Martin Scorsese A Very Personal List of Top 250 Films - Part 5: #50-1 A list in which there aren't any films that are better than these...
Steven Spielberg A Very Personal List of Top 250 Films - Part 4: #100-51 Three of Satoshi Kon's four films, a couple of Best Picture winners, and a heaping dose of DiCaprio...
Rian Johnson A Very Personal List of Top 250 Films - Part 3: #150-101 A bunch of black and whites, a few with the word "sun", and a previous #1...
Martin Scorsese A Very Personal List of Top 250 Films - Part 2: #200-151 Featuring a couple Wachowskis, a couple Paul Thomas Andersons, and a couple of mashups
The Top 250 Films A Very Personal List of Top 250 Movies - Intro: Honorable Mentions The Overture to the Substack Event of the Season™ is here!
Alfred Hitchcock The Highest Heights - Vertigo Alfred Hitchcock's undeniable masterpiece owes its success to many different sources...
Building the Top 250 In the Shadow of Greatness - To Kill A Mockingbird A cinematic translation of the 20th Century's most-read book
Building the Top 250 Harnessing the Metatext - Unforgiven Clint Eastwood deconstructs westerns, tests his audience's patience, and delivers a masterpiece
Wes Anderson A Sense of Belonging - Moonrise Kingdom When society fails, fall out of it and build your own
Wes Anderson A Wonderful Melancholy - The Grand Budapest Hotel With his first solo-writing credit, Wes Anderson distills his own style to its purest form
Building the Top 250 The Madness of Friendship - The Treasure of the Sierra Madre When life imitates art...
Building the Top 250 Be the Triangle You Want to See In the World - Seven Samurai The circles alone are not enough.
Building the Top 250 The Michelle Williams Back Tattoo - Synecdoche, New York It's so much more than a trauma metaphor
Wes Anderson Robust Backstory - The Royal Tenenbaums Wes Anderson's breakout hit introduces all of his idiosyncracies... except for his sterility.
Walk & Talks We'll Always Have Paris - Before Sunset How would you spend your life if you only had 80 minutes left to live it?
Building the Top 250 Freshening Up A Genre-Medium - The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly The distance from the birth of cinema to Leone's third film is roughly the same time span as this to our present. How long until we can get something this good with the zeitgeist of the now?
Martin Scorsese This Is America - Taxi Driver One Travis Bickle was enough in 1976. How many are around today?
Building the Top 250 Life During Wartime - Dunkirk Christopher Nolan's World War II epic turns a legendary miracle into a small, intimate, personal tone poem
Joss Whedon She Always Did Love To Dance - Serenity Joss Whedon's theatrical debut was a sci-fi blockbuster that brought Firefly to a close, but in the wake of his cancelling, does it still hold up?
Building the Top 250 Fame's Shallow Ocean - Sunset Boulevard Billy Wilder's 75-year-old celebration of old and new Hollywood buts up against the value of fame and celebrity. And it's probably even more relevant now than it was when it first came out
Building the Top 250 Kerouacking - Midnight Run Bounty hunter Robert De Niro. Shady accountant Charles Grodin. A cross-country road trip. Hilarity ensues.
Steven Spielberg Stoikey Muzhik Values - Bridge of Spies Spielberg's 60s Cold War drama depicts the American justice system at work and is more relevant today than it was on release ten years ago.
