50 Most Anticipated Movies of 2018

January 4, 2018 by Matt Oakes Posted in Lists, Most Popular, Uncategorized Tagged Most Anticipated Movies, Most Anticipated Movies of 2018 Leave a comment

Ahhh 2018. A year of promise. Of renewed hope. Of unlimited possibility. I advise you do your best to not pay attention to the commander in chief’s tweets and bury your hand in the collective sand that is an unhealthy obsession with movies. Tis the very best medicine and nothing gets me more jazzed about covering the industry than looking at the year ahead and seeing just how many potential gems lay in wait. Each and every year I tell myself I’m not going to bother doing a Top 50 Most Anticipated Movies List. That someone else will do the work for me and I can just retweet it. And yet every year we get the same retreads, boring, blockbuter-loaded lists ad nauseam. Here goes my attempt to right that wrong. Read More

Worst 10 Movies of 2017

January 3, 2018 by Matt Oakes Posted in Lists Tagged Below Her Mouth, Death Note, Hostiles, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, The Circle, The Great Wall, The Mummy, The Snowman, The Space Between Us, Transformers: The Last Knight, Worst Movie of 2017, Worst Movies Leave a comment

This time of year we’re usually busy piling praise on the best movies of the year. And for good reason. There’s a ton to celebrate. If push came to shove, I could crank out a list of 100 movies that I loved this year including everything from critical darling The Florida Project down to cinematic popcorn Kong: Skull Island and be entirely happy recommending each and every movie on that list. But the time for praise is over. I’ve published a Top Ten. The time for reckoning is upon us, the day for red penning this bitch is nigh. Let’s discuss the worst 10 movies of 2017. Read More

Top Ten Movies of 2017

December 21, 2017 by Matt Oakes Posted in Lists, Most Popular Tagged Best of Year, Dunkirk, Get Out, Lady Bird, Raw, The Disaster Artist, The Florida Project, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, The Shape of Water, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Top Ten, War for the Planet of the Apes 1 Comment

’Tis an annual (w)rite of passage for every film critic to force themselves into a pretzel declaring their top ten favorite films of the year. It’s a stressful, painful experience that almost always ends in regret. Looking back at Top Tens of years past, I always groan with certain inclusions – films that haven’t weathered quite so well – and lament other omissions – films that have grown on me like a fine wine or well-worn pair of slippers. But we toil on regardless, sure to churn out a list loaded with recency bias that we’ll look back on one, two, ten years from now, pockets loaded with exasperated groans. In short, it’s a pain rite of passage even though writing these passages is probably the most fundamental requirement for every critic and inevitably draw the most page views. Read More

6 Killer New Horror Movies on Netflix to Get You Ready for Halloween

October 9, 2017 by Matt Oakes Posted in Lists, Most Popular Tagged A Dark Song, Gerald's Game, Horror Movies, Netflix, Raw, The Blackcoat's Daughter, The Devil's Candy, The Survivalist, The Transfiguration Leave a comment

Every year, the month of October rolls around and with it an opportunity to binge watch all the horror movies that may have slipped under your radar thus far. 2017 has been an outstanding year for horror films with even studio flicks making waves – It became an overnight international smash hit and deservedly so; M. Night Shyamalan’s Split returned the once maligned director to twisty-turny prominence; A Cure For Wellness delivered an eerie ode to gerontophobia and medical centers; and it wouldn’t be too surprising to see Jordan Peele’s outstanding Get Out get some Oscar nods thrown its way by the end of the year. We’ve gone ahead and compiled a list of some of Halloween-season stuff you probably haven’t seen yet, all available at the click of a button for your Netflix streaming pleasure. We threw one from Amazon Prime on there as well, for those who take their streaming packages a little more robust. Watch one, watch them all, just go out and get in the mood for the best holiday of the year.

50 Most Anticipated Films of 2017

January 12, 2017 by Matt Oakes Posted in Lists, Most Popular Tagged Adam McKay’s Dick Cheney Biopic, Alien: Covenant, American Made, Annihilation, Baby Driver, Battle of the Sexes, Blade Runner 2049, Brawl in Cell 99, Coco, Darkest Hour, Downsizing, Dunkirk, First Man, Free Fire, Get Out, God Particle, It Comes at Night, Kathryn Bigelow Detroit Riots Movie, Kong: Skull Island, Logan, Logan Lucky, Missouri, Molly’s Game, Mother, Mute, Okja, Paul Thomas Anderson/Daniel-Day Lewis Fashion Drama, Raw, Star Wars VIII, T2: Trainspotting, The Bad Batch, The Beguiled, The Circle, The Death of Stalin, The Discovery, The Florida Project, The Glass Castle, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, The Mercy, The Meyerowitz Stories, The Mummy, The Shape of Water, The Snowman, Thor: Ragnarok, Three Billboards Outside Of Ebbing, Under the Silver Lake, War for the Planet of the Apes, War Machine, Wilson, Wind River, You Were Never Really Here 1 Comment

My god does putting this thing together every year take a little bit of my soul. The product of countless hours of hunting, refining, ordering, researching, writing all so you can look at the pretty pictures as your zooming from one title to the next. A labor of love this must be. This year, more than those before, making this list was exhausting (and exhaustive) because it required so much cutting down. The initial rundown included 92 films and you better believe I wasn’t about to write up more than 50. Read More

2016 Silver Screen Riot Awards

January 4, 2017 by Matt Oakes Posted in Lists, Most Popular 1 Comment

Now that we’ve gone ahead and declared our Top Ten Films of 2016 as well as our Ten Favorite Horror Movies of the Year, it’s time to get into the particulars and hand out some superlatives for other “Bests” of the year. Here we celebrate the best performances of the year, the finest directing, our favorite genre films, documentaries, animated features, foreign language films, even costumes… basically all the stuff we haven’t given props to yet. No lengthy discussion here, just some pictures and prizes. Read More

Silver Screen Riot’s Top Ten Films of 2016

January 3, 2017 by Matt Oakes Posted in Lists, Most Popular Tagged 10 Cloverfield Lane, Arrival, Don’t Breathe, Green Room, La La Land, Moonlight, Sing Street, Swiss Army Man, The Lobster, The Witch, Top 10 Movies of 2016 3 Comments

2016. What a year. As rock ‘n’ roll gods and Princess Leia were smote from the surface of the earth, Trump and Suicide Squad and the Zika virus emerged. But through the muck and the mire emerged a slew of films that rocked socks and reminded us that the movie theater is more often than not a safer space than CNN. As always there were a huge number of films in contention for a limited number of spots and making room for some meant dashing the hopes of others. So before we get to the top ten, let’s run through some very laudable runner-ups. Read More

Top Ten Horror Movies of 2016

December 9, 2016 by Matt Oakes Posted in Lists, Most Popular Tagged 10 Cloverfield Lane, Babak Anvari, Baskin, Don’t Breathe, Green Room, Hush, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Ouija: Origin of Evil, The Eyes of My Mother, The Invitation, The Lure, The Neon Demon, The Shallows, The Wailing, The Witch, Under the Shadow 2 Comments

It’s that time of year. Christmas music infects our radios, capitalism runs rampant and industry insiders rush to be the first to publish their official Top Ten lists. While we at Silver Screen Riot are not racing to the finish line before we’ve seen the likes of Rogue One, Martin Scorsese’s Silence or a number of other potential contenders for the title, there is a collection of films that we do feel comfortable ranking: that of the horror persuasion. Read More

The 25 Best Movies of the 21st Century

August 31, 2016 by Matt Oakes Posted in Lists Tagged Best of Leave a comment

Ever since the BBC polled some critics and named the “25 Best Films of the Decade”, there’s been an avalanche of people spewing their picks. In Seattle, Brian Ziztelman polled a group of local critics (including myself) to name our collective favorite picks. While an impressive 9 of my 25 bowed unto that selection, I, like Brent McKnight before me have decided to reveal my own list. After all, these are my favorites. Without explanation or excessively commentary, here they are. My pick for the top 25 of the decade.
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The 25 Best Films of 2016 (So Far)

June 24, 2016 by Matt Oakes Posted in Lists, Most Popular Tagged 10 Cloverfield Lane, Anomalisa, Demolition, Don’t Breathe, Don’t Think Twice, Everybody Wants Some, Green Room, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Indignation, Krisha, Love & Friendship, Manchester by the Sea, Midnight Special, Rams, Sing Street, Swiss Army Man, The Birth of a Nation, The Nice Guys, The Witch, Transpecos 1 Comment

The year is just about half way through and with three film festivals under the belt, it seems appropriate to recount what have been the best of the year to date. We know there’s six more months of cinema coming down the drain and a lot of late arrivals usually have significant dominion over our end of year Top Ten list but we want to take the time to acknowledge what has already come and gone, to celebrate 25 marvelous films which unfortunately most people probably haven’t seen. Some of these have only played festivals and will get a wide release later in the year so keep your eyes peeled while others are already ready and waiting on Blu-Ray or DVD for your viewing enjoyment. Do yourself a favor and look into a few of them, won’t you? Read More