Author Archives: Grain&Noise
The Best Films of 2024
“They don’t have any idea that the movie business is over. They have no idea.” – Jerry Seinfeld (director of Unfrosted) “There’s this kind of strange thing that I find with reactions from a general audience where a lot of the rhetoric they’re citing seems to be very corporate. People are talking about box office […]
The Best Films of 2023
The Best Films of 2023 “Part of me thinks that because it was all so idiosyncratic and so wild, it was almost like no one really knew where to start taking it apart. Like, where are you going to start hacking away at how strange it was?” – Greta Gerwig on the lack of studio notes for […]
The Best Films of 2022
“The whole system has been primed to make sure that you accept only a superhero movie….if you said to a college student today “dude, you’re a sellout” would they even know what the hell you were trying to say?” – James Gray “….if I can make a business case to spend a billion dollars on […]
The Best Films of 2021
“Movies, unlike branded entertainment, need to live in the world, not just on personal devices…because while we’re talking about infrastructure, we are also talking about pleasure — the pleasure of the cinematic object, and the pleasure of your company and conversation. It’s frustrating that people keep writing lazy obituaries for cinema, something they have no […]
The Year of Living Dangerously
The Year of Living Dangerously (dir. Peter Weir, 1984) “In focus, it’s pornography. Out of focus, it’s art.” – Billy Kwan played by Linda Hunt “As with all these movies, casting is the biggest rewrite.” – Pete Weir “That’s a story you journos don’t want to tell.”“Nobody wants to hear it.”“Tell them anyway.” – Billy […]
Against All Odds
Against All Odds (dir. Taylor Hackford, 1984) “If you’re playing a king in a movie and nobody treats you like a king, well, then you ain’t a king. Same goes for being an alien in a movie too.” – Jeff Bridges on acting “A righteously generically American film movement that exposited one great theme, and […]
The Best Films of 2020
“The history of cinema is in part an anthology of premature obituaries. Sound, color, television, the suburbs, the VCR, the internet — they were all going to kill off moviegoing, and none succeeded. Cultural forms, and the social and private rituals that sustain them, have a way of outlasting their funerals. How many times have […]
Capricorn One
Capricorn One (dir. Peter Hymas, 1978) “My generation thought that if it’s on television, it’s true. I was sitting there one day watching TV and CBS News was covering the space shots. They would cut to a simulation in St. Louis, Missouri of what was going on with the Apollo missions. I realized that the […]
The Best Films of 2019
“Relentless normalcy is boring. Bring on the divas with their superstitions and quirks and strange routines.” –Ruth Graham “If I had to say the single biggest contributor to people preferring to watch things on Netflix versus going to theaters, it’s that the theaters nickel and dime on bulbs….more than 60 percent of American theaters are […]
Running On Empty
Running on Empty (dir. Sidney Lumet, 1988) “but I’ve done three movies, Daniel, Running on Empty, and Family Business, that are thematically the same thing—the cost that others pay for one’s passions—and I only recognized this afterwards…. Any deep emotional commitment on the part of the parents is going to cost something… not just […]
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