The Best Movies of 2018 You Never Saw

January 6, 2019 by Matt Oakes Posted in Lists Tagged Cold War, Hearts Beat Loud, Lean on Pete, Leave No Trace, The Endless, The Kindergarten Teacher, The Rider, The Sisters Brothers, Thoroughbreds, You Were Never Really Here Leave a comment

With my Top Ten Best Films of 2018 officially done and out of the way, it’s time to highlight a few other films that flew under the radar in 2018. This time around, I wanted to highlight movies that, for some reason or another, did not connect with audiences, that were shuffled off to the periphery, failed to perform at the box office, and, by and large, are met with responses of “Huh?” whenever you mention them to anyone outside of the inner circle of filmoholics. Read More

Out in Theaters: ‘YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE’

April 20, 2018 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Joaquin Phoenix, Lynn Ramsey, Out in Theaters, You Were Never Really Here 1 Comment

Violence is cynical in Lynn Ramsey’s down and dirty arthouse thriller You Were Never Really Here. A rough and tumble look at a life surrounded and dictated by violence, Ramsey’s long-awaited follow-up to 2011’s We Need to Talk About Kevin stars Joaquin Phoenix as a mumbling fixer. Armed with a hammer and crippling PDST, Phoenix’s squirrelly and traumatized antihero is a hired gun; a vigilante who specializes in liberating young women from sex trafficking. 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