MMM is probably my favorite Woody Allen—it's certainly the one I revisit most often. It doesn't have the philosophical weight of C&M — Allen's "best" movie in my opinion — and doesn't look as beautiful as BoB or H&HS (or, I suppose, Manhattan, which I still think is overrated) but it works almost perfectly as a "movie…

Fact: Shutter Island > Inception

Just watched DH2 a couple of nights ago and man  was it a lot worse than I remember. The action scenes, in particular, were really badly staged, confusing and boring. And Willis's "witty" asides seemed tired already. I also recently watched DH3 and liked it more than when I saw it in the theater, though the ending is…

a couple of other stellar single-serving performances
Todd Field as Nick Nightingale in "Eyes Wide Shut"
Jack Kehler as Marty, the Dude's landlord, in "The Big Lebowski"

but how many bands went five for five?
The Police released five—and only five—very good to great records in the span of six years and then had the good sense to break up before they could record a bad or mediocre record. It's been a long time since I've played any Police album except Synchronicity all the way through,…

BBP was my then two-year-old daughter's first favorite song, though it seems to have recently fallen out of her top 20. (Her current favorite adult songs are "Lisztomania" and, oddly, the theme song from "Rocky.") Consequently, I have listened to it approximately a billion times. Lucky me.

Movies that End with Jennifer Connelly Staring at the Ocean over a White Fence: Dark City, Requiem for a Dream, The House of Sand and Fog.

Birth and Solaris
Alexandre Desplat's wintery (but far from festive) score for "Birth" (which should also be considered a New Cult Classic!) and Cliff Martinez's low-key, ambient score for Soderbergh's "Solaris" are both favorites.

Ted McKeever's Metropol
Now that would make a cool "angel's with machine guns" apocalypse movie. Though I haven't revisited the series since it first came out, I've always thought some visionary director would adapt it for the screen and blow our collective mind. When I first saw the previews for Legion, I thought…

The best movie he was in was Altman's The Long Goodbye, as a nameless goon. Predator made the best use of his wise-cracking, tough-guy, and slightly bemused tough guy. True Lies is the most annoying. T2 remains his the best and most watchable "Schwarzenegger film." End of Days is his most boring. And Eraser is his…

Just bought this on DVD for $3 and found, upon watching it for the first time since it was first released, that time has not been kind to the pacing, music, effects (sound and visual), acting (with the exception of Roddy McDowell), fashion, or plotting. But it was still worth $3 and 90 minutes of my time —plus another…

Here's your backlash: I've now seen The National live three times and each time they've been more boring than the time before. Love "Boxer" but their live "show" had more than a hint of jam band and induced in me only jaw-dislocating yawns.

Arrested Development
I was thrilled to read elsewhere on the site that according to David Cross, the movie is not going to happen. The series was, with the exception of the thrid season detour into British-land or whatever it was called, perfect.

I'm just going to put this out there: The Great Gatsby is the most overrated work of 20th-century American literature. Rereading this for the first time in 25 years was the most disspiriting literary experience I've had in a long time. I still had the copy I read in high school—with all of my original underlining and…

The Intruder is a pretty good film—a little preachy by design, but well shot and creepily atmospheric. Shatner is very effective as a sort of freelance race-baiter who seduces his audiences with his good looks and simple message of hate. In his autobiography, Corman talks about the very convincing death threats the…

also, Limbo
Another great KK performance in the underrated John Sayles film.

Juliet, Naked
Just finished the new Nick Hornby novel last night (at 4:30 am!) and Northern Soul plays a minor and amusing part in its narrative. And now here it is as a GTG column? Does the A.V. Club know what I'm doing all the time?

The Lovely Bones
Saw it this weekend and while it was definitely flawed (a badly miscast Mark Wahlberg, a wildly inappropriate montage sequence of Susan Sarandon's grandmother making like the Cat in the Hat, and a curious emotional mutedness), it was far short of the disaster I'd been expecting. It's the kind of movie…

The 13th Warrior! The 13th Warrior!
This movie was widely panned when it was (barely) released (lots of lazy guffaws about Antonio Banderas playing an Arab in a viking movie) but I was persuaded by a rave review on the old SciFi website (you know, when they knew how to spell) and ended up loving it, too.

Daybreakers took itself way too seriously to be enjoyable. The movie cried out—or, rather, I did—for a little dystopian satire. A couple of scenes suggested it (SPOILER: the scene of the test subject exploding) but I got the feeling that the filmmakers had spent so much time developing the film's reality that they…