Mini Reviews 2020: Birds of Prey, Honey Boy, Da 5 Bloods and More

COVID has thrown everyone’s life into disarray. In my case, with movie theaters shutting down, along with several other life issues unrelated to the pandemic, my productivity on this blog was slown to a crawl and eventually came to a screeching halt. To get back into the swing of things, I thought I’d get back to an old tradition of mine and knock out a few short reviews of movies I’ve seen during lockdown and release them in a compilation. Most of these went straight to streaming, but I’ll also be including a few stragglers from last year that I didn’t get a chance to see until recently. Here’s what I’ve been watching:

Streaming Recommendations for Social Distancing (April 2020)

Since the COVID-19 pandemic has found many of us stuck at home for the unforeseeable future, many have taken the time to catch up on the various shows and movies they may not have had the chance to see. Since this blog was partially started as a way to let people know what new stuff is worth seeing, and since all the major streaming services dumped a slew of new releases at the beginning of the month, I thought I’d do my part in letting people know what’s worth watching during this extended staycation. I will be covering new releases on the three major streaming services (Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime) that have or will be coming out this month, and this only applies to new releases in the U.S., so results may vary in other countries. And if reception is good and we end up doing this for longer, I might do another one next month.

An Update From Man In The Movie Theater

So, things have been pretty crazy lately, huh?

As some of you may have noticed, my productivity on this blog has slowed to a crawl. This is for a myriad of personal reasons, but recently that crawl has slowed into a near halt. As I'm sure you're all aware, the United States (and most of the world for that matter) has been put under quarantine to slow down the spread of COVID-19, AKA the Coronavirus. This has affected many people's lives, and since part of that quarantine is discouraging large public gatherings, several businesses have been negatively impacted, including my own. Several movies that were slated for a March or April release date, up to and including A Quiet Place Part II, Mulan and The New Mutants have been postponed indefinitely, and press screenings have likewise been cancelled. Because of this, and financial strains due to my day job also being impacted by the quarantine, I will not be able to go see any new movies for the time being.

But in the meantime, in order to keep this blog going and maintain my own sanity, I will try my best to expand upon my comfort zone and try new things. There have been some ideas that I've been spinning around in my head for a while but never got around to, and I think this would be a good time to get started on that. A year ago I made the promise of a new blog series called "I Fucking Love This Movie", something that never came to light. I'd also love to expand upon my love of so-bad-it's-good movies in some capacity, as a certain entry in my best of the decade list understandably left some people confused. (If you read it, you know exactly what I'm talking about.) Hopefully I can use this time to get these projects off the ground.

Thank you all for being so understanding. In the meantime, stay safe, stay healthy, wash your hands, take care of yourself, and more importantly, take care of each other.

Sincerely, Graham Kristensen, AKA Man In The Movie Theater.

Onward: Pixar’s Still Got The Magic

Portrait of a Lady on Fire: A Stroke of True Genius

The Top 100 Movies of the 2010's (in my opinion)

The 2010’s was a decade of constant change. Politics changed. Mass communication changed. Barriers were broken down. Technology and new mediums that were once the stuff of science fiction became mainstream. Filmmaking as an art form has always been in a state of flux, but in the past ten years it has evolved and mutated faster and more aggressively than ever before. Despite outcries of creative drought, there was no shortage of original, interesting, evocative and mind-blowing films out there, with a plethora of fascinating experimentation happening both in the mainstream and the underground. And as the decade comes to a close, I’d like to take a look back at some of the best films the 2010’s had to offer. This list is a mixture of examples that reflect what I see as emblematic of the best the medium had to offer and laid the groundwork for where cinema is going, as well as personal favorites that meant a lot to me personally. What movie belongs in which category I’m leaving to interpretation. And since this list is 100 films long, I will be listing them alphabetically to avoid favoritism. They are as follows:

The Gentlemen: Guy Ritchie’s Return to the Boy’s Club

1917: Dropping the Audience Into the Trenches

The Top 10 Worst Movies of 2019 (in my opinion)

Pretty self-explanatory. Let’s go.

The Top 10 Movies of 2019 (in my opinion)

The end of a decade always feels like a changing of the guard, and 2019 is no exception. The 2010’s was a decade of constant turmoil and uncertainty, and that was reflected in how much film has changed in those years. (I’m currently working on a top 100 movies of the decade list, which you can expect to see sometime around February.) Funnily enough, the year for movies was lopsided, with most of the best films not coming out until after September, with the first half being such a drought of noteworthy content that for the first time, I forewent making a mid-year list. I had to make a lot of painful cuts, and that’s not even accounting for the stuff I missed like Ford v Ferrari, Doctor Sleep, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, The Peanut Butter Falcon, Dolemite is My Name, Waves, A Hidden Life, Richard Jewell, 1917, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, just to name a few. But once Oscar season rolled in, I was graced with not just some of the best movies of the year, but a few of my favorites this decade. Needless to say, this list is built largely on movies that dropped within the last three months. With all that said, these are the top 10 movies of 2019 (in my opinion).