Category: Editorial

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Summer’s Best Guilty Pleasures

John Stark

With all the films tanking at the box office this summer, I felt like exploring some of my favorite summer releases that I might have to call “guilty pleasures”, because they aren’t typically regarded as ‘great’ movies. I tried to pick one from each summer from the last twenty years. Here’s a very damning list that I probably shouldn’t share with anyone, but I’m gonna post it. And yeah, I loved Rough Night, and I liked Baywatch. That’s why this list exists. 2016- Ghosbusters Technically, critics loved this. It got a 73% on Rotten Tomatoes. And it made 128M domestically, … Continue reading Summer’s Best Guilty Pleasures

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Best Of 2016: My Top 30 Favorite Films (30-21)

John Stark

Alright, so this was a good year for films. I honestly couldn’t compile a smaller list of films I liked or loved. I settled on 30, because I felt like I got to name most of the films I liked this year that way. This list is different from how I graded films, though I can say that everything on my list got at least a B+. When compiling this list I thought about how much I personally enjoyed the film. Will I watch it again? Will I buy it on DVD or Bluray? Did I recommend it to anyone? Have I already seen it multiple times? A lot of films I grade higher because of one or two great performances, and not because the film is good. Those films end up often not making this list.
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Best Of 2016: Some Honorable Mention Performances

John Stark

I’m about to start releasing my top 10 performances lists, but there are some performances this year that are outside that list. I figured, I’d list them here. Of course, this might give you an idea of what my top 10’s are, since these performances are going to be missing from those lists. I’ve left off performances I was able to already recognize in another category, like comedy, or young actor. These are all performances, for the most part, that at one time or another were on my top 10 list, but got moved off as I saw more films.
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Best Of 2016: My List Of Shame, Films I Missed

John Stark

I always have a goal for myself to complete my Best Of lists before the Oscar nominations. Those come out Tuesday morning, and I still need to release my picks for Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, Actress, Actor, and my Top 30 films of 2016. I’ve seen 125 films released in 2016. It’s not my best year, but in the effort of full disclosure, here are some major films I missed, and therefore cannot end up on any of my lists. I only picked films that I’m actually sad I missed, or intended on seeing, not films like Max Steel or When The Bough Breaks that I intentionally avoided. Since I’m doing a top 30, I compiled a shame list of 30. I’m ashamed of most of these.
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Best Of 2016: Directing Awards

John Stark

For me, when I pick my directors, I think of many different factors. Was the film made better because the director was attached to it? Does the director have a unique voice and/or perspective? How well shot and edited was the film? Did it have a lot of pacing issues? Was the work original and groundbreaking, or just more of the same. Could literally anyone have replicated their work? These are the 10 directors I felt did the best directing job of 2016, plus five more for “Breakthrough In Directing”, which means they either had directed their first feature, or nearly their first.
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