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Upcoming Movies to Watch in 2022

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It’s been a bit of a funny couple of years for movies, in case you hadn’t noticed. But COVID be damned, there is every chance that 2022 could be the year in film we were all hoping 2021 was going to be. It’s a packed new release calendar which sees everything from heavy-hitter directors, promising-looking indies, action-drenched blockbusters, and a full roster of superhero movies to get buzzed about.

We’ve rounded up a master list of the films we’re most excited about with dates that were correct on the day of publication. We’ll try to keep these updated as things change. Let’s put 2021 behind us, and take a look at the cracking year of cinema ahead.

The 355

Release Date: Jan. 7

After the success of James Bond’s latest adventure in theaters this year, Universal Pictures is dishing its own spy thriller with The 355, which stars Jessica Chastain as a CIA agent who must form her own international super team of secret agents to recover a weapon that threatens the planet. Together, these spies form a new faction called “355” that includes British, Chinese, Colombian, and German agents.

Chastain came up with the idea for a female-led spy movie while working on X-Men flick Dark Phoenix with director Simon Kinberg, who is now helming this actioner. But this isn’t just a work of pure fantasy. The codename “355” is steeped in real-world history as it refers to the still-unidentified female spy who helped the Patriots during the American Revolution. She was a pivotal member of the Culper Ring, the spy network responsible for stealing information from the British Army’s NYC headquarters. Will The 355 all tie back to 1776 somehow? The movie’s star-studded cast also includes Lupita Nyong’o, Diane Kruger, Bingbing Fan, and Penelope Cruz. Sebastian Stan and Edgar Ramirez also co-star.

Scream

Release Date: Jan. 14

Despite being simply titled Scream, this will actually be the fifth installment in the cult horror series created by the late, great Wes Craven. Fortunately, this series has aged like fine wine. Set 25 years after the initial Ghostface murders, a new killer has donned the mask to stalk the town of Woodsboro, and a brand new cast of teens played by Melissa Barrera, Mason Gooding, Jenna Ortega, Mikey Madison, Dylan Minnette, Sonia Ammar, and Jasmin Savoy Brown. Fortunately, the kids have three Ghostface-hunting experts on their side this time around: Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, and David Arquette return as Sidney, Gale, and Dewey, respectively.

As Sidney says in the movie’s trailer, the three heroes will stop at nothing to catch this new Ghostface, but not all of the kids will make it out alive.

While this is the first Scream film not helmed by Craven himself (the director passed in 2015), original Scream writer Kevin Williamson, who also penned I Know What You Did Last Summer, is on board as executive producer while Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett are picking up directing duties. The two have plenty of street cred when it comes to horror. After all, they’re two of the filmmakers behind fan-favorite shockers V/H/S and Ready or Not. Judging from what we’ve seen so far, expect many of the classic franchise scares but also a few modern twists akin to the recent Halloween.

Moonfall

Release Date: Feb. 4

It’s a Roland Emmerich disaster movie about the moon hurtling towards Earth. It stars Halle Berry and Patrick Wilson. ‘Nuff said.

Death on the Nile

Release Date: Feb 11

Another starry cast, another impossibly opulent journey, and another murder to solve for superstar detective Hercule Poirot in Kenneth Branagh‘s COVID-delayed follow-up to 2017’s Murder on the Orient Express. This time the generously mustachioed Belgian is charged with tracking down a killer who has struck during a deluxe Egyptian cruise.

Potential suspects—and indeed victims—include Annette Bening, Russell Brand, Gal Gadot, Rose Leslie, Emma Mackey, Sophie Okonedo, Jennifer Saunders, Letitia Wright, and Armie Hammer, who completed this film well before his recent troubles in the press.

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Branagh’s adaptation of Agatha Christie’s classic murder mystery, published in 1937, should provide plenty of twists and turns against some stunning backdrops—the movie was shot on locations in Aswan, Luxor, and Cairo—as Hercule attempts to unravel the killing of a newlywed during a luxury honeymoon vacation. Expect fabulous outfits, fancy accents, gorgeous cinematography, and Branagh acting his socks off.

The Batman

Release Date: March 4

Easily the most eagerly anticipated superhero film of 2022, Matt Reeves’ star-studded combination of grim superhero action and film noir severs all ties to the DCEU and tells a complex tale situated in a young Caped Crusader’s second year on the job. The Batman stars Robert Pattinson as a deeply haunted Bruce Wayne/Dark Knight, battling underworld kingpins like Oswald Cobblepot (Colin Farrell) and Carmine Falcone (John Turturro) while tracking a macabre serial killer known as the Riddler (Paul Dano) and romancing a mysterious thief named Selina Kyle (Zoe Kravitz).

Reeves’ vision of the Bat and Gotham City looks even darker and more street-level than Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight at first glance, and it will be fascinating to see the underrated Pattinson inhabit such a mythic role for the first time. We’re also excited by the prospect of new big-screen interpretations of classic baddies like the Penguin and the Riddler for the first time since Danny DeVito and Jim Carrey chewed up the scenery in those parts decades ago. The third version of Batman in 10 years—following Christian Bale’s reluctant hero and Ben Affleck’s rage-fueled squad leader—may prove to be that most elusive creature of all: the definitive one.

Turning Red

Release Date: March 11

Pixar’s latest stars Rosalie Chiang as an angsty teen who not only has to navigate adolescence but also her transformation into a panda! It’s a nutty premise but one that promises one of the most beloved animation houses is going back to their roots by taking wild gambits into the unexpected and unusual. And, indeed, if you’ve seen the above teaser, a Pixar movie with Miyazaki influences is very strange, indeed.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2

Release Date: April 8

The Sonic the Hedgehog cinematic universe expands in this sequel which sees Sonic again facing off against Jim Carrey’s Dr. Robotnik. But this time a lot more characters from the beloved Sega Genesis era of the franchise are making the jump to the big screen: the foxy Tails (voiced by Colleen O’Shaughnessey) with his trusty biplane is on hand, a is the rough and tumble Knuckles (getting a vocal upgrade courtesy of Idris Elba). With Chaos Emeralds and mysterious floating islands, things are about to get a lot more fan service-y.

Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore

Release Date: April 15

There might not be as many people clamoring for a third Fantastic Beasts movie as there would have been at the height of Harry Potter popularity, but it’s coming nonetheless. Following the world-shaking events of The Crimes of Grindelwald, The Secrets of Dumbledore is poised to center on Albus himself (Jude Law) as he moves to stop Dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald (a newly-arrived Mads Mikkelsen, replacing Johnny Depp) from securing control of the wizarding world.

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For obligatory reasons, magizoologist Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) will be there to help him, and someone (Dumbledore) has given him control of a team of witches and wizards to carry out an important mission. Look for more fantastical beasts to be shoehorned into the plot, which marks the halfway point of a prequel series with two more planned Fantastic Beasts installments on the way.

The Northman

Release Date: April 22

Horror master Robert Eggers sets out to 10th-century Iceland for his Viking revenge tale, The Northman. The film marks the third Eggers picture after the stunning one-two punch of The Witch and The Lighthouse. And yet, rather than being a straightforward chiller, the filmmaker is clearly reaching for something grander and more epic with a tale of vengeance and incestuous murder.

The Northman is based on the tales of Amleth–a medieval figure of Scandinavian legend who inspired William Shakespeare to write Hamlet. With that said, the blood soaked images we’ve glimpsed of Alexander Skarsgård tease a protagonist who is anything but dithering. The film also stars Eggers favorites Anya Taylor-Joy and Willem Dafoe, as well as Nicole Kidman, Ethan Hawke, and Claes Bang.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

Release Date: May 6

It’s taken almost six years to finally get a Doctor Strange sequel. Now director Sam Raimi will fling the good doctor across multiple MCU-adjacent realities. WandaVision’s Elizabeth Olsen will also be on hand as the reality-bending Scarlet Witch, so anything is possible. Could we even get Raimi to revisit his own personal corner of the Spider-Verse? Stranger things have happened…

DC League of Super-Pets

Release Date: May 20

John Krasinski will voice Superman and Dwayne Johnson will voice Krypto the Superdog in this all-star CGI superhero comedy. The film also stars Kevin Hart as Ace the Bat-Hound alongside Vanessa Bayer, Natasha Lyonne, Diego Luna, Marc Maron (as Lex Luthor!), Kate McKinnon, Thomas Middletich, Keanu Reeves (!!!!), Ben Schwartz, and Jameela Jamil.

Top Gun: Maverick

Release Date: May 27

The long delayed sequel to the ’80s classic is finally taking off in 2022. Tom Cruise returns as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, who, decades after his fateful encounter with enemy MiGs, and Iceman and Goose, is still working as a flight instructor and test pilot at TOPGUN. No longer the young rebel at the academy, Maverick is now a relic of the past in the eyes of his superiors. But even if he’s on his way out, he still has a new generation of pilots to train, including Lt. Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw (Miles Teller), Goose’s son.

Other new recruits include Glen Powell, Danny Ramirez, and Jay Ellis. They are joined by Jennifer Connelly and Jon Hamm. Joseph Kosinski, who also helmed Tron: Legacy and Oblivion, directs.

Jurassic World: Dominion

Release Date: June 10

The gang’s really all here for this sixth entry in the dinosaur franchise, as stars Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum return alongside Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard. The dinos are roaming free in human civilization and it seems that we’re all about to be living in a lost world.

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Jurassic World: Dominion Could Open the Door for More Jurassic Park Movies

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The film marks the end of the current cycle of Jurassic World films, acting as an end to the current trilogy as well as the overarching storyline that started in 1993 with the original film. It’s the film director Colin Trevorrow says he’s dreamed of making since reinvigorating the franchise in 2015, so let’s see if it can offer one more jolt of new (genetically manipulated) blood to the saga.

Lightyear

Release Date: June 17

Buzz Lightyear—the fictional human astronaut, not the toy based on him—gets an origin story. Chris Evans voices Buzz in Angus MacLane’s debut. Well, we imagine Tim Allen isn’t happy about that, but some fans might be curious to see the movie that first inspired Andy to buy the toy. Maybe.

Elvis

Release Date: June 24

This biopic from Baz Luhrmann chronicles the life of The King himself, from his Army days to music royalty. It stars Austin Butler as Elvis and Tom Hanks as the manager who helped make The King’s career, “Colonel” Tom Parker. It’s Luhrmann’s first narrative film since the visually dazzling The Great Gatsby adaptation in 2013, so we’re game to see if he can shake up the doldrums of musical biopics.

The Black Phone

Release Date: June 24

Scott Derrickson’s return to horror after a sojourn in the MCU with Doctor Strange couldn’t come at a better time, especially since his new film is based on a short story by Joe Hill and features Ethan Ethan Hawke as a deranged child abductor. Word says this one’s as creepy as they come, and represents Hawke’s continually fascinating career reinvention as of late.

Thor: Love and Thunder

Release Date: July 8

Thor: Ragnarok is one of the most beloved entries in the MCU thanks to the style and wit of director Taika Waititi, who injected a welcome jolt of Jack Kirby-esque cosmic weirdness into the franchise. Waititi directs this sequel, which sees Natalie Portman’s Jane Foster become the Goddess of Thunder and Christian Bale as the terrifying Gorr, the God-Butcher.

It’s all wild enough, and Waititi enough, to immediately stand apart from the traditional MCU pack.

Nope

Release Date: July 22

Do we know much about Jordan Peele’s next horror movie? Nope. But are we excited anyway? Hell, yes!

Though Peele has a habit of keeping his horror projects close to his chest, we haven’t been disappointed yet after his Oscar-winning Get Out and highly creepy twist on the home invasion movie, Us. What we do know about Nope is that it’s got a cool title, and that it will feature his Get Out breakout star, Daniel Kaluuya, as well as Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun, Barbie Ferreira, Brandon Perea, and Michael Wincott.

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Last Night in Soho: Quentin Tarantino and Jordan Peele Got the James Bond Poster in the Movie

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The film will be released by Universal under Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions, and is written and directed by Peele. So far the only plot clues we have are a mysterious poster of a dodgy-looking cloud which appears to be trailing bunting, hovering above a mountain town, and the IMDb description saying it’s a “fantasy” as well as a horror and a thriller. Ominous.

Black Adam

Release Date: July 29

Dwayne Johnson finally joins the DCEU as Black Adam, an ancient champion imbued with the power of Shazam who became corrupted in ancient times before returning to our modern world. The film will bring the legendary Justice Society of America to the big screen for the first time with Pierce Brosnan as Doctor Fate.

Salem’s Lot

Release Date: Sept. 9

For many readers, Salem’s Lot remains the greatest Stephen King novel ever written. Which makes the fact there hasn’t been a great film adaptation of it all the stranger. Oh sure, there’s plenty of reason for horror fans of a certain age are nostalgic for Tobe Hooper’s loopy TV miniseries from 1979–it’s got some great moments. But this modernization of Dracula, in which ancient vampires descend upon a modern New England small town, and an author with a past is forced to face his demons as childhood friends fall beneath the thrall of the Undead, demands a classic cinematic interpretation.

Hopefully this year’s Salem’s Lot will be it. The new version is written and directed by Gary Dauberman, who penned both of New Line’s two-part It movies a few years ago. He also wrote and directed the best of the Annabelle movies, Annabelle Comes Home. With any luck, Dauberman will make a vampire movie that plays more like It: Chapter One than Chapter Two.

Don’t Worry Darling

Release Date: Sept. 23

Olivia Wilde proved herself to be an enormously talented director with her brilliant feature debut Booksmart in 2019, which makes her follow-up, Don’t Worry Darling, one of our most anticipated movies of 2022. It doesn’t hurt that the period piece stars Florence Pugh, one of the most interesting actors of her generation, opposite Chris Pine, Gemma Chan, and Harry Styles. It also has a killer premise: a 1950s housewife living in an experimental “utopian” community begins to suspect her husband’s company is hiding something nefarious. Intriguing.

Mission: Impossible 7

Release Date: Sept. 30

Did anyone watch 1996’s Mission: Impossible and guess that it would become one of Hollywood’s most durable action franchises? The plot and title of M:I 7 remain a secret for now, but Tom Cruise (of course), Rebecca Ferguson, Simon Pegg, Vanessa Kirby, and Ving Rhames are back, joined by Hayley Atwell, Esai Morales, and—for the first time since the original film—Henry Czerny as former IMF director Eugene Kittridge. Fallout marked the first-time a writer/director returned to the series for more than one outing, and considering how much Christopher McQuarrie hit it out of the park (twice) we can’t wait to see the next installment of his quadrilogy!

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Release Date: Oct. 7

2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse wasn’t just an introduction to the Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) incarnation of Spider-Man or a big budget animated exploration of the Spidey mythos, it was a beautiful, emotional, psychedelic trip. Hopefully the sequel will reunite the multiversal Spideys from the first movie and introduce us to some new ones.

Halloween Ends

Release Date: Oct. 14

After the wide acclaim for 2018’s Halloween reboot, director David Gordon Green’s 2021 follow-up, Halloween Kills, met with a decidedly more polarized response while ending on a cliffhanger. Green has said that the final chapter in his trilogy, Halloween Ends, will be a “much more intimate” movie that celebrates Halloween creator John Carpenter’s “legendary body of work.” We hope, at least, that he can deliver the same kind of focused, character-driven horror that was sadly missing from his middle chapter.

The Flash

Release Date: Nov. 4

Five years after he first appeared as Barry Allen, Ezra Miller will finally headline a Flash solo movie. This flick will see Barry explore the DC multiverse, meeting an alternate version of himself, a mysterious Supergirl (Sasha Calle), and an older, wiser Batman played by classic Dark Knight actor Michael Keaton.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Release Date: Nov. 11

Director Ryan Coogler returns to the franchise that netted Marvel Studios a billion dollars, seven Oscar nominations, and was a genuine cultural phenomenon. Time will tell how the sequel will address the tragic loss of Chadwick Boseman–or the many rumors swirling around what has allegedly been a troubled production–but millions are still chanting “Wakanda Forever.” Black Panther 2 should give them reason to keep the faith.

Creed III

Release Date: Nov. 23

Michael B. Jordan makes his directorial debut and returns as Adonis Creed, Apollo’s son and a heavyweight boxing champion. The film is significant in the franchise because it will be the first Rocky-adjacent movie to not actually star Rocky Balboa. But Jordan’s made Adonis plenty fascinating on his own, and Jordan clearly thinks it’s time to let the character stand on his own two feet as he slips into the director’s chair. Plus Tessa Thompson will be returning while one of the most fascinating leading men of the last five years, Jonathan Majors, joins the cast…

Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom

Release Date: Dec. 16

The first Aquaman was a visually stunning, weird and wild rollercoaster of a film. Less superhero movie than adventure/quest film, its sequel also seems to be leaning even further into the latter. Jason Momoa is back as Arthur Curry, now the undisputed King of Atlantis. Amber Heard, Patrick Wilson, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, and Temuera Morrison will all return.

Avatar 2

Release Date: Dec. 16

Years ago, visionary filmmaker James Cameron promised several sequels to Avatar. In 2022, we’ll finally get the first one. He promises. Sam Worthington returns, as does Zoe Saldana, and even a few familiar faces who died in the last one like Sigourney Weaver and Stephen Lang. Despite all the years that passed, details are still somewhat scarce other than we will be exploring the aquatic side of the planet Pandora, as well as meeting Jake Sully and Neytiri’s children. All grown up at this point, we’d assume.

Super Mario Bros.

Release Date: Dec. 21

Chris Pratt will voice Mario in this new animated movie. Fortunately, he won’t be attempting the Italian plumber’s heavy accent. The film also stars Jack Black as Bowser, Anya Taylor-Joy as Princess Peach, Seth Rogen as Donkey Kong, and plenty of other celebrities as familiar characters.

Babylon

Release Date: Dec. 25

Damien Chazelle is back with another Hollywood-centric period drama set during the transition from silent film to synchronized sound. The premise sounds a bit like Singin’ in the Rain, but we expect a film that’s much more wistful than that with its cast of characters including Margot Robbie as Clara Bow–the original “It Girl” whose good time vibes dried out during the Depression–and Brad Pitt as a fictional character based on John Gilbert, the Hollywood silent star whose career imploded due to talkies, leading to alcoholism and an early death. Even the title alludes to one of the costliest (and ruinous) of ancient Hollywood sets…

Killers of the Flower Moon

Release Date: TBA

Martin Scorsese adapts one of the best books written in this century, David Grann’s chilling true crime study, Killers of the Flower Moon, into an AppleTV+ event with Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro finally teaming in the same Scorsese joint.

Set in early 20th century Oklahoma, this Western deals with the haunting legacy of bigotry, racism, and anti-Indian prejudices lingering half-a-century on since “the West was won.” Audiences will no doubt be excited to see DiCaprio, De Niro, Jesse Plemons, and even Brendan Fraser in a Scorsese movie, but keep an eye out for Lily Gladstone. She plays Mollie Burkhart, a Native American woman and the richest person in town as all her relatives are slowly, methodically murdered.

Disappointment Blvd

Release Date: TBA

Hereditary and Midsommar director Ari Aster teams up with Joaquin Phoenix for this decades-spanning portrait of an entrepreneur. An Aster epic? That’s something we could all lose our heads over.

The Whale

Release Date: TBA

Darren Aronofsky tackles the play about a 600-pound man who wants to reconnect with his teen daughter years after he abandoned her.

Crimes of the Future

Release Date: TBA

David Cronenberg is remaking his own 1970s sci-fi film about dermatology and skin care gone terribly wrong. As expected, this movie is not for the faint of heart.

Men

Release Date: TBA

Alex Garland is back for his latest work of horror. A young woman travels alone to the English countryside without knowing she’s in an A24 film.

The Killer

Release Date: TBA

David Fincher returns to Netflix for this noir thriller from Se7en writer Andrew Kevin Walker. Michael Fassbender plays the titular killer. We’d hesitate to call this a reunion made in Heaven, but we’re still intrigued to play along….

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mindthump · 5 years

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Robert De Niro and Al Pacino: 'We’re not doing this ever again' https://ift.tt/33hEQTi

‘Hi guys and girls,” says Al Pacino brightly, making his entrance. He is sporting a veteran-boho look: what seems like about six black cardigans on top of each other, lots of chunky finger jewellery and messy bird’s-nest hair. There may even be one of those two-inch ponytails that were popular in the late 80s in there somewhere – it is hard to see in the general tonsorial disorder.

Next to stroll in is Robert De Niro, who – in dramatic contrast – looks like he has come in from a round of golf: shirt and sports jacket, grey-white hair slicked back. Welcome, then, to the Al and Bob show.

Observing them here, in an intimate room full of selected journalists, you see how their personalities contrast as much as their dress sense. Pacino speaks in a barely audible bass rumble and is not short of waffle; De Niro, while not exactly monosyllabic, spends as much time nodding with his distinctive pursed-mouth underbite and says as little as he can get away with. That is, until we got on to the matter of a certain US president, of which more later.

The pair – the film industry’s equivalent of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards – are bona fide living legends, the greatest US actors of their generation, able to wipe the floor with modern lightweights such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt and Daniel Day-Lewis. Or that is what we would like to believe, anyway. Today, they have rolled into London as the main attraction on the press roadshow for The Irishman, Martin Scorsese’s monumental new gangster picture – and there is a lot to get through. “Wow,” says Pacino at one point, casting his mind back across the pair’s career-long relationship. “We’ve known each other for a really long time.”

For years, The Irishman was little more than a rumour; plagued by delays, distractions and drop-outs, it looked odds-on never to make it out of the starting gate. But, like a wiseguy fitted with a cement overcoat, it has landed thunderously in the middle of the autumn season, blowing away the rest of the awards-bait dross.

The Irishman is the fourth in Scorsese’s series of epic mafia pictures, following Mean Streets, Goodfellas and Casino; it is the latest variant of Scorsese’s reinvention of mob life as an agonised stations of the cross. It is also the wintriest of character studies, contemplating (like Scorsese’s last film, Silence) the approach of death with equanimity. The CGI that Scorsese added to “de-age” his actors, and the deal that the director made with Netflix to fund it, has unexpectedly put his film in the same camp as cutting-edge industry disrupters. Scorsese himself has acquired new cultural currency in recent months: the naked homage/appropriation by the makers of Joker has driven attention to his string of 70s masterworks, while his dismissive comments about superhero movies (“not cinema”) – the first shots in the publicity campaign for The Irishman, as it happens – ignited a social media firestorm that is yet to die down.

Yet, more fundamental than any of this is the sense that The Irishman is a landmark reunion of the old neighbourhood: a last gathering of the clans, a final get-together before age and time overtakes them. Harvey Keitel and Joe Pesci play ageing mob bosses, Pacino is a notorious union boss, Jimmy Hoffa, and De Niro is the Irishman, ice-cold real-life hitman Frank Sheeran. The Irishman turns on the relationship between Hoffa, whose disappearance and presumed murder in 1975 remains unsolved, and Sheeran, a hitherto little-known mob figure who confessed to killing Hoffa, his longtime friend, to the lawyer Charles Brandt, who included it in his 2004 biography of Sheeran, I Heard You Paint Houses. Hoffa and Sheeran provide suitably substantial figures for Pacino and De Niro to renew their on-screen confrontation, most vividly portrayed in the 1995 Michael Man thriller Heat (the 2008 cop comedy Righteous Kill was slightly less memorable).

Pacino says they met in 1968; at the time, Pacino was a firebrand stage actor yet to feature in films, while De Niro was doing wacky avant-garde movies such as Brian De Palma’s Greetings. “Early on in our careers, we connected from time to time and we found we had similar things happening to us,” says Pacino. “Our lives took on a whole different kind of thing.” It was camaraderie, he says, that “got us together”.

Looking back, their acting careers did seem to blossom with a mysterious symbiosis. Both acquired a reputation in their teens as a troublemaker: De Niro spent much of his youth in Little Italy, Manhattan; Pacino, three years older, grew up in the Bronx. Both scored major breakthroughs in the early 70s courtesy of the Italian-American presence in the Hollywood new wave: Pacino as the flint-hearted capo-in-waiting in Francis Ford Coppola’s gangster epic The Godfather in 1972, De Niro as a knockaround guy in Scorsese’s Mean Streets a year later. The two appeared in the same film for the first time, although not together, in Coppola’s Godfather sequel in 1974: De Niro played the young version of Pacino’s father.

Sometimes I feel I know nothing about acting. Until you start. That's what's exciting for me

Al Pacino

Pacino gets a little dewy eyed; he looks a bit like a panda with a secret sorrow. “We’re really close. We don’t see each other very much, but when we do, we found we shared certain things. In a way, I think we’ve helped each other throughout life.” The thought of Tony Montana chewing things over with Jake LaMotta is not an image to trifle with. De Niro nods away, bottom lip almost wobbling, but there is no stopping Pacino. Their off-screen friendship, he says, has fed into their acting; in Heat, he says, “we were at opposite ends”, whereas “we were close” on Righteous Kill. They “had a chance to explore that again” on The Irishman: the relationship between Hoffa and Sheeran, who were friends for years before Sheeran’s betrayal, is the nub of the film. “I don’t think we talked about it consciously. It came relatively easy, as those things go.”

When it is his turn to talk, De Niro is all business. The Irishman, it would appear, is as much his show as Scorsese’s. He explains how he nagged Pesci on to the film, despite him having all but retired: “I said: ‘Come on, we’re not going to do this ever again.’” Sentiment is not his thing. “It was tough enough to get it done, to get the money to do it and everything. I don’t see us putting on a movie like this. I hope we do other films together, but like this? Not likely. This is it.”

Much ink has been spilled over the years on the De Niro-Scorsese axis, as well as the De Niro-Pacino one. But, bizarrely enough, Pacino and Scorsese had never worked together before. For two such high-profile princes of the Italian-American sensibility, that feels like a mistake. “I know,” rumbles Pacino, leaning in and turning worldly-wise. “Like everything in this business, if you’ve been in it for a while, you realise that things get started, but then they go in different places and they don’t always culminate in a film. A couple of times, Marty and I were going to do something together, then they slip away.” He mentions a Modigliani biopic he and Scorsese worked on in the 80s, which they tried and failed to get financed. “Happens all the time.”

De Niro was the key in finally getting The Irishman off the ground. He and Scorsese had been mulling another project about a retired hitman for years, The Winter of Frankie Machine, adapted from the 2006 novel of the same name by Don Winslow. As it was gearing up, De Niro was directing his second film, The Good Shepherd, about the early days of the CIA; that film’s writer, Eric Roth, gave him a copy of Brandt’s Sheeran book as research. After reading it, De Niro took it straight to Scorsese. Just as Frankie Machine was about to get the green light from Paramount, Scorsese did the unthinkable: he walked away and started over again.

More Scorsese films intervened – Shutter Island, Hugo, The Wolf of Wall Street, Silence – before schedules and money aligned and The Irishman could start shooting. For half a decade, De Niro says, the only relic of the film was a now-legendary table read in 2012, “just to have it documented so it could be shown to anybody who was interested”. Every now and then, De Niro says, Pacino “would call me and ask: ‘Is it happening?’ I’d say: ‘Yeah, yeah, it’s happening.’ But it took a long time.”

So long, in fact, that they started to get too old to play their roles as originally conceived. Both actors are well into their eighth decade: Pacino is 79, De Niro 76. Scorsese had been clear that he did not want to use different actors for their middle-aged selves, who dominate the film’s scenes. Enter the “de-ageing” CGI technology. “Netflix came in and paid for the process,” De Niro says. “It helped us all along.”

Did they get the willies confronting their younger versions? Sheepish guffaws ensue. “What do you think?” asks De Niro. “Don’t we all?” replies Pacino. Do they still enjoy the job? De Niro is pithy: “It’s different, but I like it just as much.” Pacino goes long: “It sort of depends on what you’re doing,” he says. “I hate to say it, but you can go 20 years between inspirations.” He stops for a moment, baffled by his own eloquence. “Bear with me – I’m going through the bushes here and I’ll come out with something.” He says he is always on the lookout “to find something that you really connect to, you really want to do”. A lot of the acting he does is “work-rest”, he says, so he can “get back to looking around and seeing what’s out there”.

We have a gangster president who thinks he can do anything he wants

Robert De Niro

De Niro nods along furiously. Pacino is in the groove. “Sometimes I feel I know nothing about acting. Until you start. That’s what’s exciting for me. A new character. I often say: ‘Desire is more motivating than talent.’ I’ve seen people with great desire take it through. The truth is, it’s the same thing that is always was: you are feeling this new character, this new person, this new story.” As he grinds to a halt, Pacino looks pleased: he has come out with something all right. It is a great manifesto for a living legend.

As the encounter starts to wind down, one big question – arguably the biggest – remains unasked. If it is about anything, The Irishman is about the gangsterisation of US politics, how the Cosa Nostra exploited opportunities to corrupt the electoral process and organised labour. Two big killings – those of John F Kennedy and Hoffa – are characterised as the outcome of mafia intervention in the political sphere. Some might say the US is still living with the legacy; as De Niro’s version of Sheeran likes to say: “It is what it is.” De Niro has a record on this: we know he hates Trump and has called him out time after time. But the way he suddenly takes over the room is amazing to behold: eyes like gun-sights, he gives Trump both barrels. “We have a real, immediate problem in that we have a gangster president who thinks he can do anything he wants.” De Niro is livid; Pacino knows to keep quiet. “If he actually gets away with it, then we all have a problem. The gall of the people around him who actually defend him, these Republicans, is appalling.” He does not call Trump a “mook”, but he may as well have.

Instead, he has a message for the press: “It’s a resentment of people like you guys, writing about what you see is obvious gangsterism. They don’t like that, so they say: ‘Fuck you, we’re going to teach you people.’ And they have to know they’re going to be taught.” This is De Niro unfiltered, and it is thrilling to experience it at close quarters. Does he think Trump will go to jail? “Oh, I can’t wait to see him in jail. I don’t want him to die. I want him to go to jail.”

And with that the Al and Bob show closes. De Niro abruptly resumes his affable persona and says goodbye; he and Pacino are swiftly escorted out. Trump – we can but hope – is quaking in his boots. But The Irishman roadshow rolls on. It is what it is.

The Irishman is released in UK cinemas on 8 November and is on Netflix from 27 November

#IFTTT #Feedly #Movies

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ao3feed-larry · 2 years

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The ring of Fire

by HelenaAzure

Lies are like vines, no matter their intent. The more you feed it, the more it fests. It grows and grows till round you neck. Either you cut it apart, or choke till death.

The world may be ending. But that's only half of Louis' problem. As Arachnia's top dog on the field, Louis has many secrets. But that's hardly an inconvenience...or so he thought. With a new mission in his checklist, he heads off to the ancient waters of the Pacific aboard an ill-named research vessel. But what seemed plain and simple on the surface, soon turns into a battle of survival, with lives of million hanging by the thread. But like he said, that's only half the problem. Because aboard the ship is also the world renowned-scientist Harry. The very man Louis last saw four years ago, when a devastating turn of events forced him to leave him heartbroken. The only way either of them can survive, is by working together. And for that, Harry needs to forgive Louis. But forgiveness is hard, when you don't know the whole story. or An adrenaline filled Larry Stylinson fic which would even make Ethan Hunt proud. Though mind the tags. This is a proper spy fic with a lot of violence and graphic scenes.

Words: 767, Chapters: 1/19, Language: English

Fandoms: One Direction (Band)

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence

Categories: M/M

Characters: Harry Styles, Louis Tomlinson, Zayn Malik, Niall Horan, Liam Payne, Original Styles-Tomlinson Child(ren), Alexa, Anastasia

Relationships: Harry Styles/Louis Tomlinson

Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, Agent Louis Tomlinson, Geologist Harry Styles, Evil Plans, Mystery, Character Development, Original Character(s), Lies, Secret Identity, Strangers to Lovers, but then something happens, Blood and Injury, Blood and Violence, Near Death Experiences, Multiple times, Action/Adventure, world in danger, Saving the World, Mpreg, Post Mpreg, Major Character Injury, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Kidnapping, Hostage Situations, Happy Ending, Niall is a horrible flute player, Louis Tomlinson Loves Harry Styles, Deception, Strategy, Strong Female Characters, Drowning, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Humor, Protective Louis Tomlinson, Protective Harry, Sad Harry, Sad Louis Tomlinson, Pacific Ring of Fire, Volcanoes, Subduction Zones, Underwater explorations, Mystery child, CIA, MI6, mossad, Explosions, Lot of Pringles, intimate scenes, Fluff and Angst, Harry and Louis nearly die, Plot Twists, plot heavy

via AO3 works tagged 'Harry Styles/Louis Tomlinson' https://ift.tt/VPGfE60

#author #larry stylinson #larry fic #ao3 feed larry #The ring of Fire #<p>by <a rel= href="/users/Helen

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franksgrl · 6 years

Text

Title: Fighting for Love

Fandom: The Punisher

Pairing: Frank Castle/Dinah Madani

Matt Murdock/Karen Page

Rating: Teen and up

Summery: Dinah just wanted to move on with life. Frank was doing what Frank does. But when Dinah goes missing from a secret CIA location Frank just can’t let that go. Caught between his code to protect a friend and feelings he doesn’t know to trust, this proves to be one of his hardest quests yet.

Chapt.1: Dinah

Secret location:

Dinah reached for her gun but was stopped when a boot came down on her hand hard. She kept herself from screaming. “What do you want?” Dinah asked trying to hide her pain. The man said nothing as the butt of his gun came down on the back of her head. As Dinah lost consciousness she was glad to know that the last text sent was to him.

New York

Getting out of the shower Frank sighed. He shouldn’t be here but Dinah said he could use her place. He watched the blood run down the drain. He had gotten rid of those two punk gangs and still had more to do.

Putting on his boxers he headed out to the kitchen. He poured himself a cup of coffee and went and sat down on the sofa. He was about to turn on the tv when he noticed he had a message on his phone.

Flipping it open, he felt his blood begin to boil. That feeling of fear mixed with anger and urge to make someone bleed was filling him fast.

He looked at the message again and made that guttural grunt he always made when the adrenaline started to rush. He even heard himself mutter “one Batch, Two Batch” methodically like he used to.

He read it one more time. “Need help. Sending coordinates. Please Frank I need you, Madani”. Putting down the phone and the coffee cup, he went into the bedroom.

He put on his jeans and boots and then a shirt and last he put on the vest. The vest that was born from the blood of his wife and children. The vest that carried the blood of his brother, Billy Russo. The vest that also had Dinah’s blood painted on it.

The vest had taken down many evils and it was about to take down more. “Don’t worry Madani, I’m coming” Frank said grabbing his duffle and leaving. The coffee cup still on the living room table.

Five hours later: Micro’s Bunker

Frank paced as David looked up the coordinates. They didn’t make any sense. They just kept taking him to a remote location in Easter Iran. There wasn’t anywhere they could’ve set up base but yet that’s where Dinah’s coordinates led them.

Frank slammed his gun on the table and kicked a chair. “Calm down cowboy, I’m working as fast as I can. It’s like they are in some deep science fiction camouflage shit. There’s no where they could be hiding” David said taking a drink from his beer.

Frank grunted and collapsed onto the little bed off in the corner and closed his eyes. He couldn’t, no he fucking wouldn’t, let Dinah die.

Suddenly out of nowhere he felt something land on his stomach and giggle. He opened his eyes to see Leo and Zach sitting on top of him laughing. He smiled. He loved David’s kids. He had been adopted as Uncle Frank and he couldn’t be any happier for the title. And unlike Uncle Billy who betrayed his kids, he would never betray David’s.

“Uncle Frank, will you be gone long?” Leo asked tears playing on the sides of her eyes. Frank swallowed. It was like looking into Lisa’s face every time he went back over seas. It was her face the day he came home from his final trip.

He shook off the memories and held Leo tight. He loved Zack, but Leo was his little fighter. She was his light in the darkness. Amy has also become that but she was in Florida learning to dive for treasure.

“Leo, I will be back as quick as I can be and I will be bringing Dinah with me. You remember Dinah right, the agent that helped save your brother and mom” Frank said rubbing her back.

Feeling her relax made him relax. “I remember Uncle Frank but what if you get killed?” She asked, her question hitting him like a ten pound block of concrete. He shook that off as well.

“Leo, you listen to me baby girl, Uncle Frank doesn’t die, he does the killing and he will always come back to you. But while I’m gone, you have to make sure your dad gets out of this hole in the ground and does some actual moving around. Also, make sure your mommy gets a lot of help around the house. And Zack” Frank said turning his attention to the other kid on him “you make sure Leo has some fun and doesn’t just sit and worry you hear me. Also, I want you to talk to that neighbor kid, he could use a friend” Frank finished ruffling Zach’s hair. Both kids nodded and proceeded to play another round of “what’s the punisher doing next”?

Just as they hit round three, David said proudly “I’ve figured out what her coordinates are Frank. You can go get your agent back”. The kids giggled as Frank’s face quickly flushed a bright red.

Easily standing up with both kids in his arms, Frank headed over to where David was celebrating is little achievement. When Frank and the little monkeys finally got over to him he sat up and cleared his throat, ready to deliver his amazing news.

“See, what I was doing was taking the numbers as I saw them but, they were actually scrambled so even if the message was intercepted, they would never get

anything from it” David said leaning back.

“So where the hell is she?” Frank growled and he sat Leo and Zach down on the floor. “She was in a remote base off the western border of Iran. That would be where you would start my friend” David said looking sadly at Frank wishing he could do more.

Frank patted his shoulder. “Thanks Micro, can you get me on the next flight out there?” Frank asked starting to pack his duffle while ignoring the sniffles coming from Leo who was standing next to him.

He almost stopped when he saw her flinch at the assault rifle. She always flinched while he packed the guns. She hated them just like Amy. He sighed scooping her into his strong arms.

“I’ll be back before you know it sweetie. I’m going to go save Agent Madani and then I’ll be right back and I’ll teach you how to change oil in a car” Frank said with a grin. Leo smiled and hugged him tightly. He hugged her back and set her down.

Grabbing his duffle and hugging each of the kids goodbye and thanking David for his help, Frank left the bunker and headed to an unknown battleground. He tried to hide it from himself but he knew why he was going and it scared the shit out of him.

As he drove to the airport where he would meet up with a private plane David got him, “Dani I’m coming” escaped his lips and flew into the wind.

A empty warehouse

Madani groaned and as she was about to give herself up to fate, a breeze from nowhere blew past her and the words “Dani I am coming” danced in her ears.

Dinah’s eyes teared up and she promised herself then and there that she would fight to live so she would be there when he arrived.

Just as she closed her eyes again, she heard the door open...

#the punisher #frank castle #savethepunisher #the punisher season 2 #dinah madani #fradani #fanfiction

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rsadelle · 8 years

Text

Yuletide 2016

Below the cut is a Yuletide round-up of recs and also the things I wrote.

Stories For Me

all that is good (10136 words) by sevenfoxes Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Bourne (Movies) Rating: Mature Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Jason Bourne/Nicky Parsons Characters: Jason Bourne, Nicky Parsons Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, unprotected sex Summary:

You think about Landy, how the hearings meant to expose corruption instead started to swallow her whole, destroying the last genuinely good person you knew at the CIA. You think about Vosen and Conklin and Abbot and all the fucking men who hid behind the flag and a thick line about patriotism while pursuing their own agenda, their own power and money. You think about your father dying alone, believing you were gone, that the last of his family was dead.

“There have to be consequences,” you tell him.

That is the difference between the two of you. Jason wants to be left alone.

You want vengeance.

What I liked: NICKY! I was really excited to get a story all about Nicky. This does a really good job of alternating past and present to flesh out the characters and their relationship. Plus reproductive choices.

make haste from Babylon (3990 words) by Addison R Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: The Killing Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Stephen Holder & Sarah Linden Characters: Sarah Linden, Stephen Holder Additional Tags: Soul Bond, Writing on Skin Summary:

This must be the new guy, but he sure doesn't look the part.

What I liked: SOULBONDING. I won't give it all away, so suffice to say there's a match to shapes that I enjoyed, and also a pull to keep them together.

Other Stories I Enjoyed

A Divinely Attractive Arrangement (5895 words) by Fahye Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Love and Friendship (2016) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Characters: Sir James Martin, Lord Manwaring, Lady Susan Vernon Summary:

A selection from the Private Diary of Sir James Martin of Martindale. Concerning Peas, Friendship, the state of Blessed Matrimony, and several wonders of Modern Medicine.

What I liked: This is absolutely hilarious. The characterization is spot-on, and I laughed all the way through it.

Exclusive, Mutually (1507 words) by youjik33 Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Arrested Development Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: George Oscar "Gob" Bluth/Tony Wonder Characters: Michael Bluth, Lindsay Bluth Funke, George Oscar "Gob" Bluth, Tony Wonder Summary:

“You realize they’re only even having a wedding for the attention, right?” Michael asked.

Lindsay looked at him quizzically. “Well, yeah, why else?”

What I liked: This is an outsider pov on Gob and Tony Wonder's wedding. It's funny, and I also suggest listening to the mood music linked in the notes as you read.

Aviens Rex (1603 words) by sumeria Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: birdsrightsactivist (Twitter) Rating: Not Rated Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Bird (birdsrightsactivist) & Original Character(s) Characters: Bird (birdsrightsactivist), Original Male Character(s), Original Child Character(s) Additional Tags: Twitter, Yuletide, epistolary?, no politics Summary:

In which Brad and Steve just want to have a picnic and a Tyrannosaurus is only another kind of bird.

What I liked: This is a very funny story told in tweets where we see both sides of Bird's interaction with a family having a picnic.

They Call it Undercover Work for a Reason (But Not That Reason) (8273 words) by greywash Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Spy (2015), Olympics RPF Rating: Explicit Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Nancy B. Artingstall & Susan Cooper, Susan Cooper/OFC, Susan Cooper/Nancy B. Artingstall/OFC (ish), Susan Cooper/Rick Ford, Susan Cooper/Rick Ford/Nancy B. Artingstall (ish), Nancy B. Artingstall/the Italian men's Olympic rowing team Characters: Susan Cooper (Spy 2015), Nancy B. Artingstall Additional Tags: Yuletide Treat, the olympics, Actual Bids for the 2024 Summer Olympics, (but everything else is made up), (definitely 100 percent made up), Los Angeles 2024, Paris 2024, Budapest 2024, international espionage, Adventure, The CIA: Have Fun and See Europe While Hitting Lots of Dudes in the Face, Rivalry, Hatesex, Alternate title: The Dr. Seuss Compendium of Hatesex, Would you do it on a plane?, Would you do it at a party?, Would you do it in an alley?, Would you do it on a Ferrari?, Cephalopods, Oh my God Rick Ford be better at your job, Susan and Nancy 2017 World Tour, I have 'friends' at the American embassy, Everything author knows about French accents they learned from Harry Potter IV, (sorry France), Irresponsible use of Google Translate, (sorry everyone), shh shh you have a head wound, maybe guest starring some famous person's second cousin once removed or something just because, also there's a yacht Summary:

"Cooper," says Crocker. "We've had word of an agent trying to undermine the American bid for the 2024 Summer Olympics."

"Do we care about the Olympics?" asks Nancy.

What I liked: This is exactly as absurd as a Spy story should be.

10 Things I Hate About Reunions (17278 words) by BryroseA Chapters: 2/2 Fandom: 10 Things I Hate About You (1999) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Kat Stratford/Patrick Verona Characters: Kat Stratford, Patrick Verona, Bianca Stratford Additional Tags: Partial epistolary - text messages, Post-Canon, the 2nd chapter is just the story stripped of all formatting for accessibility Summary:

Is there anyone less likely than Katerina Stratford to go to their high school reunion?

Well...maybe there is one person.

What I liked: I loved the mix of Kat and Bianca's relationship and the improbable coincidences that happen because of Bianca's scheming.

And All The Roads Are Blinding (7978 words) by moemachina Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: 10 Things I Hate About You (1999) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Kat Stratford/Patrick Verona Characters: Kat Stratford, Patrick Verona, Bianca Stratford, Cameron James Additional Tags: Lovers to Friends to Lovers, Sisterhood, Social Media, History of Technology Summary:

In the years after high school, Kat tentatively becomes friends with her ex-boyfriend Patrick. And then Bianca gets married.

What I liked: The slow reconnecting, and also the bits about Bianca's relationships with her exes.

Days Gone Down (1614 words) by Nomad Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Eroica Yori Ai o Komete | From Eroica with Love Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Characters: Klaus von dem Eberbach, Klaus von dem Eberbach's father, Dorian Red Gloria Additional Tags: Future Fic, Yuletide Treat Summary:

An aging Klaus has a conversation with his father.

What I liked: Aging, the connection between Klaus and his father, the mix of that serious conversation with the ridiculousness that (of course) occurs when Dorian shows up.

Friday Night Bracing for Monday (21485 words) by Addison R Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Good Will Hunting (1997) Rating: Mature Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Will Hunting/Chuckie Sullivan Characters: Chuckie Sullivan, Will Hunting, Morgan O'Mally, Billy McBride Additional Tags: Sharing Clothes, Happy Ending, Sharing a Bed, Postcards, Canon-typical language, Families of Choice, Past Violence, Past Child Abuse, Post-Movie(s), Yuletide 2016 Summary:

Chuckie grows up a little, and Will moves back to Boston.

What I liked: Stories about people growing up and getting their lives together are my faaaavorite.

The Dame's Only Doing It for that Doll (1561 words) by major_general Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Guys and Dolls - Loesser/Swerling/Burrows Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Sarah Brown/Sky Masterson Characters: Sky Masterson, Sarah Brown, Nicely-Nicely Johnson Additional Tags: Rule 63, Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Lesbian Character, Lesbian Sky Masterson, Misses Clause Challenge Summary:

Sgt. Sarah Brown runs a mission on her own terms in the years after agreeing to a Boston marriage with Sky Masterson.

What I liked: Lesbian Sky Masterson! Also the effect of a gangster and a missionary making a life together.

Renovation (2712 words) by faithfulcynic Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Practical Magic (1998) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Characters: Bridget "Jet" Owens, Frances Owens Additional Tags: Humor, Siblings, Magic, The House has Opinions, Franny watches HGTV, Jet wants another brownie Summary:

Every decade or so, Frances has the urge to renovate the House and every decade or so the House has other plans. Jet always gets caught in the middle.

What I liked: I enjoyed the House's personality and the battles it has with Frances.

Stories By Me

Every Single Holiday (4043 words) Fandom: Spy (2015) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Susan Cooper/Rick Ford Characters: Susan Cooper (Spy 2015), Rick Ford, Nancy B. Artingstall Additional Tags: Dick in a Box, 5+1 Things Summary:When it comes to gift-giving, Ford's repertoire is somewhat limited.

First Choices (2017 words) Fandom: Chalion Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Characters: the Bastard (Chalion), Original Female Character(s), Original Male Character(s) Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting Summary:A growing number of L.G.B.T. Quintarians are choosing to devote themselves to gods other than the Bastard.

Life to the Kingdom (2097 words) Fandom: The Huntsman (Movies) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: The Huntsman/Sara (The Huntsman)/Snow White (The Huntsman), The Huntsman/Sara (The Huntsman), The Huntsman/Snow White (The Huntsman), Sara (The Huntsman)/Snow White (The Huntsman), Snow White/William (The Huntsman) Characters: The Huntsman (The Huntsman), Sara (The Huntsman), Snow White (The Huntsman), William (The Huntsman) Additional Tags: Threesome - F/F/M, Infidelity, Future Fic Series: Part 1 of The Huntsman: Future's Hope Summary:When the kingdom of the north had been freed and the mirror's shards taken to Sanctuary, Eric and Sara returned to Snow White's kingdom.

Hope Of Our Hearts (4031 words) Fandom: The Huntsman (Movies) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: The Huntsman/Sara (The Huntsman)/Snow White (The Huntsman), The Huntsman/Sara (The Huntsman), The Huntsman/Snow White (The Huntsman), Snow White/William (The Huntsman) Characters: Original Female Character(s), Original Male Character(s), Snow White (The Huntsman), William (The Huntsman), The Huntsman (The Huntsman), Sara (The Huntsman), Ravenna (The Huntsman) Additional Tags: Future Fic, Past Infidelity Series: Part 2 of The Huntsman: Future's Hope Summary: When the Heir to Snow White's kingdom, who was known to the people not only by her name of Hope but also as Hope-of-our-hearts, had reached her majority, word came from the kingdom to the east that they were being harried at their eastern border by an army of nearly supernatural strength.

#fic rec #yuletide

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curdinway-blog · 5 years

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Top 102 Movies of the 2010’s, According to a Crackpot

I’ve decided to try the impossible.

The seed for this idea came from Polygon. The site ran an article by which various staff members ranked their top ten movies for the decade. Naturally, that got me thinking about MY top ten films for the decade. Then I realized I hadn’t seen most Oscar winners, let alone enough movies to qualify to make a list. Then I realized I would have much, MUCH more than ten movies in my list.

Thus, I embarked on a madman’s dream. It involved crunching movie after movie after movie, then trying to hopelessly rank it on my list if I thought it was good enough. I missed my own deadline of New Year’s. Now, I am releasing this on my next deadline: The Oscars. Literally now, when they are already underway.

I hope you will read this list with some forgiveness in your hearts. Biting off more than you can chew doesn’t describe it. There are a whole host of movies I wanted to see before I made this list I haven’t gotten to and probably never will. There are many movies on this list I saw close to a decade ago and am trying to place in a ranking against pieces I just saw a few days ago. Oh, and I’m comparing across genres and types. What I’m trying to say is, this list is probably going to suck in a lot of ways.

With that being said, I really did try to rank the following to the very best of my ability. I racked my brains, racked them, and racked them again. Ultimately, I made my decisions from a whole host of criteria, ranging from everything from pacing, to various aspects of entertainment value, to complexity/themes, to cinematography. I tried to be objective as much as possible, but I also think that how much you like a movie should be considered a piece of criteria as well. After all, that’s primarily why we go to the movies; we want to have a good time. As such, expect to see a lot of science-fiction and animation of this list. In my defense, it was a great decade for each.

And now…without further ado…let me introduce…The Top 102 Films of the 2010’s, According to a Crackpot!

102. Live Die Repeat: Edge of Tomorrow

Starship Troopers meets Groundhog Day, Live Die Repeat is a well-executed mecha-battle movie with a wrinkle of time-travel tossed in for good measure.

101. Wreck-It Ralph: Ralph Breaks the Internet

It may not be as good as the original, but Wreck-It Ralph 2 makes the grade with some cunning swipes at internet culture, the world’s best worst Disney Princess song, and bittersweet revelations about what it means to be a true friend.

100. Mirai

Few films truly approach their story from a child’s perspective; but in tone, structuring, and imagination, Mirai lets us see again through young eyes. Director Mamoru Hosoda uses time travel as a vehicle for exploration of deeply personal familial relationships, and how they shape us into the people we become.

99. The Last Gold

The Last Gold is an unheralded little gem about a quartet of female US Olympic swimmers who found themselves competing in an impossibly frustrating and unfair situation; the 1976 Olympics. As East German swimmers swept podium after podium (with the aid of a systematic doping program), the US Women’s team faced intense public criticism, especially phenom Shirley Babashoff, who could have been the female Mark Spitz if not for the rampant cheating going on. Largely forgotten and regarded as a disappointment by the American public, The Last Gold illustrates the team as one worth remembering and dignifying; in particular, for their final, desperate effort at gold in the 4 x 100 m freestyle relay.

98. Mad Max: Fury Road

Pretty much nonstop surreal nutty action, Mad Max surely has some of the most creative and tricky stunts done in the past decade.

97. The Amazing Spiderman

Utterly forgotten in the wake of its more successful follow-ups (and predecessors, for that matter), The Amazing Spiderman is nonetheless a solid reboot of some well-worn material. The concept behind Spidey’s origin is well-thought out and original, and ties directly to an interesting villain who is more the victim of his own genius than the archetype evil megalomaniac.

96. Doctor Strange

Doctor Strange marks itself as unique among the various Marvel offerings by pondering nothing less than the meaning of life… and overloading us with psychedelic, Inception-esque imagery.

95. Concussion

Featuring a terrific and vocally unrecognizable Will Smith, Concussion asks not only some difficult questions about the country’s (and my own) favorite sport, but also some difficult questions about what it means to be an American.

94. The Big Sick

I’m not a big rom-com guy, but The Big Sick won me over by creating romantic tensions from realistic scenarios; in particular, the difficulties that arise from differences in race and religion. The film’s awkward sense of humor is well-incorporated, making this a funny movie as well as an intelligent one.

93. Bridesmaids

A funny movie about friendships and change (anchored by an excellently tragicomic Kristen Wiig), Bridesmaids showed the Judd Apatow formula could work on equal terms for the female sex.

92. 50/50

50/50 tackled the cancer movie with an unusual slant of good humor, and chased it down with heartfelt drama and good performances.

91. Hanna

In which a supergirl Saoirse Ronan (pre-fame and accolades) is honed into an assassin by her father so that she can kill a wicked, hammy CIA operative Cate Blanchett before the agency gets to her first. If you ever wanted to see a small girl beating thugs to death with her bare fists in the style of Jason Bourne, this one’s for you. Loads of fun, totally bananas, and dripping with cool.

90. Hunger Games

More or less a faithful adaptation of a literary bestseller, Hunger Games nonetheless deserves credit for doing the job right. The cinematics and ideas here are very nice for a teen blockbuster, and Jennifer Lawrence rightfully turned into a star for BEING Katniss Everdeen.

89. What We Do in the Shadows

Quirky, subversive, hilarious, and utterly “New Zealand”, What We Do in the Shadows made vampires and werewolves funny again…in a good way.

88. Icarus

An accidental documentary seemingly spurred on by fate, Icarus is about the creep of misinformation and deception into every aspect of our lives, even sports, by the unscrupulous and powerful.

87. Prometheus

A film I absolutely adored the first time around, but toned down my enthusiasm for with a more critical eye to detail. Nevertheless, Prometheus should be appreciated for its immense scale of ambition and huge open-ended philosophical questions; it should also be appreciated for throwing a veritable kitchen sink of full of campy horrors at its viewers, including a crazy autosurgery scene.

86. 10 Cloverfield Lane

10 Cloverfield Lane flies high on its simplicity. Three main actors, one small doomsday shelter, and loads of palm-sweating, stomach-clenching, double-guessing suspense. John Goodman, you so craaaaazy.

85. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Give J.K. Rowling credit for not making this a cynical cash grab; the writing in Fantastic Beasts is actually delightful. There is a strong balance here between the sweet magical whimsy going on and some dark, brooding commentaries on American society. A strong cast of endearing characters rounds out a very robust entry in the Harry Potter series.

84. How to Train Your Dragon II

A very good sequel to a classic, HTTYD II still provides the acrobatic, dragon-flying goods, even as it steers us into a troubling, thought-provoking battle between might and right, fixed circumstances and free will.

83. The Big Short

While Inside Job will always remain the definitive work on the maddening 2008 financial collapse, The Big Short is a strong effort featuring intimate inside perspectives of the actual people who did the dynamiting. A slick sense of humor and a celebrity all-star team intent on ripping Wall Street a new one makes this film a winner.

82. Captain America: Civil War

Cap: Civil War is noteworthy in that it makes civilian collateral damage the primary fulcrum and conflict of a superhero movie. It is also a bit of a “mini-Avengers” that successfully incorporates some slam dunk additions to the team; then pits them against each other.

81. Get Out

One of the decade’s cleverest and most ambitious horror flicks, Get Out shows how the sum of a million little microaggressions equates to something very ugly indeed.

80. The Hateful Eight

A slow-burner as far as Tarantino films go, The Hateful Eight is an interesting social play interspersed with exaggerated violence and profanity; a commentary on how our nation was forged in the fires of overcoming racial and societal differences.

79. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

Catching Fire does what all good sequels aim to do; take the appealing constructs of the original film and pump them up on steroids. Everything the Hunger Games did, Catching Fire does bigger, badder, and better.

78. Big Hero 6

A weeaboo’s dream, a great superhero flick, and a gentle meditation upon loss and healthy grieving, Big Hero 6 is a very entertaining film with a big heart and a wonderfully plush-looking buddy robot.

77. Mary and the Witch’s Flower

Mary and the Witch’s Flower is a Studio Ghibli flick, helmed by Studio Ghibli animators…under a non- Ghibli studio. Here are all the familiar beats we love as viewers; the weird, wonderful setting (a school of sorcery for talented children), abuses on the natural world wrought by technology and ambition, and a delightfully ordinary red-headed girl who must think on her feet and grow if she is to survive. Harry Potter crossed with Miyazaki…who could ever resist that?

76. Avengers: Infinity War

The key to Infinity War’s successes is Thanos. The Mad Titan had been waiting in the shadows for most of MCU’s run during the past decade; in Infinity War, we finally see him in the formidable flesh. At once terrifying and tragic, Thanos is the most iconic villain of the 2010’s; a villain finally worth pitting an entire squad of heroes against, and perhaps, more than a match for all of them. The film’s shocking ending and willingness to go to darker places makes this movie MCU’s The Empire Strikes Back.

75. Alien: Covenant

Man, did Covenant get a bad rap. Audience members branded its characters stupid, its monsters unscary, and its premise a letdown from Prometheus. They were wrong on every count. The characters of Covenant act as normal explorers should; not as we, in all of our omniscient wisdom, should advise them to. The monsters are absolutely bloodcurdling; truly nasty, unrelenting creatures which are content to flay their victims alive if they cannot kill them outright. And the story did not answer many of Prometheus’s big questions because it was simply better and more interesting than that. I posit the reason Covenant was such a flop is not any failure on its part, but rather a failure of audiences’ openmindedness and tolerance for the macabre. Alien: Covenant is the best Alien movie since at least Aliens; a pitch-black, bordering on nihilistic tale of bad things happening to good people. It is also a successful conglomeration of the various qualities of Alien, Aliens, and Prometheus, and a fascinating cross-examination of an android who is too human for his own (or anybody’s) good.

74. The Shape of Water

Amélie meets The Swamp Thing, The Shape of Water is an odd, intriguing romantic Cold War thriller that celebrates those members of society who are ostracized, marginalized, or cast aside.

73. ParaNorman

Funny, scary, and important, Paranorman is a spooky, kid-friendly take on tolerance and the price of ignorance.

72. Gasland

By all practical accounts, Gasland is horrifying. This is a film that shows the surreal consequences of free-for-all fracking; water that can be set on fire, air pollution that exceeds 100x the safe limit for some toxins around fracking wells, and literal poisoning of wildlife and residents via breathing, drinking, and skin absorption. While all of this content would make for a great documentary, it is banjo-pickin’, easy-going filmmaker Josh Fox who makes this film even better. His heartfelt personal accounts and willingness to stand aside and let the victims speak for themselves gives this documentary a warmth and decency usually missing from such explosive exposés.

71. Wreck-It Ralph

A hilarious mash-up of video games and memorable arcade characters, Wreck-It Ralph manages to stay clever, hip, and inventive the whole way, even as it plays expertly off audience nostalgia.

70. Green Book

Thanks in large part to its pair of terrific leads, Green Book manages to be an uproariously entertaining road trip buddy movie; even as it brings to light the racial problems which existed (and continue to exist) in America.

69. Scott Pilgrim vs The World

Possibly the most Millennial film ever made, Scott Pilgrim is a busy, delicious barrage of video games, garage bands, pop culture references, and comics. Intricately detailed and gut-bustingly funny, Scott Pilgrim’s supply of visual gags and uber-referential one-liners is practically (turns 8 sideways on fridge) infinite.

68. Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Winter Soldier is high-tier MCU. The electric superhero proceedings benefit from a deliciously twisty plot, and a surprising injection of sharp political commentary.

67. Dunkirk

One of the most viscerally intense PG-13 movies ever, Christopher Nolan’s war epic is a nightmarish tour-de-force that places viewers directly in enemy crosshairs. In typical Nolanian fashion, however, this is also high-brow, intellectually stimulating fare. There is not only the logistical puzzle at play of how to successfully evacuate 300,000 plus English soldiers from the French coast; Dunkirk understands warfare as a product of two extreme and opposite polarities of human nature. War cannot be waged without nasty, selfish streaks of human survival, as there will simply be no one left to fight it; neither can it be won without remarkable acts of courage and willing sacrifice.

66. Blackfish

Deeply troubling and disturbing, Blackfish shows what happens when you take the most intelligent and sensitive animals in the world besides us and confine them in a bathtub for their entire lives. A stirring call for respect for nature, and a long-running tally of SeaWorld’s sins, Blackfish is a must-see documentary.

65. Contagion

Contagion is one of the decade’s scariest films. After all, murdering mask-wearing lunatics and supernatural bumps in the night can be discounted as a trick behind the camera; but the boogeyman in Contagion almost assuredly exists, a nuke buried somewhere in the bosom of Mother Nature. If we blunder into it, God help us all. The film’s chilly, distant demeanor and scientific accuracy (Contagion gets bonus points for being the most scientifically accurate movie of all time) makes its depiction of a modern plague frighteningly plausible; its fixations on points of transfer are enough to convince anyone to wash their hands twice.

64. How to Train Your Dragon

One of the best movies to ever exit out the Dreamworks pipeline, HTTYD is an excellent parable about hate and jingoism, wrapped up in an exhilarating thrill ride that made us all want a Toothless of our own.

63. Restrepo

Restrepo is such a hard film to gauge. It doesn’t take aim at politics, or delve too deeply into the lives of its subjects; American soldiers in the Korangal Valley, Afghanistan. Restrepo is content to simply put us in their boots. Never has combat been so realistically brought to the American doorstep. In Restrepo, one can see the terror of death, the adrenaline hit of downing an enemy, the tomfoolery of kids messing around with one another in between bouts of fighting for their lives. This is the pure essence of modern war; in its DNA, one can see what so many directors of fiction have been trying to recapture in their work. Restrepo is a remarkable and dangerous accomplishment; an accomplishment that would eventually cost co-director Tim Hetherington his life while shooting a subsequent film in Libya.

62. Abominable

Dreamworks has been a rather lackluster studio in comparison to the rest of the industry. With that being said, it is more than capable of making great movies; and Abominable is right up there with the best the studio has ever made. This gorgeously made Asian-flavored film explores China as a meeting grounds of various philosophies; wealth and privilege versus working class, urban versus agrarian, East versus West, and how exploitation and cultural diffusion have reshaped life there. It is also simply a wonderful tale of an introverted girl who must travel to the Himalayas to deliver a magical yeti back to nature; and how that journey unlocks her ability to grieve and connect with others.

61. Winter’s Bone

Winter’s Bone is the movie that announced to the world that this Jennifer Lawrence person could act, I tell you h’what. This menacing coming-of-age journey through the Ozark drugscape shows the importance of family in such poor, isolated communities as something more than a cliché of hillbilly pride; it is actually a means to survival and redemption.

60. The Boy and the Beast

The Boy and the Beast can certainly be appreciated simply as a fantastical, colorful training/battle movie about an orphaned human boy and his cantankerous bear master. But it is as it dives deep into the complexity of the male mind that the film fascinates thematically and generates stirring emotional resonance. In particular, the film has something to say about the anger that can spur young men to violence, and the stabilizing force a mature male presence can have (but does not always have) on that anger. The benefits of fatherhood extend to father-figures as well, who become more emotionally aware and sensitive, and gain deeper meaning and fulfillment in their lives. Hosoda is truly one of the best directors working in animation today, and The Boy in the Beast is typically intelligent, thematically dense work from him.

59. The King’s Speech

A feel-good film done with classical style, The King’s Speech is an elegant, touching tale of friendship that will surely play well among lovers of The Royal Family.

58. The Artist

Thanks to rich visual storytelling and fantastic performances, this pre-talkie throwback hardly needs words to delight.

57. The Tale of Princess Kaguya

Isao Takahata’s final film The Tale of Princess Kaguya feels like a beautiful pastel picture book brought to life. At once a fable of ruinous greed, classism, and sexism, it is also a haunting soliloquy of love, nature, freedom, beauty, and death…all that makes life precious.

56. Kubo and the Two Strings

Kubo and the Two Strings makes me mad. Not because it is a bad film; far from it. I am angry because Kubo had everything going for it. It had big-name actors, it had effects which pushed stop-motion to its limits, it had a big marketing push in theaters to push viewership, it had great critical reviews. It was supposed to be Studio Laika’s crown jewel; the film that would win big at the box office and thrust the studio of perennial indie hits like Coraline and Paranorman into well-deserved limelight. And it was good. Like, really good!

Unfortunately, Kubo and the Two Strings flopped at the box office, for reasons I cannot imagine nor articulate in polite company. But it will get its due here; Kubo is a stop-motion masterpiece with rich, resonant themes and ground-breaking visual effects. It also has a rendition of “My Guitar Gently Weeps” on a Japanese samisen. So go see the damn thing.

55. The Wind Rises

We might be getting another Miyazaki film after all, but The Wind Rises was a fantastic send-off piece for anime’s most legendary director. This is a truly complex, mature film about the relation of beauty and art to woe and suffering, and a critical examination of the tunnel vision that often grips great artists.

54. Knives Out

A classic whodunit tweaked for the modern era, Knives Out balances its twisty mystery proceedings with some well-timed black humor and more than a few pokes at the wealthy elite.

53. Inside Job

A carefully researched and scathingly delivered incrimination of the greed that ruined a nation, Inside Job is one of the best documentaries of the era.

52. Hugo

A wondrous, Dickensian-tale of an orphan who lives in a Paris train station and discovers the secret of a mysterious automaton, Hugo is an intelligent, sensitive family picture and a touching love letter to early cinema.

51. Moonlight

Being different is hard, as I can say from firsthand experience. While I can hardly imagine what it is to be African-American or gay, let alone both at once, Moonlight offers some glimpse into that difficult reality. The film’s touching love story is a journey of self-acceptance and courage that is well worth seeing.

50. Tangled

Tangled was Disney’s announcement to the rest of the field that it was back, baby. After a period of shaky and poorly thought-out 3-D projects in the early 2000’s, Disney took a long, hard look at itself and identified what it did best, then brought out the best of those qualities in its witty, triumphant take on Rapunzel. Here are the songs, guffaws, villains, and magic we all love as fans, delivered perfectly into the next dimension.

49. Source Code

Groundhog Day via sci-fi thriller, Source Code is a clever, action-packed take on time travel, but also an emotionally investing take on what it means to live each day-and life-to the fullest.

48. Toy Story 4

Rarely has a sequel piece ever seemed as risky as Toy Story 4. The studio had its closing piece in Toy Story 3; a film I thought was respectable but not particularly interesting. But rather than let sleeping dogs lie, Pixar opted to throw that ending in the garbage…and pulled something far more bizarre and wonderful from the trash. Toy Story 4 is a wacky, existential riff that acknowledges the importance of family and responsibility in our lives, while simultaneously declaring that it is okay to value ourselves outside those traditional parameters.

47. Arrival

Arrival is hard science-fiction done exceedingly right. Depicting an extraterrestrial visitation across the globe, Arrival seems truly tangible in a way most alien films do not, down to the very form of its decidedly non-humanoid creatures. In vein of Contact or Interstellar, Arrival picks the brain and heartstrings with equal acumen, making it a lasting and valuable commodity to anyone’s sci-fi library.

46. Spiderman: Homecoming

Spiderman: Homecoming is the geekiest of Spiderpieces. This is the Spiderman where Spiderman is Go-Pro-ing himself before a big battle, or joining a quiz bowl team, or building a Lego Death Star with his nerdy confidante, complete with miniature Lego Palpatine. Light, refreshing, and utterly hilarious, Homecoming gets a lot of mileage out of Tom Holland’s awesome portrayal, and tells a simple, uncomplicated story that doesn’t impede the shenanigans.

45. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt. 2

Audiences were expecting a fireworks show for Deathly Hallows: Part II, and boy did they get one. A terrifically exciting heist sequence and a grand final battle made this the most epic and exciting entry in the Harry Potter canon. The culmination of carefully laid character arcs and sentimental links back to the series’ early days had fans smiling through their tears and punching their tickets to Platform 9 ¾ again and again. A splendidly satisfying sendoff.

44. Skyfall

Apparently, you can teach an old dog new tricks. Skyfall brought Bond into the new decade in style, modernizing and sharpening all its facets while remaining, yes, Bond. James Bond.

43. Argo

Argo is a rock-solid retelling of a tense CIA extraction op, hitched to the allure and wonder of good old-fashioned movie making.

42. Free Solo

Free Solo is a marvelous documentary, and I mean that quite literally. Marvel at the jaw-dropping heights depicted, marvel at the logistical challenges of filming a free climber without killing or distracting them (which would mean the same thing). But most of all, marvel at the huge cojones of subject Alex Honnold, as he attempts to climb the world’s largest rock wall; without the life-saving grace of a rope. As a thrill act, Free Solo is visceral and terrifying. But as a character study, it is equally fascinating. The same things which make Honnold such a one in a billion talent are the same things which cripple him emotionally and socially. Watching Honnold slowly start to conquer these own personal obstacles-even as he prepares for the physical obstacle of his life-is a truly satisfying experience.

41. The Lego Movie

Endlessly imaginative and hilariously subversive, The Lego Movie is not only a worthy standard-bearer of its iconic toy brand, but also a glorious celebration of creativity and free expression.

40. Snowpiercer

I’m gonna describe Snowpiercer using single word describers. Okay? Hilarious. Bloody. Ambitious. Tragic. Exhilarating. Revolutionary. F***ing insane. Okay, that last one was two words. How about amazing? Yeah. Amazing works. This dystopian satirical piece is a mad thrill ride on a runaway train through an environmentally wrecked world, and it is one of the craziest things I’ve ever loved in my life.

39. Moneyball

This movie is a sports genre gamechanger about a sports genre gamechanger; that is, the “Moneyball” strategy that forever changed the world of baseball evaluation. Watched purely on the terms of its baseball X’s and O’s, Moneyball succeeds. However, it is the tale of lovable loser Billy Beane, and the film’s assertion that winning comes second to loving yourself, that really turns this hit into a home run.

38. The Social Network

As eccentric and brilliant as its central genius, The Social Network depicts the synthesis of Facebook as an unflattering mirror for the site itself; that it is often driven by negative emotions of inadequacy, jealousy, and loneliness, and serves as a proxy for the real social interactions we require for fulfillment and happiness. Slickly edited, funny, and smart, this is one of the most iconic and generational films of the decade.

37. Gravity

The opening few minutes of Gravity is one of the most intense movie scenes not only of this decade, but of all time. From there, the tension just barely relents. Suspenseful and tightly-spun as a space survival story, Gravity is also a technical marvel which redefined zero-G cinema forever; and made us eternally thankful we are safely on the ground.

36. Beasts of the Southern Wild

Beasts of the Southern Wild is a ground-level view of poverty and climate change in the Mississippi River Delta region, seen through the eyes of a child. Quvenzhané Wallis brings her role to life with an incredible child performance, and lends this work a sense of deep intimacy and emotional resonance, even as it grasps at themes which are national to global in scale.

35. Incredibles 2

Incredibles 2 is one of Pixar’s best ever sequels. Here are the same witty, relatable family dynamics we fell in love with in Incredibles 1; but the superhero shenanigans have been one-upped and then some. In fact, Incredibles 2 has the best action sequences I have ever seen in a 3-D animated film. Add in a smart ideological battle between the current age’s (perhaps correct) cold cynicism and yesterday’s quixotic beliefs, and you have one of the best superhero movies ever, as well as a film that arguably beats out its OG.

34. Guardians of the Galaxy

I admit that from the film’s opening credits, where Chris Pratt canters across an alien planet to “Come and Get Your Love” and utilizes a scurrying lizard creature as his own personal microphone, that I was sold on Guardians of the Galaxy. This is one of those rare works like Shrek or Princess Bride that simultaneously skewers and elevates its genre; in this case, the old-timey B-movie science-fiction flick. A riotously funny movie that just doesn’t give a (expletive), Guardians of the Galaxy is also surprisingly poignant when it chooses to draw its eclectic bunch of outlaws into an impromptu family. This is absolutely one of the best films in the MCU.

33. Coco

A gorgeous, vibrant love letter to Mexico full of zesty music, Coco has some big things to say about art and its link to memory, and how exploitation can tarnish its beauty. Pixar has once again illustrated a remarkable ability to craft a world utterly original and believable in its own rich details and machinations; a world which sets a grand stage for its intimate story. It has also once again illustrated an ability to make us all cry our eyes out. Curse you, Pixar!

32. Her

The film that made a romance between an artificial intelligence and Joaquin Phoenix work somehow, Her is a thoughtful and sensitive film that expands our definition of love to encompass all levels of intimacy and circumstance. It is also, to my knowledge, the most gentle and hopeful AI movie ever made, and it deserves commendation for that.

31. Spotlight

Spotlight is a black hole. This film about the Boston Globe’s reporting on the Catholic Church’s coverup of child molestations by priests starts off slowly, then sucks you in more and more, gathering its mass until you are crushed under all the weight of deception, apathy, pain, and despair. I suppose this is also a strong allegory for the value of reporting or something like that, but frankly, I was too upset for most of the film’s duration to notice. As a lifelong Catholic, Spotlight made me feel utterly betrayed and angry; not only at the Church, but also at myself for sleeping at the wheel. This simply cannot happen again.

30. Citizenfour

Citizenfour qualifies as arguably the most important film of the decade. Laura Poitras’s documentary on government informant Edward Snowden is an intellectual horror flick; full of deserved paranoia, stunning overreaches of executive power, and spooky mirrors to the Orwellian nightmare of 1984. Citizenfour reveals how the alluring promise of the internet has betrayed us, and provided a means to the exponential surveillance of everyone in our supposedly free Western society.

29. Marvel’s The Avengers

Avengers seemed like a fantasy project when it was announced. How could anybody hope to make a movie about not one superhero, not two superheroes, but a whole team of them, without sacrificing narrative coherence, without losing sight of the big personalities at play? Joss Whedon proved such an all-star game could be possible, and somehow, work synergistically. This is one of the biggest popcorn movies ever, and it changed the expectations for superhero flicks towards bigger, grander, better. The success of Avengers also established MCU as the defining franchise of the 2010’s; and perhaps, beyond.

28. Inception

Inception’s script took Christopher Nolan 10 years to tweak, and watching the film you can believe it. This is a 3-D maze of a caper/heist movie, in which dreams form the substance of worlds stacked atop one another. It is a devilishly tricky exercise, but one that is done with the greatest precision and execution. Featuring impressive and trippy set-pieces, one of the generation’s best femme fatales, massively cerebral ideas, eerie atmosphere, and an insidious sense of ambiguity, Inception kept me awake for quite some time after I watched it at two in the morning.

27. Room

Focusing on a kidnapped mother and her young son Jack, who has only known captivity, Room could have been a very dark movie. Instead, it chooses to tack a different route; how do we survive trauma, both its initial effects and its aftermath, and triumph over it?

The film is sold by Brie Larson and Jacob Tremblay. Larson deservingly won an Oscar for her role; Tremblay’s performance is the best child performance I have ever seen. Together, they create a mother-son relationship that is utterly real and compelling. The film is also noteworthy for its camerawork, which is used very effectively to suggest changes in Jack’s worldview as he grows older.

26. Django Unchained

Brash, bold, and unapologetic, Django Unchained is a gloriously socially-conscious revenge fantasy. Featuring buckets of blood and Wild West shoot ‘em up gunfights against Klansmen and slave-holders, the film charts the course of a former slave on his way to rescue his sweetheart from the clutches of a diabolical slave owner.

25. Lincoln

Thanks to yet another star turn from acting legend Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln is a witty and warm biopic of one of our greatest presidents. It is also a glimmer of encouragement during the political gridlock and dysfunction of the early 2010’s. Rather than proving democracy does not work, Lincoln seems to argue, such issues are actually a sign of a functioning and healthy democracy. Our ability to disagree strongly with one another and come to imperfect compromises in order to solve our problems is our country’s greatest legacy. It was also the means to the passing of our noblest and most overdue piece of legislation: The 13th Amendment.

24. Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

Won’t You Be My Neighbor is, for me, the best documentary of the decade. Focusing on the extraordinary Mr. Fred Rogers, the film does a great job of humanizing Mr. Rogers; revealing his insecurities, relentless drive, and sly sense of humor (often through dream-like Daniel Tiger animated sequences) while demonstrating that yes, he really was that good of a person. As it progresses, the film grows increasingly melancholic and encompassing. The qualities Mr. Rogers stood for-namely, understanding, love, honesty, and respect-seem sorely lacking in today’s society. Even more distressingly, it would seem the saintly Rogers was beginning to have his own doubts about his life’s work as the cruelty and hate of the 21st century emerged in full on 9/11. Won’t You Be My Neighbor expresses human goodness as something fragile which must be fostered and prioritized by all of us if Mr. Rogers’ message is to mean something in our modern world.

23. Moana

Moana’s audiovisuals are off the charts amazing. The lush tropical landscapes and utterly lifelike oceans make this the most graphically impressive 3-D animated work I’ve ever seen. The soundtrack, partially composed by Lin-Manuel Miranda, stands as one of Disney’s best all time. But it is Moana herself, the titular princess, who stands as the film’s greatest game-changer. Realistically proportional, of Pacific Islander descent, and strong enough to carry a story without a love interest, Moana is a refreshingly modern character utterly in command of her own destiny. Add in a rich story steeped in Polynesian culture and veined with environmental undertones, and you get the new high bar for the Disney Princess Movie.

22. The Breadwinner

The Breadwinner is a testament that must be heard. Adapted by Cartoon Saloon from Deborah Ellis’s excellent book of the same name, the movie is a street-level account of Parvana, a young girl who goes undercover as a boy to feed her family in Taliban-era Afghanistan. The conditions portrayed are nearly unimaginable; imagine being a prisoner in your own home, only let out for reprieve under the supervision of a male guardian. Such was the reality of thousands of women and girls in Kabul as late as 2001. Cartoon Saloon drenches this film in a constant, lingering fear; at the same time, normalcy is depicted and triumphed. Siblings still squabble. Clothes are still washed, meals are still cooked and eaten, water is still fetched. Stories are still told. The Breadwinner is not just Parvana’s tale; it is the voice of the thousands who live in war-torn or oppressive societies worldwide, and yet still make their own brand of normalcy, still form expression and find joy. Their daily survival is an inspiration to us all; their story is to glimpse the resiliency and spark of the human spirit.

21. A Quiet Place

A Quiet Place is one of the most auspicious debuts I can remember. First time director John Krasinki makes his creature feature a masterwork of tension and clever sound editing, and crafts an indelible world where so much as a pin dropping puts everyone on pins and needles.

20. Inside Out

Pixar’s peek inside a child’s mind is a work of the utmost intelligence and sensitivity. Intuitive enough for even the youngest viewers to understand, yet nuanced enough to describe the transition of a human consciousness from child to adult with painful clarity, Inside Out is one of the studio’s very best features, and a strong defense of mental health and self-expression.

19. Your Name

For so long, director Makoto Shinkai was an exercise in frustration. 5 Centimeters Per Second was gorgeous. Garden of Words was the most visually stunning 2-D animation I had ever seen. And yet the writing was pedantic. The plot was tepid, the characters flat. I would watch these films, eye candy at its most pure and non-nutritional, and seethe that they were not better, that all that glorious potential was yet unrealized. And yet, I never stopped believing in the potential of Makoto Shinkai. One day, I reasoned, this guy was going to piece a story together with some semblance of care as he did his illustrations, and on that day something special would be born.

I saw Your Name just a short time ago. Of course it’s jaw-droppingly beautiful, that goes without saying. But here’s what else it is, folks: it’s funny. It’s heartwrenching. It’s suspenseful. It’s got plot twists. It’s got a story. And not just a good story, but a GREAT one.

I imagine watching this movie must be like watching your kid graduate high school. You forget all the mouthing off and dirty socks left all over the place and that fender bender with your new car, and just soak in the glow of that special moment you always believed would come. You couldn’t be happier. You couldn’t be prouder. And you know this is the beginning of something truly wonderful.

Congratulations, Mr. Shinkai. You did it, man.

18. Interstellar

The knock on Christopher Nolan was always that he had the heart of a robot and didn’t have strong female characters. Debate whether that is true of his other films, if you must; but not this one, because Interstellar is possibly the biggest tear-jerker in sci-fi history, and Jessica Chastain’s Murph is a bitter, brilliant centerpiece to it all. Interstellar stands tall as one of the best science-fiction films of the decade. It has strong, ambitious science wrapped in glorious visual effects, and is very quietly a solid piece of Americana, lovingly arrayed amidst America’s cornfields and dusty roads in a tribute to The Great Depression. Most of all, however, Interstellar is a wondrous joining of heart and intellect, a working theoretical thought experiment that demonstrates love is a force greater than gravity, space, time, or any other cosmic entity the universe may foist upon us.

17. The Force Awakens

While it is not number one on my list, perhaps no film brought me greater joy this decade than watching The Force Awakens during its Thursday night premiere. It was nothing less than the very Star Wars movie I had hoped and dreamed for as a kid. As a massively entertaining blockbuster surpassing huge expectations, Star Wars: The Force Awakens is terrific. As a perfect passing of torch from beloved old to promising new, it is an utter triumph.

16. Rogue One

Okay, is my bias showing yet?

Perhaps this is a bit steep for some people, but heck, when you are dealing with the second-best movie in one of Hollywood’s most beloved franchises, you have to give props where props are due. Rogue One is such a gamechanger for Star Wars. Its gritty, pulpy sense of realism seems peeled straight from a Star Wars comic book; its characters immediately strike as memorable, particularly K-2SO, who is like C-3PO if C-3PO got sent to prison and came back jacked. Rogue One also is important for its many departures from tradition. Many of the innovations credited to Episode VIII were done first-and done better-in this film. Rogue One is not afraid to show the rebellion in terms of moral gray; a shocking act shortly after the film’s opening establishes this and destroys the previous model of basic black and white good vs. evil. If Luke, Leia, and Han got to play the part of hero in A New Hope, then it was because there were elements in the Rebellion doing the dirty and morally-questionable grunt work shown here; Rogue One shows how the war was won.

Rogue One also introduces a few other themes riffed heavily by Episode VIII, including the idea that the Rebellion/Resistance is not a neat, idealistic counter to oppression but an uneasy conglomerate ravaged by internal conflict, and that force-sensitive people are not necessarily the product of hereditary chains of Jedi and Sith, but often sporadic and independent products of the Force. It is, on top of what it initiated, simply a well-paced and superbly-crafted piece of space opera. Rogue One has the best romance (besides Han and Leia) in Star Wars history, has hands-down THE BEST Vader scene ever filmed and another that is a classic in its own right, and has one heck of a villain in Director Krennic. Krennic is one of those mid-level bureaucrats that must have always existed for the Empire but which never received such deserved attention before; his position of weakness, coupled with burning ambition, makes him a hilariously pathetic figure, one you might begin to feel bad for were he not such a nasty piece of work. Even the soundtrack is great. Rogue One is a war film, and Michael Giacchino of Medal of Honor fame makes this sound like a war film, even though it also sounds very much like Star Wars. Ultimately, that’s what Rogue One is. It is a Star Wars film that manages to be a war film and everything else it wants to be terrifically well. To hell with it. I’m putting it this high. If you have a problem with Rogue One being the #16 movie on my list, you can go kiss a wampa’s backside.

15. Roma

Like its protagonist-a nanny to a wealthy family in 1970’s era Mexico-Roma is a film of marvelous patience and understated strength. Alfonso Cuarón’s otherworldly composition and autobiographical authenticity makes this movie a deeply complex take on class and gender, as well as a heartbreaking meditation on what it means to love and be part of a family.

14. Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse

Spiderverse was such a brilliant reimagination of what the superhero genre could be. Not only did it break convention by featuring an African-Hispanic-American kid as its protagonist; it prismed a classic Marvel character in danger of going stale into a delightful and zany spectrum. At once funny as hell and a poignant portrait of growing up as a minority in America, Spiderverse isn’t just the great animated Spiderman movie that nobody saw coming; it’s one of the best superhero movies ever made.

13. Baby Driver

Baby Driver is the coolest movie of the decade. The film centers around Baby, a gentle young getaway driver locked up in bad deals with bad hombres, motoring through traffic and criminal plots in an attempt to just get out and get his girl; but it is so much more than that. This is Tarantino, juiced up on Bullitt, playing in time to a nonstop eclectic jukebox. The dialogue is sharp and hilarious, the characters are all immediately memorable and lovable (even the baddies), and it should go without saying that the car chases are PHENOMENAL. This is entertainment on nitrous oxide.

12. Lady Bird

I did not go into Lady Bird expecting great things. Lady Bird is a family drama. I, for the record, do not like family dramas. But I liked this one. I liked this one a heck of a lot.

Lady Bird is told with so much humor and honesty about the mistakes we make as kids and parents. Struggles for independence and control, respectively, fuel furious arguments and alienation during the difficult period of adolescence. It is not until later that we gain the wisdom to understand why we fought and gain a richer understanding and appreciation of one another’s feelings. In Lady Bird, there is a key revelation regarding the girl and her mother that seems to unfold at the film’s close. It is a profound and emotionally resonant moment that brings the film around to a highly satisfying conclusion.

This movie is also one of the first “time capsule” pieces on the early 2000’s. As we grow older, I would expect more of these films to emerge, but as of right now Lady Bird is the only one that comes to mind. The film absolutely nails the sense of growing up in a troubled time; the Iraq War blares constantly on the news, full-time employment becomes a tenuous prospect no matter how qualified you are, and gay rights are still something very much in infancy. Lady Bird plays out its teenage struggles against this backdrop, showing how such crises were navigated, albeit painfully sometimes, and overcome. Few films have been so well-rounded, nuanced, and well-crafted this decade.

11. Song of the Sea

If you are unaware of the name Tomm Moore, it may be time to become acquainted, as the guy has been killing animation since he first stepped onto the scene with Secret of Kells in 2009. It is no exaggeration to call him the Irish Miyazaki; and Song of the Sea his Spirited Away. Like that film, there is a deeply human story to be told, but it is all dressed up in fantastical trappings. In Spirited Away, a girl struggling to grow up found herself working in a spirit bathhouse. Song of the Sea uses Irish mythology as a gateway to understand the deep and complicated love between siblings, and the necessity of expressing and sharing loss.

This is one of the most beautiful animated pictures this decade. Were the framed stills not hundreds of dollars on Cartoon Saloon’s website (yes, I’ve looked at them), I would probably own at least a few by now. The animation style is so distinctive and innately appealing, with gentle watercolors that soothe and invite the mind. The Celtic musical arrangements are similarly intricate, wonderful, and soothing. Together, story, art, and music come together, and work some deep and affecting magic on the soul. Song of the Sea should be regarded as one of the best animated films this decade.

10. Sicario

Sicario is an utterly bleak, magnificent film that truly depicts the drug war as it is; a chaotic maelstrom of murder, torture, and corruption, spinning and spinning with no end in sight. In such a storm, there is no moral high ground to claim, let alone hold. There is only power to control which direction the storm is heading next, whom it will chew up and devour in its path. And as for the powerless, the best they can hope for is to stay out of its way. Sicario is a sharp critique of American drug policy and a stark glimpse into the grim reality of cartels, packaged perfectly as an ultra-violent thriller.

9. Looper

It is hard to do a time travel story well. Managing plot threads makes plots a nightmare; it is a difficult juggling act merely to keep one’s head above water. That is what makes Looper so special. It is not only a cool-looking, cyberpunk-flavored noir that manages its logic very well; it also features great characters, and larger overarching themes of fate and redemption it advances via those same logistical acrobatics. Looper blew my mind the first time I saw it. It is easily one of the best time travel stories ever, and a sci-fi classic to boot.

8. Blade Runner 2049

It is going to ruffle some feathers to say this, but I think Blade Runner 2049 is even better than the original Blade Runner. While Ridley Scott’s dark, smoggy Los Angeles will always be iconic, Blade Runner 2049 had Roger Deakins behind the camera, and he took us to sections of our nightmarish future we had never been before. Patterns of solar farms set up outside of town to feed swathes of humanity. A post-apocalyptic landfill outside of town for the city’s forsaken. Best of all, a neon-orange radioactive Las Vegas. That seems to be the common theme of 2049. It has taken all the best features of Ridley’s classic and expanded them while trimming down the less successful elements. The defining theme of Blade Runner-what makes us human-is here expounded upon and taken to even deeper levels. And the film’s beautiful ending brings the franchise to a truly satisfying conclusion.

7. Zootopia

Zootopia feels like Disney’s final evolution. The cute critters from its primordial past have fully anthropomorphized, to the point that they must contend with some of the same societal ills as us; chief among them prejudice. Visually gorgeous, full of top-notch tongue-in-cheek gags, and the slickest, most concise cartoon buddy cop riff since at least Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Zootopia counts as one of the most finely crafted animated features I’ve ever seen. Its timely message, coupled with its fantastic quality and outreach potential to the young, makes it one of those rare movies that can change the world.

6. Ex Machina

Ex Machina is one of the most finely-tuned and lean films science-fiction has to offer. In the age of growing research into artificial intelligence, it is also vastly important. Many films have explored the issues associated with artificial intelligence, but few have so fully delved into the ethical quagmires which might arise. Creating new minds means accepting responsibility for the lives of welfare of other beings. Are we prepared to do such a thing? We, who are constantly waging war and victimizing one another? Also, if we are so morally limited, how can we avoid passing on negative traits to our digital children, who will be vastly more powerful and intelligent than us? What if they think differently than us? The possibility of misunderstandings would be catastrophic for both parties.

Ex Machina explores all of these issues with deep intelligence and building tension. This film is one of those beautifully ambiguous works I love so much that require you to pay attention and come to your own conclusions. The primary question in the film asked of the characters is the same one the film asks you: is Ava, the artificial intelligence in question, essentially human? For me, the question was left unanswered until the final, remarkable, tragic shot.

5. The Revenant

Bloody as hell and absolutely gorgeous, The Revenant is a deep plunge into our primal hearts, into the remarkable human invention of identity. At the most fundamental level, we are all the same species; we share the same roots, the same trunk. Yet by means of our human experiences, our courses of life and interactions with other humans, we draw deep fundamental lines between one another. These lines are powerful things. They are what we see ourselves as. We draw lines of genetic heritage; lines of cultures born into, or adopted. Lines brand certain people as friends, while others remain strange or alien. Sometimes, lines can even define people as something hostile; a new species which may destroy us if it is not destroyed in turn. And there are lines which describe the people we call our families; those whom we love and protect at the most fundamental level of our being.

The Revenant draws attention to the lines we draw as human beings; how they are as deeply ingrained to us as breathing or bleeding, for better, and for worse. Aided by director Alejandro Iñárritu’s magnificent direction, and anchored by Leonardo DiCaprio, who has never been better in his storied career, The Revenant is a deep, uncompromising gaze into our personal and national Heart of Darkness.

4. Zero Dark Thirty

Zero Dark Thirty became the unfortunate victim of warring politics. Right-wingers decried the portrayal of torture in the movie, while leftists criticized the movie’s account of torture supposedly supplying the correct information (Director Kathryn Bigelow acknowledged to Stephen Colbert her lead, being from the CIA, might be untrustworthy on that particular facet but she was operating with accuracy to her source). That is all a shame, because such criticism misses the point of the movie entirely. Zero Dark Thirty is made in the spirit of true and utter neutrality. There is no political axe to grind. There is no glorification in the act of Bin Laden’s death; in fact, the face of America’s most notorious terrorist is never shown. Zero Dark Thirty is a work of national recollection. It begins with a deeply painful call to authorities on 9/11, and does not end until Bin Laden’s assassination over 9 years later. In between, there is torture, bombings, false leads and frustrations, hours upon hours of poring over data and entries, and finally, that fateful, dangerous foray into Pakistan. We are reintroduced to each of our own actions through the eyes of Maya, the CIA agent who supposedly made the case that it was in fact Bin Laden hiding in Abbottabad. At the end of Zero Dark Thirty, the movie adds up that long tally of what we sacrificed in order to defeat our greatest enemy and posits a simple question: was it worth it? Each will have their own answer to that difficult and important question. This is one of those rare films that forces us to review our path as a nation, examine what we did right and what we did wrong, and adjust our trajectory accordingly. Zero Dark Thirty is an essential American masterpiece, crafted by a true and powerful auteur at the top of her game.

3. The Raid 2: Berandal

The Raid: Redemption was a revelation in what could be attempted in a martial arts movie. Its creators decided that wasn’t enough and upped the ante. What ensued was the madness of Berandal.

The stuntwork of Berandal has to be seen to be believed. Some participants were knocked out cold; it is amazing nobody was killed. It is doubtful something like this will ever (or should ever) be attempted again, so we may as well enjoy it. There are car chases, assassins affectionately known as “Bat Boy” and “Hammer Girl”, simply loads and loads of fantastic martial arts combat, and more. But in between all this ruckus, there is a compelling gangster story to be told, populated with fascinating characters. A son looking to take over and dangerously expand his father’s influence; a creepy rival leader who cheerfully pulls out razors for throat-slitting; a sad, old-timer assassin who confesses to his daughter that killing was the only way to provide for her; an informant, caught in the middle of the maelstrom and sweating out the possibility that he will be discovered and never make it back to his young family; and of course, Hammer Girl. She’s my favorite.

In The Raid: Redemption, character Mad Dog talked about the pulse. Berandal is that pulse, fully transposed into brutal, symbolic symphony, in which the façade of civilization and negotiations between thugs break down into savage, unbridled violence. This is the best action movie ever, and the Indonesian Godfather, all rolled into one.

2. Avengers: Endgame

No list of top films of the decade would be complete without Avengers: Endgame. It’s the biggest blockbuster in history; and for once, that title is deserved. Nothing like it had ever been attempted before; indeed, it may be hard to do ever again. Facing 1 in 14 million odds, the Russo brothers pulled off a miracle, wasting not a moment in a three hour movie that never feels long and completing the arcs of over a dozen beloved characters, en route to a final and wholly satisfying conclusion to the most ambitious film project ever attempted. If that wasn’t enough, there are more than enough in-jokes, clever riffs on past movies, and sensational action pieces to please even the most critical fan. Avengers: Endgame is the closest to pure catharsis you can feel, and without a doubt the best superhero movie ever made. I confess that I moved it back and forth between #1 and #2 on my list at least a few times; ultimately I left it at #2, with the compromise that even if it cannot be called the best movie of the decade, it will forever be known as THE film of the decade.

1. Wolf Children

Wolf Children is one of those movies you come across that can only be described as magical. As a simple tale of motherhood, it succeeds. As a complex allegory for race and adolescence, it works equally well. It can be shown to the young. It can be shown to the old. It can be shown to all in between. It is sublimely beautiful, patient, and paced. It is excellently scored. It has some of the most fully-realized characters ever depicted in animation. It is warm. It is gentle. It is funny. It is sad. It is life; in all its unpredictability, twists and turns, and wonder.

But I think the reason I truly love Wolf Children is because it engages with the two most difficult and important aspects of being a good, healthy, happy human; how do I love others, and how do I love myself? Wolf Children shows us a truly rapturous example. For being the most beautiful movie, both inside and out, I have seen this past decade, and for a whole host of other reasons, Wolf Children deserves to top this list. Truly, it is Alpha Wolf.

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