I have disliked - nay, hated - Jennifer Lopez for years. She's never impressed me with her acting, her music is generic pop and every story I've heard about her makes her sound like a complete asshole. Hell, at one point I found her so irritating, I even made a parody Twitter account for her.

This is all to say that every time she popped up in Hustlers, I lit up. I was overjoyed. I finally saw a magnetic side…

Tim Burton's films always feel more like elaborate fantasies than actual films. Even my favorites from him like Edward Scissorhands or Big Fish seem like fairy tales that Burton is simply adapting. There's nothing wrong with that, and I especially like this style in his earlier, pre-Ed Wood work. But Ed Wood plays more mature to me than any other Burton film, because while this is a loose interpretation of the worst director of all time, it's also is a…

Oh boy, my least favorite of any Oscar nominee in any category this year. This thing is awful, pretentious, annoying and bloated. If you make a biographical film, please be aware that your story might not be interesting to anyone other than yourself. Pear Cider and Cigarettes plays like a biography about the director Robert Valley and his friend Techno, yet it makes so many leaps and weird transitions and statements that make no sense. For example, at one point,…

Criterion spine #30:

When I decided to start going year-by-year through film history, there were a few films at the beginning that really made me think that I was doing something very exciting. Among those films were The Circus, City Lights, and All Quiet on the Western Front. For some reason, I wasn't sure if I should include foreign films, but after watching M, I knew I absolutely had to.

M absolutely blew me away the first time I saw…