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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This & That: SAG fallout, Beale St agnosticism, Kidman's AACTA win

December is a bear, isn't it? It just keeps on coming at you and more intense as it goes, too. We're so far behind, we're just going to do this with no structure and no editing. Here is a list of lots of news-items or curiousities that are probably worthy of their own articles  but they aren't going to get them! We need a big staff (now seeking volunteers!) Okay, here we go...

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Christmas at TFE: "While You Were Sleeping"

Team Experience will be discussing their favorite holiday films! First up is Chris Feil...

One part of the tradition of revisiting Christmas classics this time of year is debating whether or not a film technically qualifies as a “Christmas movie”. These perceptions sometimes sway with the tides. Lately, the bros have won and conventional wisdom will tell you that Die Hard is indeed a Christmas movie. Eyes Wide Shut? Welcome, but with reservations.

My personal “Yes it’s a Christmas movie” vendetta is While You Were Sleeping. The confirmation that this is the hill I will die (though perhaps not alone) on is of the unfortunately reductive sort. In my experience, other viewers seems all too appeased by considering Sleeping simply as a romantic comedy. But to consider it so simply is to ignore the central journey of Sandra Bullock’s heroine Lucy, and the kind of stories we revisit this time of year and why they resonate.

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