Reviews of albums, films, concerts, and more from the Bay Area Music and Movie Nerds
The end of the year of course means Top 10 lists! Here are my ten favorite films of 2024 (and four honorable mentions). Oscar nominations follow in just a few weeks, on Friday, January 17th. Stay tuned to see if Oscar voters share my thinking. And be sure to also check out fellow SP Film Critic Chad’s Top 20 list here. In the meantime–see you back in the cinema in 2025!
Continue reading “Film Feature: Carrie’s Top 10 Films of 2024”
Writer/director James Mangold is no stranger to a music biopic. In 2006, Reese Witherspoon won a Best Actress Oscar for playing June Cash in Mangold’s Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line. The movie garnered four other nominations, including a nomination for Joaquin Phoenix’s portrayal of Cash. Now, 18 years later, don’t be surprised if A Complete Unknown, Mangold’s dramatization of Bob Dylan’s rise to fame, yields similar awards for its exceptional cast.
When Denis Villeneuve first revealed that his adaptation of Dune was going to be divided into two parts (kept relatively secret for some reason until the first part’s release in 2021), the news was somewhat disappointing. Was the justification for two parts simply another studio cash grab? Would the first part contain enough story to justify its existence? The answer, as you may know, was that Dune: Part One blew away everyone’s expectations, establishing Villeneuve’s vision as unique, monumental, and cinematically astounding. The stakes were high for Dune: Part Two, since Part One was a critical and box office success and even made a push for the Best Picture Oscar (which it lost to CODA, yeesh). Now Dune: Part Two has finally arrived after a long delay due to the WGA strike last year, and it’s a masterpiece. The new film expands upon the original’s narrative scope, delivering nearly three hours of stunning visual storytelling and character arcs, placing it among the best sci-fi epics of the last fifty years, and making it perhaps one of the greatest sequels in cinema history.
In 2018, writer/director Paul King’s Paddington 2 earned the coveted number one spot on my Top 10 list. After a few years working in television, King has returned to the big screen with his Paddington 2 co-writer Simon Farnaby to bring us Wonka. The picture is a similarly delightful and warmhearted holiday treat.
Fox Searchlight has finally released Wes Anderson’s very long-awaited new film The French Dispatch, and this sentence pretty much sums it up: “Leutenant Nescaffier is emphatically celebrated among cooks, cops and capitaines, not to mention swindlers, stoolies and snitches, as the great exemplar of police cooking.”
If that sentence – with its very sneaky verb, its obviously overbalanced serial commas, its all too visible use of French terms, and finally, its curious “police cooking”- makes you smile, laugh, giggle, catch your breath, or even tingle, then this is your film. If not, then there’s nothing I, or this review, can do for you.
Screenwriter Luke Davies knows a thing or two about writing tearjerkers — his adapted screenplay for the missing boy drama Lion was nominated for an Oscar last year — so it’s no surprise that his follow up is equally adept at pulling the heartstrings. Also based on a true story, Beautiful Boy is a gut-wrenching portrait of a son’s battle with addiction and his father’s unwavering quest to help him. With Oscar nominees Steve Carell (Foxcatcher) and Timothée Chalamet (Call Me By Your Name) as the father and son, respectively, Belgian director Felix Van Groeningen scored in the talent department, and it’s hard to imagine two other actors doing justice to the roles. Continue reading “Film Review: Beautiful Boy“
The 90th Academy Awards air this Sunday, March 4th on ABC at 5:00 pm PST (pre-show festivities start well before, if you want to weigh in on Oscar fashions). Spinning Platters film critics Carrie Kahn and Chris Piper share their predictions – and hopes – for the major categories, and discuss their reasoning for six of the biggest categories in the podcast below. Will there be another Moonlight/La La Land fiasco? Tune in on Sunday to find out – and to see how we – and you – do on the big night!
Continue reading “Film Feature: Carrie and Chris Pick the 2018 Oscars”
Spinning Platters Film Editor Carrie Kahn shares her ten favorite films of 2017, presented in descending rank order. You can also check out her list from last year here.
Continue reading “Film Feature: Carrie’s Top 10 Films of 2017”