Tony Hale Archives - Silver Screen Riot

After three directorial efforts, I think it’s safe to say that Aaron Sorkin is a boring director. The celebrated scribe’s career began with early works like A Few Good Men and The Rock before rising to prominence pulling triple duties as writer, executive producer, and creator with NBC’s mega-hit The West Wing. Sorkin’s vocation hit a high note through the early aughts, earning an Academy Award nomination for his writing work on Moneyball and winning an Oscar for David Fincher’s excellent The Social Network – still his best work to date. Sorkin turned to directing with 2017 Molly’s Game and followed that decent-enough effort with the awards-desperate courtroom drama The Trial of the Chicago 7. Both films revealed a creator that apes the style of other better directors with none of his own. Read More

At the height of Pixar’s creative boon, Toy Story 3 threatened the impossible: a sequel would be the animation studio’s best movie to date. This on the heels of the triple-threat punch of Ratatouille, WALL-E and Up, to this day the finest consecutive output Pixar would manage. Toy Story, to this point in the studio’s history, was Pixar’s only ongoing franchise – Cars 2 would come along and bust their Fresh streak just one year later – but its sequels managed to keep pace with their starkly original one-off creations by diving deeper into the pathos of its collection of anthropomorphic toys and achieving an even greater sense of world-building. Woody, Buzz and the gang discovered things about themselves by exploring larger sandboxes and, accompanying them, we too saw the world with eyes renewed. Read More