotic, extravagant, elegant, mesmerizing, gonzo. A tale about a struggling religious man that never fully commits to its religious underbelly (Park Chan-Wook is not, as far as anyone knows, a Christian), it nonetheless draws upon the legend of the vampire as a metaphor for the baser primal instincts latent in all men, the id which wages a savage war for dominance with the hero’s waning Catholicism. It employs special effects rarely but effectively, has one of the best, most justified sex scenes ever for what that’s worth, and couldn’t possibly close in more spectacular fashion.

Three Amigos –

“Will you kiss me on the verandah?”
“Lips are fine.”

Top Secret! –

Old review here. Top Secret! makes Monty Python’s Holy Grail look slow and dull and dated. No other film has such a sustained and rapid onslaught of visual jokes except for maybe Scott Pilgrim, which undercuts its own appeal by aiming so much humor squarely at nerds and hipsters.

Transformers –

People masquerading as critical consumers of media automatically (and quite stupidly) dismiss this as a stupid Michael Bay movie, but nobody rolls out a slicker Bayhem movie than the Bay himself, and Transformers undeniably crushes all alternatives in straight-up, effects-driven action movies. Just see the highway chase with Bonecrusher barreling through a truck, the opening assault on the Qatar base, or the shot of Ironhide blasting himself off the ground to avoid incoming missiles and a screaming woman. Even the cheesy and very well-worn subplot of dorky nerd Sam Witwicky trying to impress hot car mechanic Megan Fox has grown on me with repeated viewings. All this is topped off with one of the most epic-sounding, dramatic, woefully underrated scores ever. You’d have to wear a Decepticon sticker on your car to not appreciate this modern classic in waiting.

The Tree of Life –

The Tree of Life isn’t as easily explained as most of the other movies on this list. It’s certainly a lot harder to explain than Teeth, and it’ll probably take some repeat viewings before I finally feel I get it. Terrence Malick gives us a deeply spiritual and artsy piece that ignores our thirst for rational understanding and doesn’t resemble any other film aesthetically.

Tron: Legacy –

Tron has gained something of a legacy as that protracted Daft Punk music video which was commercially designed to be as exhilarating and visually gigantic as possible, and you can certainly watch it that way if you want. Or you can flex your brain muscles a little harder and try identifying all the Jesus, Holocaust, and Creation story symbols the writers cleverly wormed into their huge, flashy Ultimate Frisbee fantasy film. You do you. No hate. Sorry.

True Grit (2010) –

Just a good, old-fashioned revenge yarn brought to you by the Coen Brothers and a brilliant ensemble. Ever stalwart.

The Truman Show –

A funny thinking person’s movie, not just prophetic of reality television trends but filled with religious subtext, kind of like it’s slicing, dicing, and peeling all at once. Someday I’ll get around to reviewing it, but I don’t necessarily like using my brain on long, detailed, philosophical blog posts that no one reads in full, so that’ll be a while.

12 Monkeys –

A Terry Gilliam-directed sci-fi movie that’s a little off all the way through, and not only in the best and craziest role Brad Pitt has ever played.

Unforgiven –

“It's a hell of a thing, killing a man.  Take away all he’s got and all he’s ever gonna have.”

The Vengeance Trilogy (u1) –

Taken collectively, these are the best films I’ve ever seen in terms of film form. Orson Welles is always credited with inventing the cinematic toolbox, but Park Chan-Wook has built much greater wonders using the same tools. Like Welles, Park underwent no formal film schooling, studying philosophy in college, and actually busied himself outside of directing with writing essays and film critiques. Knowing nothing of his personal background while watching the trilogy, it didn’t surprise me to learn afterwards that he counts Shakespeare, Sophocles, and Vonnegut among his major influences, as all three movies deal in the kind of high drama, dark comedy, and flexible narration those older writers mastered. To say a brief word about each film, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is a tightly scripted, starkly photographed thriller wherein every character action is justified, makes perfect sense, and contributes to an escalating trail of violence. Oldboy is the comic-book movie to end all lazy comic-book movies, running circles around American action flicks with parallel imagery, in-camera transitions, stunning long takes, and almost every other trick in the book. Lady Vengeance falls somewhere between them both, starting out as perhaps the most confusing and stylized of the bunch before transfiguring into the most contemplative, harrowing film of the series. I could write pages upon pages about every aspect I loved in each one’s framing, editing, scoring, cinematography, and writing, but for now I’ll simply exhort you to order the Blu-ray or pull Oldboy up on Netflix, which looks about the same. Since they’re not a trilogy proper but an accidental sequence of thematically related dramas, you can really watch them in whatever order pleases you – alone, without your kids or friends, because they’re rated R for many, many reasons.

Victoria (u1) –

Would Victoria be as impressive a film if it wasn’t captured in an unbroken two-hour take and just shot traditionally? As to this we can only speculate, but it is marvelously structured as a thriller and I wouldn’t expect it to weaken on repeat viewings, unlike Birdman, which uses its faux-one-shot grandstanding as a smokescreen for an insufferably masturbatory script. The flashing lights and drowning bass of a transportive nightclub beckon viewer and young heroine alike into a sensual underworld, demanding to be seen and heard in the same darkness that engulfs the characters.

The Village –

Full review here. At the time I called it the most vividly first-person film I’ve seen, and I’d stand by that assessment today. In his prime, Shyamalan utilized sensations of sound and color more fully than almost any other filmmaker, and The Village embodies the perfect marriage of cinematic and symbolical depth. The Village also marked the turning point in critical reception of Shyamalan’s works, and it marked that point because the majority of movie critics are communists. I don’t know if M. Night Shyamalan is a communist, but he sure made one hell of an anti-communism horror film, much better than The Giver – the movie, which was the original anti-communism story about a village where all is not as it seems. Would that that movie had never been released from its community.

Walk the Line –

Walk the Line doesn’t break any new ground in how to structure an artistic genius story: you’ve got the detached husband who dreams of making it big, the wife who wants him to choose a safer, family-centered career, montage sequences of said husband rising into stardom, drug addiction, infidelity, a beautiful romantic interest who’s “too afraid to fall in love”—lots of movie-ish stuff we’ve seen before. Rarely are these stock components executed with as much pathos as they are in Walk the Line. I’m not sure how much of it is factual, but given that it’s based on Johnny Cash’s autobiography, I doubt that any of it was meant to besmirch his legacy. I would recommend this film to anyone who thinks that country music has always sucked, or who thinks that Straight Outta Compton or Pitch Perfect were aca-effing-mazing. Not only would they hear a splendid recreation of the sound of Johnny Cash and June Carter, but they’d also get to see one of the most versatile actors ever, Joaquin Phoenix, turn into a complete and utter wreck on camera. And people think that Leo gets cheated at the Oscars.

Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Wererabbit –

Still a better love story than Twilight, and the cool thing is that Aardman Studios actually took a story about a wererabbit somewhat seriously.  “I have two – one golden bullet left.”

We Need To Talk About Kevin (u1) –

Beautiful, tragic, grim, and more disturbing in a real-world sense than most anything since Silence of the Lambs, Kevin delivers a powerful meditation on pure evil, whether it exists as an entity in itself or is merely inculcated by external causes. Lynne Ramsay doesn’t make films often, but when she does they are astounding.

Whiplash –

Kind of like this decade’s Karate Kid or Rocky, but with drumming and a million times better directed, acted, and edited. Makes you want to play an instrument so you too can get the girl of your dreams. Or maybe not. Check it out. Even if you hate jazz. No, especially if you hate jazz, not because it’ll automatically endow you with a new appreciation for the art of jazz but because you can then tell all your friends who love jazz that you thought Whiplash was the coolest movie ever and those friends will no longer be able to call you “ignorant”.

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100-something Movies You Should See If You Like Movies: M-P

Continuing a dynamic and somewhat subjective list of truly excellent movies for people who like all kinds of movies.  For a more thorough explanation of the methodology behind these recommendations, check out part 1 here.  Newer entries will be labeled u1, u2, u3... uX depending on when I add them, so use your internet word searcher and check back in several months to follow my ongoing chronicle of the best that Hollywood has to offer.  Links to other sections are appended at the bottom.

Mad Max: Fury Road –

My dad’s remarks upon the credits roll were something like, “Wow.  That was two hours of crazy.”  Who could have summed it up better?  As with Edge of Tomorrow, you can condense pretty much the whole plot into two separate lines of dialogue.  Why does George Miller keep making these films 35 years after the one which he made on practically no budget and almost nobody has seen?  Maybe he regards it as his duty to absolve the action genre of its many modern transgressions.  If the old guy can’t fix what’s broken, he’ll go insane.  What a movie.  What a lovely movie.

Mars Attacks –

This probably doesn’t belong on the list because it really wasn’t that funny, practically speaking, and Natalie Portman’s acting stinks, but I once wrote a pretty thorough breakdown of Mars Attacks’ cynical, realist political themes contrasted with Independence Day’s liberal, pacifistic idealism, so I’ll use this newer, lazier article as an opportunity to pimp my older, much more detailed article.

The Matrix –

Because what list would be complete without it? Your list is already dead.

May (u1) –

I got a little carried away working my night shift and accidentally wrote about a page of commentary on May in coincidental enthusiasm and boredom. Suffice it to say that May is a delightfully oddball yet also reflective horror film about isolation, female sexual desire, and obsession with aesthetics. It’s probably not for everybody, but those for whom it is are certain to love it.

Memento –

I really want to write about this one in more depth. If someone asks me what my favorite movie ever is, I usually refer them to Memento, but now that I have this list I need not do that anymore. Now, where was I?

Memories of Murder (u1) –

Memories of Murder is unlike any movie you’ve ever seen, unless you have seen Mother. This may be the best entry point to Korean New Wave cinema, intermittently hilarious, suspenseful, and dizzying in its presentation.

Men in Black Trilogy –

If someone mentioned Will Smith to me three years ago, I’d instantly associate him in my head with Men In Black. Then Will Smith decided to have kids and become Obama’s little whiny female pug dog. What a shame. All three of these are hilarious in a weird and nonconformist way. The writer and director of Men In Black would go on to produce and partially direct the short-lived cult television series Pushing Daisies, a most delightful program no one cared for until its second season was lying in the coffin.

Midnight in Paris –

Midnight in Paris could easily have been a cheesy, exploitative romantic comedy weighed down by too many celebrities, time-travel gimmickry, and tourist destinations gratuitously snuck in for advertising, but instead Woody Allen made a funny, pensive, and appropriately pretty film about a screenwriter going through an Existential Crisis and reevaluating his blind romanticizing of the past. Though it concerns unfulfilled love, defeatism in artistry, and inter-family squabbles, Midnight In Paris doesn’t mar its light tone with a lot of made-up movie conflict, as the story’s mostly about Owen Wilson thinking that he wants one thing, thinking he wants another thing, and finally coming to terms with what he really wants.

Minority Report –

The music in Minority Report is really disappointing, too often sounding like fill-in, generic John Williams background scoring. I don’t think I can say anything negative about the film besides that, given how accurately and humorously it skewers recent ‘advances’ in individualized marketing and the surge of the surveillance state in a probably misguided, certainly mismanaged War on Terror, all while investigating big philosophical questions about free will and its relationship to foreknowledge. Everybody runs, John Anderton.

Moana (u1) –

I will admit that Moana is far from a perfect movie. In fact, I could probably fill a page or two with things I would change in it – some irritating lines of dialogue, a lame song in the middle act, the way her hair never stays wet very long. It’s also the first Disney movie in a really long time I can envision myself watching over and over again without getting bored, like Shrek or How To Train Your Dragon (both of which it resembles a lot), as well as the first Disney movie in a while that didn’t have some severely dating social agenda to grind and just contented itself with telling a good story about two people learning to respect each other. I’m still in shock at just how great it was. I. Am. Moanaaaaa.

Moon –

Moon is irregular, slow-burning speculative sci-fi that emphasizes sympathetic characters over action, potently asks what makes one human, and examines the justifications one group makes for harnessing another to its profit. It’s also an incredible one-man show for Sam Rockwell if you care about that sort of thing.

Moonrise Kingdom –

Young love and khaki scouts realized through the whacky mind of Wes Anderson. I totally want to ask some girl, “What kind of bird are you?” Then I’ll know if she has good taste in movies.

Mother (u1) –

Mother is unlike any movie you’ve ever seen, unless you have seen Memories of Murder. Of the two, this one packs more of an emotional punch and may linger longer for that reason. Bong Joon-ho cleverly builds the end into the opening credits, but one can’t understand the significance of it until the story has run its breathtaking course.

My Cousin Vinny –

Marisa Tomei stole George Costanza’s heart in this comedy and continues to steal the hearts of Boss Men watching it for the first time 25 years later. “She’s my fiancé.” “Well, that would explain the hostilities.”

Napoleon Dynamite –

Napoleon Dynamite isn’t typically categorized as great art by people of any persuasion, but you know by the time The Promise rolls that you’ve borne witness to something whole and something freaking sweet. Lucky!

Nightcrawler –

Everybody knows that Jake Gyllenhaal got robbed for best performance of the year, but Nightcrawler would still be gripping and provocative without his maniacal presence making it that much darker. Using a little explored or contemplated aspect of local crime broadcasting, Nightcrawler undoubtedly casts a shroud of sadism and exploitation over the integrity of journalism but goes even further by dramatizing the obsessive drive of human beings to create the finest, most arousing and impactful version of their craft, regardless of the human suffering they enable or ignore thereby. Nightcrawler’s level of violence isn’t that extreme in the big picture, but the utter callousness with which Gyllenhaal’s Lou treats it renders this one of the more outrageous and gripping thrillers of recent times, one that instantly earns its place alongside Taxi Driver as one of the great Crazy Guy classics. Nightcrawler is much more morally concerned than Taxi Driver as a story, though, and so I found it even more enthralling.

Pee Wee’s Big Adventure –

One of the most peculiar and entertaining comedies ever. Andy? ANNNDDDYY!

Perfect Blue (u1) –

I will admit up front that I don’t admire Perfect Blue as much as some other movies on the list; in fact, one might view its inclusion as a kind of affirmative-action for alternative animations. But here we have to ask if affirmative-action is even inherently bad when it comes to cinema. If it’s good enough for the Oscars (and we all know the Oscars have never, ever honored crappy movies), then it’s good enough for us. Regardless of politics, Perfect Blue is still an entrancing thriller by all measures, whisked along by jarring transitions, freakish animated imagery, desperate violence, and a perspective that keeps getting more and more unmoored from reality as we know it. If you’ve already seen Black Swan, you should feel obligated to watch the crazier, more visionary original that inspired it. I should also note that this isn’t a movie to watch in public or with judgmental people, unless you don’t mind people thinking you’re weird.

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (u1) –

Perfume can aptly be described as the anti-Les Miserables, employing much of the same apparel and décor but designed to polarize, repel, and offend. The sensualist movie manages to be at once massive in scope and incredibly tactile, and like Les Mis it’s highly musical, though it aims to be more eerie and haunting than anything else. For a great (and funny) video further extolling Perfume, albeit by sampling scenes taken from very late in the film, check out Twin Perfect’s video on it here.

Possession (1981) –

It’s really late in the evening/early in the morning, and I’m pretty certain neither I nor anyone else will ever understand what director Andrzej Zulawski was trying to say in Possession, so I’ll keep this short. Suffice it to say this film is way too abstract, illegible, and grating on the ears for 90% of viewers, but an equal proportion will also be revolted, mesmerized, and horrified by its scenes of absolute, out-of-control demonic torment, so in my mind it did exactly what a movie with a name like Possession should do.  By all means, though, feel free to hate upon it.

The Princess Bride –

One of those old movies that was actually better than the book, you know, back when books were kind of good. I’m kidding, of course. There have always been bad books. The Princess Bride just showed a little more effort than the rest of the bestsellers at its time.

Prisoners –

Once you do something you know is really wrong, it’s hard to do the thing you know will probably set it right. Prisoners’ crime mystery seems shoddy in a lot of places upon closer contemplation, but the phenomenal acting, direction, and cinematography more than compensate for its scattered logic holes.

Punch-Drunk Love (u1) –

Does choosing the Adam Sandler-starring Punch-Drunk Love as my only essential P.T. Anderson flick over The Master or Magnolia or any of his more serious movies make me a simpleton? Maybe it does, but The Master and Magnolia only really succeeded in making me bored or angry, and there are lots of other movies that induce me to anger or boredom. On the contrary, there aren’t a lot of movies that made me feel quite the same as this, thanks to Jon Brion’s incomparable score, the unhinged soundscape in general, and Sandler’s surprisingly convincing performance as a toilet plunger salesman with lots of unspecified issues. Punch-Drunk Love thrives upon the kind of cringeworthy situations and crippling anxiety that permeate a lot of the Youtube videos I consume, but does so in a commendably entertaining way. I would urge anybody who doesn’t appreciate its brilliance to watch the first thirty minutes or so of the movie Krisha, which aspires to do pretty much the same thing and ends up being the most excruciating thing I’ve ever heard.

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100-something Movies You Should See If You Like Movies: E-H

Continued from part 1, which also describes the methodology behind this list in case the title doesn’t make it clear.  Newer entries will be labeled u1, u2, u3... uX depending on when I add them, so use your internet word searcher and check back in several months to follow my ongoing chronicle of the best that Hollywood has to offer.  Links to other sections are appended at the bottom.

Edge of Tomorrow –

The helicopter scene alone merits a spot on this list.  And Emily Blunt doing pushups.  Is there something on her face?  Too bad Emily Blunt had to go and make such a dumbkopf of herself.

Edward Scissorhands –

Old but complete review here.  A very sad yet very wonderful movie.

Empire of the Sun –

Spielberg’s historical magnum opus, much better than the also strong Saving Private Ryan.

Enemy –

Jake Gyllenhaal plays two physically identical characters, or two versions of the same character, depending on how you try to make sense of the story.  I don’t know why people think this is slow-paced. Of all the nonsensical, symbolism-fueled arthouse pictures I’ve seen, this is probably the most riveting.  I’m not really convinced that it’s a split personality movie.  I really want it NOT to be another split personality movie.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind –

A very imaginative and experimental movie about love, memories, and how our past defines our present.  Charlie Kaufman is kind of an annoying artsy-fartsy hipster (see the movie he wrote about himself writing the very movie that you’re watching), but bravo to him for pulling this script off.

Evil Dead II and Hausu (u1) –

A couple basic things I learned about filmmaking from watching Evil Dead II: 1. Cutting scenes on action can be very startling and effective; 2. POV shots are sorely underutilized in modern cinema; 3. Practical effects can look really cheesy, and sometimes that is charming; 4. Humor and horror are a lot less separate than one might think.  Both rely on setting up and subverting expectations, and a great director will allow his viewers sufficient leeway to laugh or recoil as they will.  This is what separates a political comedy like Borat from a TV sitcom like Friends, or a Sam Raimi horror film from the latest chapter in the Insidious-Conjuring saga.

I affix Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 film House to the more customary Evil Dead not because it’s more entertaining or because it inspired the latter (House wasn’t released in the United States until Janus/Criterion picked it up in the 2000s), but for lifting some symbolical weight from the whacky horror comedy genre and for pushing the limits with its visual weirdness.  It’s also just more pleasing to look at all around, achieving moments of simple beauty in its colorful sunsets and killings, whereas Evil Dead II delights viewers more by its homespun, unabashedly cheap aesthetic than by Raimi’s painterly eye for composition.  In truth, if you were to watch any of the ugly Evil Dead movies every week for a lifetime, you’d probably get sick of the world pretty fast.  The Hausu Blu-ray comes with subtitles, so you could induce yourself to take a pleasant, 90-minute nap nearly every time.

Ex Machina –

Unpredictable, thought-provoking, and extraordinarily beautiful robot movie that exploits modern liberal sensibilities on the rights of the nonhuman and shockingly rejects those sensibilities in the final act.  It doesn’t wield quite as much staying power on second viewing, but then what movie does that packs so many astonishing, last-minute twists?

Exit through the Gift Shop –

The less that’s said about Mr. Brainwash, Banksy, and the other street artist icons mythologized by Exit Through the Gift Shop, the better, because their documentary is a bit of a trip.  The story told herein seems too outrageous to be true, and that’s kind of the point.  People have debated how much of Brainwash’s journey is real and how much is a carefully constructed fabrication of director Banksy, whoever he is, but the crucial moment in the drama – people lining up in droves to fork over massive sums of money for what’s essentially a worthless piece of hodgepodge, mishmashed junk – is completely factual.  Exit Through the Gift Shop is in essence a movie about marketing and all the trickery involved, so why do so many people care if the movie itself is an engineered work of entertaining trickery?  Maybe art is just a joke, but doesn’t the art of deceiving stupid people lie at the core of all American politics and commerce?

Fantastic Mr. Fox –

The stop-motion Wes Anderson comedy with talking animals we never knew we wanted.  What the cuss kind of movies list would this be without it?  Really old review from the dark days of The Author’s Files featured here.  Read it to see how far we’ve come.  All the sentences are just like this one and the one after it.  They start with a noun, follow with a verb of being, and end with an adjective describing the noun.  That kind of writing just isn’t very interesting.  Even for a wild animal.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High & Election –

These two go rather hand in hand, both aiming to expose a darker and more worldly aspect of high school that’s often glossed over in the genre, and not in a crass, extravagant way a la 21 Jump Street but with a sobering maturity and sincere awareness of real social faults.  Teenagers in both these films are accurately and/or idealistically portrayed as horny, malicious, power-hungry, jealous, injudicious, petty, rabidly sexual beings.  Fast Times is particularly renowned for a poolside fantasy experienced by Judge Reinhold, Election deals more frankly with the reality of pervy high-school teachers than perhaps anything else, and young Reese Witherspoon is anything but America’s sweetheart in the latter movie.  I prefer the satiric Election for all the political observations it milks from student government proceedings, though both are strong pictures of young adults’ life in their respective periods.  Fast Times originally left a sour taste in my mouth because of how lightly it ended up treating abortion, but then I mulled it over for a longer time and ceded that the movie’s not really concerned with judging any of the characters, just with honestly depicting moral dilemmas that many people really face in high school.  Both these movies do this very effectively.

Fight Club –

Superbly entertaining to watch, with captivating, moody cinematography, snappy writing, and great performances, while also being thematically perplexing enough that people fifteen years later can still argue about what the heck it really means.  Regardless, it’s mostly great for being so slick and absorbing.  See the outro scene that made a Pixies “fan” of everybody for the prime example of how to end a movie with a bang, like literally.  I am Jack’s remnants of a once brilliant mind blown to smithereens.

The Fly –

For a special effects-driven movie about a scientist turning into a human fly, this was surprisingly emotional and effective at making me care about Jeff Goldblum’s tragic metamorphosis.  No one questions the enduring magnificence of its revolting makeup and prop design, but it also packs one of the saddest endings ever put to screen.

Full Metal Jacket –

Me love this movie long time.

Ghost in the Shell 1.0 and 2.0 (u1) –

Densely philosophical science-fiction that’s animated immaculately and often strains one’s ability to follow the plot.  Treads a lot of the same ground since covered by Ex Machina, Snowpiercer, and of course The Matrix, and I maintain a weird theory that the art team of the game Mirror’s Edge must have spent a lot of time pouring over Ghost’s future Hong Kong.  I actually prefer the second movie for its more involving narrative and action, so if you find the original too plodding and unapproachable, give Innocence a shot. Or go watch the Scarjo remake soon to hit theaters that looks like generic, PG-13, robot-fighting-for-its-freedom trash.

Gladiator –

Russell Crowe has so many good lines within this film, it’s almost tragic that he’s just a made-up movie character.  And who could forget what a sickly, horrifying creepazoid Joaquin Phoenix made as Commodus?

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly –

I would say they just don’t make them like they used to, but then I’d fall into the trap of romanticizing the movies of the past as exponentially, universally superior to the movies of the present, which they most definitely aren’t.  Unless the older movie is directed by Sergio Leone and scored by Ennio Morricone.

The Graduate –

Mrs. Robinson is the most attractive of all Dustin Hoffman’s parent’s friends, but he thinks she’s trying to seduce him.  A very messy, nontraditional story of free spirits falling in love and running away ensues, resulting in a fabulous fusion of everything that makes a movie stand out as a movie.

Hard Candy (u1) –

Allow me to cut the tension: Hard Candy is an extraordinarily unrelenting and stylized experiment in generating empathy for a really messed-up guy, propelled by powerhouse acting and luscious, ethereal filmmaking.  Its centerpiece, which stretches on for at least 15 minutes in several shots that bleed into each other, has to be the most uncomfortable scene for male viewers in modern American cinema. Simply put, it took a lot of balls to make this movie, and I definitely wouldn’t recommend it to feminists.  Or maybe I would.  I don’t know.

On a side-note, Hard Candy introduced me to my favorite song by Blonde Redhead, which sounds all the more punchy and hypnotic after the near-total absence of musical score in the rest of the movie.  If you do plan on watching something with a title and a poster like Hard Candy, then don’t click on the link to Elephant Woman.  If you don’t, however, plan on that, then do click on the link.

Hardcore Henry (u1) –

I’ve swayed back and forth in my mind on whether Hardcore Henry belongs on a list of movies for people who like movies.  It’s certainly a movie for those who like video games, and for those who, recognizing the numerous faults of modern first-person shooters, criticize such perversions of gaming form with knowledge and passionate urgency.  The majority of mainstream critics, having attained the age or elitist sophistication that apparently precludes one from recognizing interactive storytelling as art, don’t hate Hardcore Henry’s inspirations with knowledge or with passion or with urgency, which led nearly half of them to dismiss it as dumb, mindless fun instead of crediting it for what it is: an intelligent and pointed parody that one can also passively enjoy as an extremely fun and over-the-top action movie.  In truth, Hardcore Henry skewers nearly every gaming cliché imaginable – formulaic level design, in-game tutorials, bad NPC lines, overlapping dialogue, boss battles, a silent protagonist, equestrian transportation, scantily clad warriors – and does so through a highly entertaining POV presentation that hasn’t been executed so well by the artiest of art films.  But I suppose you wouldn’t know that if you’ve never held a video game controller.

Heathers (u1) –

They just don’t make high-school movies like this anymore, movies that gleefully revel and find humor in the kind of hot-button topics that Millennials’ mollycoddled and puritanical culture has anointed not to be questioned or transgressed.  Upon consideration, I don’t think that any mainstream teen movie has succeeded the irreverence of Heathers, which owes in part to the patronizing notion that movies about or aimed at young people should have an explicitly moralizing function.  Believing high-schoolers haven’t yet developed the moral compass to discern independently that Winona Ryder and Christian Slater are playing really unethical and depraved people, studios prudishly refrain from OK’ing any script starring a teenage starlet as an anti-hero unless it verbally labels her an anti-hero and reforms her through her experiences.

Heathers has no such reservations about the satirical comprehension of its viewers.  This is a daring and different pre-Columbine comedy, and one that I am very glad exists.

Hellboy –

Really old, unexhaustive review here paired with commentary on Shrek.  It’s funny, stylish, emotional, occasionally beautiful, and laconically sums up the philosophy by which any man should live: “I can promise you two things.  One, I’ll always look this good.  Two, I’ll never give up on you.”  Hellboy 2 is also visually creative and entertaining fan service but can’t compete with the originality of the first, which I just realized is not an origin story.

Her –

Probably the most intensely sensual film I’ve yet seen, it portrays a man’s longing for intimacy without any of its trials, disappointments, or uncertainties.  It may be early to make this call, but ten years from now, Her will also be recognized as one of the most prescient cinematic visions of the future, taking a slightly exaggerated version of our present, cell phone-addicted society and forming an all too probable conclusion about the corrosive effect technology will continue to have on human relationships.  I almost cried.

Hero (without kung fu) –

A very interesting, little remembered film starring Dustin Hoffman, it’s basically about what makes a person good or bad, whether it’s a pattern of behavior that we sustain throughout our day-to-day life or the momentary choices we make in times of extreme tribulation.

Hero (with kung fu) –

I don’t know if I’ve seen a movie that exudes more epicness than Hero. Every shot is designed for maximum visual sensation, and not in the aggressive, Rick Berman fashion of shoving unnecessary crap into the frame for the sake of “denseness”, but in a gentle and caressing manner that seduces your eyes with the splendor of the colors, the hugeness of the settings, and the fantastical beauty of the cinematography. Aside from being a landmark work of photographic art, it’s also a great film to show any aspiring creative writers, weaving a nonlinear, not always objective story through multiple layers of flashbacks and eschewing a traditionally happy ending for a much more somber resolution open to individual interpretation.

Holes –

Let me tell you girl scouts a story.  Once upon a time, when I was just a little kid who couldn’t watch most PG-13 and R movies, there was a magical movie called Holes, where it (almost) never rained, where there was a surprising amount of killing and starving and danger for a Disney film, where Shia Labeouf was just a cool teenager.  Louis Sachar’s script simmered with memorable one-liners and characters.  The end.

Hoodwinked –

If you think that Pixar movies are the pinnacle of creative writing in the animation medium, you’ll probably think Hoodwinked feels a lot like hot coffee, all over your neck, very, very painful.  If you like layered storytelling that draws on multiple points of view, cleverly contorts existing folklore, alludes to other cultural touchstones, and tells a musical fable of going over the woods and through the river, then here’s a story I hope you’ll like.

How To Train Your Dragon –

I didn’t really get the hype about this the first time I watched it in the theater with stupid 3D glasses.  Then I grew up a little bit, and How To Train Your Dragon grew with me.  That may be the dumbest, most falsely sentimental sentence I’ve written in praise of a film.

The Hunt (u1) –

In a time when campuses like the regrettably-named Emerson College actively discourage misandrist, brainwashed youths from using neutral qualifiers like “alleged” or “accused” in reference to sexual assault, the themes of this uncommon Danish movie seem all the more poignant and vital.  Intentionally or not, The Hunt feels like a convicted rebuttal to the all the most trumpeted tenets of rape culture ideology (and the narcissistic #MeToo fad). So argues the film, that the severity of the claim doesn’t inherently give it credence, that people lie for a multitude of reasons, even about rape/assault/harassment, and that persecuting someone found innocent in the name of justice is just about the most unjust, uncharitable, and un-Christian thing that one can do.

If this had been an English-language film, Mads Mikkelsen would currently be an Oscar-winning actor.

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