What did you see this weekend?

by Nathaniel R

What did you see this week? I caught up with Ralph Breaks the Internet and *gasp* Paddington 2 (I regret my life choices that put the latter off this long). Here's what general audiences and big city moviegoers were checking out...

Weekend Box Office (Estimates) (December 14th-16th)
W I D E 800+ screens	PLATFORM / LIMITED excluding prev. wide
1 🔺 Into the Spider-Verse $35.4 on 3813 screens *NEW* Review	1 🔺 The Favourite $2.5 on 439 screens (cum. $6.7) Review, Podcast ❤️

2 🔺 The Mule $17.2 on 2588 screens *NEW*	2 🔺 Mary Queen of Scots $700k on 66 screens (cum. $961k) Review

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Top 25 Reasons to Watch "White Christmas" This Season

Members of Team Experience have been asked to share their favorite Christmas movie. Here's new contributor Eurocheese...

25 Reasons to Watch White Christmas (Again)

01 Eye popping color (the first VistaVision film!) at every opportunity

02 The “Sisters” number! A surprise drag number where the actors can’t stop giggling in the 1950s? Yes please.

03 The way the movie teases snow until we almost demand it...

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FYC?

Dearest Readers, Nathaniel and Team Experience are requesting your memory jogs as we prepare our "best of the year" lists. We're particularly looking at the following fields of joy that are sometimes hard to keep a mental list of in the busy last months of the year.

So what are YOUR favorite...

• Line readings of the year?
• Best kisses or sex scenes?
• Favorite credits sequence?
• Action sequence or fight scene?
• Cameos or tiny roles?
• Individual scenes of any kind?

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Reviewed

Every Saturday this month, Tim will be taking a look at one of the films submitted for the Best Animated Feature Oscar.

Fans of Marvel's iconic hero Spider-Man have had a packed 2018, between Tom Holland's third big-screen turn as the character in Avengers: Infinity War and Tom Hardy's role as the antihero Eddie Brock in the conspicuously Spider-Man-less Venom. But the best has very much been saved for last, in the form of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, a new animated feature that's easily the best Spider-Man movie since Spider-Man 2 (2004) back in the distant early days of the modern superhero movie boom.

The film is the first big-screen adventure of Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), who first appeared in comic books in 2011 as a new Spider-Man following the temporary death of Peter Parker. He's a Brooklyn teenager, awkwardly fitting into life at an elite boarding school, living in perpetual chagrin at the overbearing authority of his cop dad (Brian Tyree Henry), and expressing himself through graffiti art (one of the things his dad is specifically overbearing about). And if that was all he ever was or did, Into the Spider-Verse would still put up a good argument for itself as a more than worthy movie...

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New to the National Film Registry: Brokeback Mountain, Hud, etc...

by Nathaniel R

Each year in the thick of precursor awards season we are momentarily (and pleasantly!) asked to think about the entire history of motion pictures. Each December the Library of Congress adds 25 new movies to their list of American titles worthy of preservation. The criteria is "cultural, historic and aesthetic importance to the nation’s film heritage."

The most recent inductee this year is Ang Lee's neo western gay classic Brokeback Mountain (2005) which is about as deserving as titles get for this honor. And we're personally thrilled to see the best movie of 1963, Hud, added. Here's the whole list chronologically...

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