1997 was a pretty amazing movie year. Consider the following not in the AVClub's top 20: Affliction, The Butcher Boy, Nil By Mouth, Funny Games, Fireworks, Firelight, Good Will Hunting, Taste of Cherry, Career Girls, My Best Friend's Wedding, Gattaca, Lost Highway, Princess Mononoke, Winter Sleepers. So at least 35…

WW1 is the time of suffragettes in the UK, so there's that.

This review doesn't mention an amazing feature of the film's pre-production: Wheatley built the whole main set for the film in Minecraft and pre-vised all the complicated action and all the flashy camera moves there. The way of the future? Fanbase-sourcing of Minecraft-previs sequences?

Both the famous Box Office Poison article and the Anschluss with Austria were in 1938 not 1937 as Feud had it. Stupid mistake by Murphy's team since it made both Crawford and Pauline get things wrong.

I think it's clear that the 4K restoration is of the Theatrical Cut. Remember that one of the Director's Cut's George Lucas-level decisions was to replace Echo and the Bunnymen at the iconic, beginning of the movie with INXS ('Killing Moon' turns up later as a replacement for 'Under The Milky Way' where it has little…

Nailed it (haw haw). Great article.

If M.I.A. is really directing her own videos like the one for 'Borders' the way she says she is then she's got a big future as a vid-maker even if AIM is the end for her as a pop-star.

@TGGP. Rmlohner has just misremembered the Hitch story: the original joke turned on refusing to take baths after seeing Les Diaboliques or showers after Psycho (I also think the original story was about someone's wife not a kid hence the viewing of foreign and not-for-kids films).

@hoeness. Thanks for the correction and the vid.! My lede then should have been: dominant Russian synch swimmers won gold again in London with help from the coolest music including Goblin's Suspiria.

In the 2012 Olympics Synchronized Swimming event one of the Russian(?) pairs used Goblin's Main Suspiria theme for their backing track. That music is so unsettling that one really did expect to start to see massive plumes of red flood the pool. The pair didn't win (or even medal IIRC) possibly because the judges were…

Jenkins *might* be onto something. Just occasionally it *does* feel like critics 'smell blood in the water' and indulge in something like group-hate-think about a film. E.g., two summers ago critics seemed to just unload on The Lone Ranger as part of some more general Depp-backlash. When I saw the film (with very low…

@ChowYunPhat:disqus. Agreed about the 'less of it'. Almost the only thing we needed was Winstead seeing the alien ship hovering over the horizon and saying 'Come On' (leaps into her car, heads for Houston), and that kind of small budget, minimalist, funny ending would have been cooler. Still, what we got was pretty…

Prince drilled and auditioned his bands with Davis's 'If I'm In Luck I Just Might Get Picked Up'. That's all you need to know really. She's the shit.

I'd say both Gotye and Lorde getting massive hits over the last few years has showed that the eccentric-genius-artrock track to the top is still open…. the only question is whether any of the modern-pretenders to the Bush-Gabriel-Byrne-Bjork throne have the goods for the long term. Does Lorde have a Hounds of…

Originally Sellers was supposed to have Slim Pickens's role as well…

Shaq was in Barry Lyndon? I thought that it was The Duellists where him and Kobe slice each other up over 40-50 years.

Godard's Histoire(s) du cinema struck me as complete garbage, epochally bad. Thoughts is almost certainly a lot better than that, but that it owes a clear debt to Histoire(s) should stand as a warning to keep expectations for Thoughts *very* low. That the B- grade doesn't match the content of the review at all rings…

I think modern glass in houses etc. tends to be (is often required to be) 'safety' glass that shatters into little chunks (like the glass in modern cars), but older houses are full of lethal, shard-making glass. Plus old glass is brittle, so watch out!

Kids today are going to be nostalgic for this year's Grease Live TV-event, which will be at least 3 layers deep nostalgia (nostalgia for 2010s nostalgia for 1970s nostalgia for the 1950s). Or maybe a wound's a wound as Don Draper might say.

I'm trying to remember the first post in this series, and why for it Jaws wouldn't count as a violence-driven action movie (certainly if Three Days of the Condor counts)? Ditto Shivers (1975), in which Cronenberg arrives and blows minds. Will have to track down Dolemite, it sounds like a hoot.