Well, my favorites, anyway. Fun stuff, guaranteed. No indie art films here. In reverse chronological order.
Sinners (2025)
Ryan Coogler's woke Delta Blues vampire masterpiece stars Michael B. Jordan in a dual role as twins Smoke and Stack, a couple of gangsters looking to establish the best juke joint in the Jim Crow South during the depths of the Depression. Monsters, monsters everywhere — not all of them with sharp, pointy teeth.
Barbie and Oppenheimer (2023)
A.k.a. Barbenheimer, the most-unlikely double feature in movie history, with Greta Gerwig fashioning a billion dollar phenomenon out of a plastic doll while Christopher Nolan finally won a long overdue Oscar for his biopic about the father of the atomic bomb. Barbie is pure genius, Oppenheimer, engrossing.
Top Gun: Maverick (2022)
The sequel you didn't know you needed (or wanted) with Tom Cruise reprising his 1986 star-making role as a hotshot pilot, now older, wiser, and puffier around the jowls. A surprisingly-moving adrenaline rush with a heartbreaking cameo from the late, great Val Kilmer.
Little Women (2019)
The umpteenth (and best) remake of Louisa May Alcott's classic novel about the trial and tribulations of four sisters during and immediately after the American Civil War, Greta Gerwig revisits a recurring theme in her work: what is the role of an ambitious woman in a society that only values her for one thing? Featuring an all-star cast (Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh, Emma Watson, Timothée Chalamet, Laura Dern, Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper), Little Women is my favorite movie on this list and one of my favorites of all-time.
Jojo Rabbit (2019)
Taika Waititi's Jojo Rabbit is a wildly-funny and deeply-moving comedy about a goofy ten year old Hitler Youth (and his imaginary pal, Adolf) who discovers the Jewish girl hiding in the attic and learns what it really means to be a Nazi.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)
An insider's look at Hollywood at the end of the 1960s, Once Upon a Time is the story of a washed-up television actor (Leonardo DiCaprio), his long-suffering stunt double (Brad Pitt in an Oscar-winning role) and the real-life Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) who cross paths with the Manson family. But if you think you know where this is going, well, clearly you've never seen a Quentin Tarantino movie.
Paddington 2 (2017)
A shockingly fabulous comedy about a talking bear with a taste for marmalade, Paddington 2 features the best performance of Hugh Grant's career as a narcissistic has-been actor who stops at nothing to stage the musical of his dreams.
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
The best Star Wars movie since the first one back in 1977 — and just between me and thee, better than that. A rip-snorting adventure about a ragtag band of outsiders who take on an evil empire and spark a revolution.
The Man from UNCLE (2015)
Guy Ritchie's stylish Cold War spy thriller that teams a dapper American thief, a brutish Russian cutthroat and a beautiful East German auto mechanic against a well-dressed family of Nazi war criminals. Fun stuff!
Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation (2015)
One of the eight movies starring Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt, a secret agent tasked with the dirty jobs no one else can handle, this one involves a rogue spy hellbent on taking down the world's intelligence community. Or something like that. Mission: Impossible features amazing stunt sequences, a great supporting cast (Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Jeremy Renner) and Rebecca Ferguson in her first turn as British super spy, Ilsa Faust.
Finally, a special shout out to A Complete Unknown (2024)
Timothée Chalamet should have won an Oscar for his turn as a young Bob Dylan. Certainly he won my eternal gratitude for turning Katie-Bar-the-Door from a lifelong Dylan detractor to one of his biggest fans. Thanks, Tim!
dis·si·dent
noun
a person who opposes official policy, especially that of an authoritarian state.
I see that Google agreed to set fire to the Reichstag call the Gulf of Mexico something other than what it is in order to appease the latest whims of the Toddler in Chief. But don't fret — we here at the Monkey will continue to live in the real world, at least until they drag us off to the gulag.
Apparently it doesn't take much to become a dissident these days ...
Of all the people I've covered in this blog over the last fifteen years, no one has fallen farther in my esteem than Woody Allen. Not, mind you, because of the accusations against him (which may very well be true, I couldn't tell you), nor because the undisputed facts that have emerged lead one to conclude that he's, at best, creepy. Here at the Monkey — where I will happily praise the art while beating the artist with a hammer — the fact that Woody Allen might perhaps deserve to spend the rest of his life in jail doesn't mean he didn't make great movies.
No, the problem for me are the movies themselves.
The older I get, the more the "Woody Allen" character — not the screwball nincompoop of the early comedies, but the neurotic, cultured, "wise" Woody of the middle years, Manhattan especially — seems more like the kvetching of an immature, half-smart misanthrope than the epitome of New York sophistication the adolescent me (who knew nothing about nothing) seemed to think he was.
In that sense, the perfect actor to play the "Woody" character isn't Woody Allen but a young Timothée Chalamet in 2019's A Rainy Day in New York because if there's anything more annoying than listening to a teenage kid explaining the meaning of life to you ... well, it's probably reading an old man's blog complaining about teenage kids explaining the meaning of life to you.
And that's what "Woody Allen" sounds like to my ears now — snotty, self-absorbed, brimming with unearned self-confidence yet insecure as only a kid can be, and name-checking the classics without any real sense of what they're about, which can be amusing, even endearing, out of the mouth of a nineteen year old kid, but is ridiculous and sadly pathetic from a man in his forties, fifties and beyond.
Maybe that's why I've come to prefer the Woody Allen movies Woody Allen isn't in. Midnight in Paris, for example.
Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) is an American writer traveling in Paris with his fiancée (Rachel McAdams) and her rich, pompous parents (Kurt Fuller, Mimi Kennedy). Gil has romanticized notions about Paris, specifically Paris of the 1920s when Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein drank absinthe in the bars and argued about art and literature. His ever practical bride-to-be has romanticized notions only about the handsome know-it-all (Michael Sheen) lecturing at Versailles.
After an argument, Gil finds himself wandering the cobblestone streets of the Latin Quarter when, at the stroke of midnight, a time-traveling Peugeot pulls to the curb and the half-drunk couple inside invite Gil to join them at a fun little party their friends are hosting.
Friends like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein — and a beautiful French brunette (Marion Cotillard) who sparks something in Gil that his rich, stuffy fiancee never has.
Owen Wilson is the rare lead in a Woody Allen movie who doesn't play like he's doing a bad Woody Allen imitation — reportedly, Allen rewrote the part to fit Wilson when the actor came aboard, and you can tell: Wilson seems comfortable in his own skin in a way the likes of Colin Firth, Jason Biggs and Kenneth Branagh never did.
Equally good is Corey Stoll who is hilarious as Hemingway, macho and pretentious at the same time, and grumbling perfectly ludicrous Bad Hemingway to Gil's awestruck delight.
"And then the man who is brave and true looks death squarely in the face, like some rhino-hunters I know or Belmonte, who is truly brave. It is because they make love with sufficient passion to push death out of their minds until it returns, as it does to all men, and then you must make really good love again."
As a lifelong Hemingway fan, I laughed so hard every time Corey Stoll was on the screen, I thought I'd have a stroke — because let's face it, while nobody was better at conveying action through words, when he started pontificating about life, nobody was more full of shit than Ernest Hemingway.
Pitch perfect takedowns of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Salvador Dalí, Zelda Fitzgerald, Luis Buñuel, among others, played perfectly by, respectively, Tom Hiddleston, Kathy Bates, Adrien Brody, Alison Pill and Adrien de Van.
And if that's all there was to Midnight in Paris, I'd still say it's the funniest movie Woody Allen has made since he saw his first Ingmar Bergman film.
But he also has some insightful things to say about the false promise of nostalgia and the trap of always living a life of "if only (fill in the blank), then I'd be happy."
First, be happy. Life will fill in the blanks.
Midnight in Paris is my favorite Woody Allen movie, and proof that no matter how false the artist, the art in this case is true.
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. Best animated feature winners are noted with an @. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
That thou mayest possess all things, seek to possess nothing. — St John of the Cross
I think 2010 must be about when I stopped accumulating every DVD that came out. At least I don't think I own a single movie that came out in 2010. Is that because I got a bit less materialistic in my outlook? Or because they stopped selling them in local stores? Or maybe I just ran out of room ...
That's not a picture of every DVD I own, by the way. A hundred or so from the silent era are in a different cabinet and thirty or forty Criterion editions are on a shelf under the television. But you get the idea.
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. Best animated feature winners are noted with an @. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
I have a friend — I'll call him "Domenic" because his name is Domenic — who is as big a fan of the Star Wars prequel trilogy as I am ... not.
He's of the opinion that Revenge of the Sith is the best of the Star Wars movies while I rank it somewhere ahead of The Phantom Menace and just behind every other movie ever made not starring Hayden Christensen, up to and including a student film I took part in when I was in college called Das Volkswagen.
But it's not like his perspective is out of the ordinary. A lot of people share his opinion (see, e.g., here, here and here).
So I'm thinking, what's the deal? How could one of us be so fundamentally wrong about something so unimportant, while I, as usual, am so right? And I puzzled and puzzed 'til my puzzler was sore, then I thought of something I hadn't thought of before — maybe Christmas, I thought, doesn't come from a store Domenic is half my age. And that actually makes a difference.
When I saw my first Star Wars movie, I was sixteen, it was the summer of 1977, and there was and only ever had been the one Star Wars movie, a standalone sci-fi action adventure flick playing in theaters for the first time that year. Han shot first, there was no Jabba the Hut sequence, the attack on the death star was half as long ...
And you also have to remember, there were no science fiction movies in those days. We had 2001: A Space Odyssey from 1968, some B-pictures from the '50s, Star Trek and Lost in Space reruns on television — and that was it! No Aliens franchise, no Indiana Jones, no Terminator, no Blade Runner, no Predator, no Lord of the Rings, no Marvel Cinematic Universe. Not even a Superman movie!
No nothing, just Star Wars ... and it was like nothing anyone had ever seen before.
It was three years before the sequel, The Empire Strikes Back came out, and three more after that before the rather disappointing Muppets in Space, a.k.a. Return of the Jedi, finished off the trilogy.
And then there was nothing for seventeen years.
In the meantime, if you cared about such things, you had to work out Darth Vader's backstory in your own head. Me, I pictured him as a hero of the Clone Wars, a hot shot pilot who, in a moment of extreme peril for his family or friends or the Republic, turned to the dark side and in the process, lost his soul.
Basically, Michael Corleone in space.
Not that it mattered. The original trilogy was the story of Luke Skywalker. Darth Vader was not much more than the evil MacGuffin that kept the plot moving. How he turned out to be Luke's father, well, space pilots are a typically randy bunch, I figured, prone to picking up green hookers in space bars ... you know, it didn't really matter!
And then the prequel trilogy came along and, what the holy hell!, Darth Vader turned out to be a little boy who grew up to be a whiny, cockblocked teenager who took his revenge on the galaxy because he couldn't spend all his time mooning over Natalie Portman.
Talk about your letdowns!
But look at that story from Domenic's perspective. A child of the 1990s, he saw the first six Star Wars movies in the order George Lucas now intends them to be seen, starting with The Phantom Menace and ending with Return of the Jedi. And that series was never about Luke Skywalker, it was about Anakin Skywalker (the future Mr. Darth Vader to you, pal).
For Domenic, Star Wars only ever unfolded in one way. No opportunity to be disappointed, no reason to be.
The point being, no work of art is ever a pristine, unchanging monument to objective truth. You bring a lifetime of experiences and expectations and prejudices with you every time you walk into a theater or a museum and that colors your interpretation of what you see. There's not one Mona Lisa, there are seven billion, and yours is probably just as valid as mine.
Something to think about before you go yelling at the kids to get off your lawn.
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. Best animated feature winners are noted with an @. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
I recently took time to revisit the works of Wes Anderson, from his tentative first outing Bottle Rocket to last year's entertainingly peculiar paean to the early days of the space race, Asteroid City — and everything in between.
And I swear I wrote a lengthy post, ranking his films, etc. But I can't find it anywhere. Maybe it's in a mislabeled file someplace. Maybe I only thought I wrote it. Maybe I just laid it all out for the dog on one of our long morning walks (as I am wont to do) and then forgot to type it up.
Well, if I did, the dog's not giving it up and my brain has already dumped that part of my memory to make room for Thursday night trivia.
Suffice it to say, after initially dismissing it during its run twenty-plus years ago, I now feel that Anderson's 2001 film The Royal Tenenbaums is worthy of nominations for picture, actor, director and supporting actress. Anderson is a quirky director — "twee" is the word most often associated with his work — and it takes time and the right frame of mind to get used to him.
I've acquired the taste.
The Royal Tenenbaums, a comedy that plays like a lost chapter from J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey, explores one of Anderson's favorite themes — family dysfunction. Gene Hackman is a charming con man who would like to reconnect with his brilliant but thoroughly screwed up kids (Luke Wilson, Ben Stiller and Gwyneth Paltrow) — because he's dying? Because he loves and misses them? Or because he's broke and just got thrown out of his apartment?
Well, as we've spent the last decade or so learning to our chagrin, truth is at best flexible and very much in the eye of the beholder.
The first time around, I found it all insufferably wacky but on second viewing, it felt more like one of those classic 1930s screwball comedies with an undercurrent of melancholy running through it — very much like My Man Godfrey, say, filmed in bright primary colors instead of glorious black-and-white.
In fact, I'll bet you could swap out William Powell for Gene Hackman and get just as big a kick out of both movies ... just thinking out loud here in the Monkey house.
Also stars Anjelica Huston, Owen Wilson, Bill Murray, Danny Glover and Seymour Cassel.
My favorite Wes Anderson film is still The Grand Budapest Hotel (read my review here) but I'd also recommend The Royal Tenenbaums, The Darjeeling Limited, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Moonrise Kingdom, Isle of Dogs, The French Dispatch (if you like old New Yorker magazine articles) and the aforementioned Asteroid City.
On the whole, whimsical, gentle, amusing.
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. Best animated feature winners are noted with an @. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
Named for Katie-Bar-The-Door, the Katies are "alternate Oscars"—who should have been nominated, who should have won—but really they're just an excuse to write a history of the movies from the Silent Era to the present day.
To see a list of nominees and winners by decade, as well as links to my essays about them, click the highlighted links:
Remember: There are no wrong answers, only movies you haven't seen yet.
The Silent Oscars
And don't forget to check out the Silent Oscars—my year-by-year choices for best picture, director and all four acting categories for the pre-Oscar years, 1902-1927.
Look at me—Joe College, with a touch of arthritis. Are my eyes really brown? Uh, no, they're green. Would we have the nerve to dive into the icy water and save a person from drowning? That's a key question. I, of course, can't swim, so I never have to face it. Say, haven't you anything better to do than to keep popping in here early every morning and asking a lot of fool questions?
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