For two months when I was 8 my favorite movie was Newsies. I've never revisited it because it's probably terrible, but Park Row always makes me feel like I was 8 again. Everything is so much larger than life that feel like a child staring up at an adult world I can't quite understand but am nevertheless enthralled by.…

The Naked Kiss and this are probably my two favorites. I'm not sure if there's ever been a more instantly gripping opening sequence than Kiss. The Steel Helmet is also great (and has some great stuff about race and masculinity), but its follow-up Fixed Bayonets is an even more intense war drama. Forty Guns is also a…

Yeah, Fuller's overwhelming love of the mechanical processes of the press is infectious. And it's nice that that science and technology are tools of progress aimed at making papers better; you get the sense that Fuller might not even hate digital media if it could reach more people (though he'd probably bemoan its…

Well, except for being the first Playboy centerfold.

There are dozens of us! Dozens!

My favorite Grant/Hepburn film is Holiday, but it's a different film with a different dynamic. Less screwball, more warm and fuzzy. But also with Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant performing a somersault routine.

History writ in punches, ink, and beer suds.

Or Adolphe Menjou and Pat O'Brien?

And why did cultures that value gold so highly splash it all over furniture and thread it into tapestries and eat off it? The wanton use of a valuable commodity is just a show of power.

Eh, he's still got 2 or 3 leading film roles he can dig his cheekbones into before he retreats to TV. Hopefully he'll be less of an annoying fratbro in them.

Yeah, the Abrams universe has a lot of potential if it can get out of the action-packed summer blockbuster mode and settle down to a calmer, prettier Trek series.

Passed out in a bucket of prune juice.

He's also gotta thrown in at least one dollar word where a dime would do. I think once he used "friscalating," which was made up by Wes Anderson.

Victim is an "important" movie in that in helped pull back Britain's anti-sodomy laws, but it's not particularly compelling outside of that historical context.

And The Guard was Don Cheadle starring in a fish-out-of-water buddy comedy with some racist Irish guy.

For a considerably better State-take on rom-coms, check out Showalter's The Baxter. It's much more sincere than their usual fare, but there's still plenty funny to go around. Also, Michelle Williams is super-cute in it.

Harry Dean Stanton had the best take on the choice:

How soon we forget Lobot. This is why Disney needs to get on that Lobot spin-off film pronto.

I remember 12 year-old me reading The Phantom Menace novelization like a month before the movie came out and thinking "This really isn't very good," but that sure didn't keep me from seeing it on opening day.

No one wrote about Jia Zhangke’s Still Life (2006 Venice Winner), so here goes, in a manner somewhat relevant to the film above.