I would personally prefer the next Bond to be an unknown quantity, or as close to it as possible. Elba is an awesome actor, but he’s already Idris Elba. The best Bonds so far (Connery and Craig) used the role as their starmaker breakthrough, able to inhabit it fully unencumbered by comparisons to previous work. By…

I don’t know if he necessarily had a “type” to play against, but Anthony Hopkins certainly had nothing in his resume remotely like Hannibal Lecter. 

From the moment I saw it in the theatre, my immediate reaction was “oh, he’s lying”. I fully expect there to be a Rey-parentage reveal in Ep IX which brings her into the Skywalker clan. Simplest answer: she’s Luke or Leia’s daughter, fostered off to conceal her lineage for safety, just as Luke and Leia were.

Spider-Man: With A Vengeance

One of Cushing’s biggest recurring roles was Baron Frankenstein, and Mitchum had done Night Of The Hunter previous to Cape Fear. 

Woody Harrelson in Natural Born Killers. I’m not a fan of the film necessarily, it’s excessive and uneven. But this was one of his first post-Cheers gigs, and it’s a pretty hard about-face from “affable supporting sitcom doofus”. (For that matter, you can toss Rodney Dangerfield’s creepy as fuck cameo into the…

“Unless you’re hunting for subtext, the Marvel properties typically strive to be about as blandly apolitical as humanly possible”

I’m responding to the article saying that MCU films are blandly apolitical. Not talking about Deadpool. 

Sandra Bernhardt and Richard Grant as vaguely incestuous evil siblings. I mean, what’s not to love?

Winter Soldier, Civil War, Black Panther, Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, Daredevil - none of these are exactly apolitical. 

Hudson Hawk is an unfairly maligned movie. Ain’t no masterpiece, but it has charms.

Or the Worlds Fair in Knoxville. 

The trailer for The Sixth Sense includes several bits that didn’t make the film - Bruce Willis dodges a car that “nearly runs him down”, there’s some unknown character crossing a street and some crash type stuff that would seem to point to the bike accident that leads to the final car scene actually having been…

Alien is the finest trailer of all time. Almost wordless, and doesn’t give away the plot or the creature, yet still legitimately terrifying - a claustrophobic escalation that really goes for it. I can only imagine the experience of sitting in a movie theatre in 1978 and seeing it, with no foreknowledge or familiarity…

I know this is a populist choice, but it’s also my honest answer: Osment in The Sixth Sense. It’s remarkable to watch his performance a second time, realizing that he knows the truth about Bruce Willis from the first moment he sees him. And the scene at the end in the car where he goes toe-to-toe with Toni Collette is…

Seriously though, Minority Report. The whole glove-dream-memory scan interface thing... the omnipresent personalized marketing / surveillance via retinal scan... holographic home movies... the seedy not-so-legal dream-fulfillment place... those robotic spider eye scanners working their way through the apartment complex…

Gollum is obviously a game-changer for mo-cap, but to me the greatest achievement of any of the Peter Jackson films is Shelob. Maybe it’s the arachnophobe in me, but Jesus that thing is terrifyingly real. 

Farscape is in my top ten of TV, ever. Has there ever been a more complex and expressive puppet character than Pilot, anywhere? It’s amazing. 

I did a quick little list before reading to see if my choices would be represented, and for the most part they were. TTT/Dawn are the two correct Andy Serkis showpieces. You got your obvious milestones (Metropolis, Kong, 2001, Star Wars, Alien, JP, Matrix, Gravity). I got the live-action/animation mash-up wrong - I…

It was dreck then and it’s dreck now.