Actually, it still would have been Milius's script. Also, Lucas was going to make it gritty and 16mm (and probably kept it more or less on schedule, on-budget, and not nearly killing everybody involved).

It focused on the shot because the embryos are being buried in mud and will, ironically, probably get fossilized.

Also Road to Morocco, Reap the Wild Wind, The Pride of the Yankees, Mrs. Miniver, and Bambi.

Casablanca had a run in New York in late 1942, but wasn't widely released until 1943. It was the #6 film of that year.
Doesn't negate your point, just a minor correction.

Pearce's choices seem to usually be "interesting and different" over "good star career move", i.e., following up LA Confidential with Ravenous; his next starring one after that was Memento. He's also chosen to do a lot of smaller, supporting roles (The Hurt Locker, The Road) that are good little roles in good movies.

"It was fun" is a perfect last(ish) line for Kirk, especially in that context. There are issues aplenty with that finale, but I think Kirk's actual last words are nicely thought through. Like Spock, he makes sure they succeeded and saved everyone, but where Spock went off on a dying philosophical rant, Kirk just…

The disturbing aspects are offset remarkably well by Jamie Lee Curtis's brilliant performance (backed up by some dead-perfect reaction shots from Arnold).

Not really. Statham and Lopez both get their characters a lot better than the script seems to, (I suspect they actually read the novel, as opposed to the writers who seem to go off the back cover description) while the film does everything it can to make a hardboiled crime drama bland and nice. There's no tension,…

But unlike some up-jumped directors, it's a solid start, showing that he could generally handle scale and money. You have to start somewhere, after all.
And consider some similar cases:
Richard Donner's only film before Superman was The Omen, a pretty modestly-budgeted horror film. A spectacularly well-executed one…

As far as I'm concerned, that's canon after the traditional fadeout.

Unless you're an insane perfectionist like Kubrick, that intuition and trusting your editor is a lot of film directing to begin with. Even Spielberg plans his films out carefully, but still ends up changing a lot in the process, improvising shots and rewriting the script on-set based on pure intuition.

At the top, that's pretty hilariously the same list in a slightly different order. (Dark Knight is #10, Fight Club #11, Spirited Away upgrades to #12 from #29)

Although I generally like the slower pace of the Bond films, that's definitely a problem sometimes. I think it generally comes out of the Bond formula, which is a careful mix of:

Octopussy, Goldeneye, Tomorrow Never Dies, and The World Is Not Enough are all beautiful-looking films, as well.

I really like the first two-thirds of it, but the studio's post-production tampering absolutely butchered the last act. It sounds like the original climax must have sucked up a third of the budget and was absolutely sensational, but it had to be deleted because all the reasons for it happening were rewritten. I really…

An example of them not meaning anything was Wolf of Wall Street, which got a C+ (and, as everyone above pointed out, that's awful), but had spectacular legs, grossing about 6.5 times its opening weekend. (A Christmas opening helped, but it held well through January, as well.)

I think the problem with Dracula: Dead and Loving It is actually the opposite one: it spends way too much time spoofing Browning's version, which is an extremely poorly structured film. Browning's has a terrific first act, then meanders through the next hour with no build-up or momentum, and then closes out with a…

Damn it all, 10% is almost exactly what I'm trying to lose.

It's got some good ideas, a few fantastic action scenes, dazzling cinematography, Ricky Jay as a strikingly authentic-feeling take on a hacker, and a contender for the best score in the series (and certainly the best non-Barry). There's a lot wrong with it, but honestly, it would probably be a lot better remembered if…