10 Best Horror Movies of the Decade (2010-Now)

October 23, 2018 by Matt Oakes Posted in Lists Tagged Get Out, Green Room, Hereditary, Horror, It Follows, Raw, The Babadook, The Cabin in the Woods, The Conjuring, The Skin I Live In, The Witch, Under the Skin Leave a comment

Halloween is just around the corner so I decided to torture myself with doing a little listicling for all you wannabe scared-to-go-to-sleepers out there. And Sweet Satan was this process painstaking! Like poking flaming needles in my eyes while my ankles were hobbled by a split ax. Or something like that. I flipped, back-flipped, see-sawed, hemmed and hawed.. etc. As a horror movie aficionado, whittling an entire decade of my favorite genre down to a mere two-hands-worth of selections was Sophie’s Choice after Sophie’s Choice. With no Meryl Streep to help! Which is probably why the last time I did this, I ended up with 13 entries. And though some of these may seem like obvious entries or redundancies that you’ve seen before, I really haven’t seen anyone nail the best of the decade, so this is me putting my feet to the fire and throwing the cards out there. Read More

2017 Silver Screen Riot Awards

January 23, 2018 by Matt Oakes Posted in Awards, Lists Tagged Barry Keoghan, Birdboy, Get Out, Jodran Peele, Michele Pfeiffer, paul thomas anderson, Raw, Robert Pattinson. Frances McDormand, Silver Screen Riot Awards, The Work 3 Comments

With the announcement of the Academy Awards nominees, we’re finally in the race to the finale of this year’s award’s seasons. Seeing that Mr. Oscar tends to get it wrong so much of the time (although this year’s nominees were fairly great across the board), we have an annual tradition of issuing our own awards to recognize the best storytelling and performances throughout the year. Since we’re not tied to any silly number of nominees, we went ahead and listed every one that we thought deserving of a mention, even if the list well exceed more than 5 or 10. You won’t find a Best Picture category here as I think that is properly summarized by our Top Ten Films segment, which I would urge you to visit if you haven’t already. With that out of the way, the SSR Award goes to… 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

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