AFI 100 Years… 100 Movies: An Overdue Update

by Juan Carlos Ojano

CITIZEN KANE (1941) was the top-placer in both editions.

I ended my 2025 by watching the remaining films from the AFI 100 Years… 100 Movies, both from the 1997 and the 2007 editions. From the egregiously racist The Birth of a Nation (1915) to the broodingly dark Blade Runner (1982), it was fulfilling to finally finish these films, an endeavor that I started back when I was in high school and just finished now in my 30s.

So this reminded me that AFI was supposed to do the 100 Movies list every ten years, but they only revisited it once, with 2017 marking its supposed update but crickets from the institute. While it is probably a longshot, 2027 marks another chance for the AFI to release an updated version of the list. For the 2007 version, the most recent films they considered were three films from 2005: Brokeback Mountain, Crash, and Good Night, and Good Luck.

 So with 2025 now over, let’s do an exercise: which films from 2006 to 2025 would most likely be considered to be added to an updated list should it happen soon? Let’s go…

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Better Luck Next Time, Nathan Crowley

by Cláudio Alves

If Sarah Greenwood wins the Oscar for Barbie, Nathan Crowley will officially become the most nominated production designer without a single win. You may be familiar with his name from many Christopher Nolan pictures since he's worked on most of them. But most is not all, and this past year, the British production designer was absent from the Oppenheimer credits. Ruth De Jong did that job and is now up for an Oscar thanks to it. Crowley, however, was less fortunate. Instead of the blockbuster biopic, he was busy re-imagining the wondrous world of Roald Dahl for Wonka – new on PVOD if you want a taste of Chalamet…

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Familiar Faces: The Chris Nolan Players

by Nathaniel R

Christopher Nolan's "Tenet" cast has a lot of first timers, including all of its leads. So will John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, or Elizabeth Debicki come back for more?

Normally we wouldn't do one of these "familiar faces" for a director known for sequels since they automatically give you repeated thespians. Repeat appearances in the work of a franchise director don't necessarily indicate affection or a favorite performative color on their palette. They're only a sure sign of  contractual / narrative obligation. Elsewhere in Christopher Nolan's filmography, though, we see that he is a true creature of habit when it comes to actors so chances are he would have worked with some of the franchise players again even if it weren't mandatory. 

With Tenet now reasonably priced for rental more people will be seeing it. Let's look at the faces that have most frequently populated Nolan's ambitious and often very financially successful endeavors...

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The Astronaut Dramas of the 2010s

by Juan Carlos Ojano

Two-time Oscar winner Goerge Clooney directs and stars in Netflix’s final awards contender to drop to streaming during this calendar year, the science fiction drama The Midnight Sky. Based on a novel by Lily Brooks-Dalton, the film follows a lone scientist (Clooney) in the Arctic who must contact a group of astronauts to stop them from returning to earth. This is Clooney’s first film as an actor since 2016’s Money Monster and his first as a director since 2017’s Suburbicon. The film will join a curiously large cinematic trend of 2010s Hollywood: the astronaut drama...

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Guardians Up, Captain Down at the Saturn Awards

The Saturn Awards, which began in the 1970s, get increasingly more confusing each decade. When they first began they were very sci-fi/fantasy niche and now they regularly seem to honor films that don't have anything at all to do with once geeky now mainstream genres like that. Consider that they have nine best picture type categories and they're expansive enough in their definitions that at least half of Oscar's Best Picture nominees were nominated for something and Whiplash and The Theory of Everything even get to be Best Film winners -- neither of which seem at all "genre" though I suppose The Theory of Everything is kinda cosmic in that it has a genre icon in Stephen Hawkings as its subject.

The big winners at the annual event were Interstellar and Guardians of the Galaxy. The big loser was Captain America: Winter Soldier which had the most nominations of all (11) and managed to lose them each one. Complete list of winners after the jump...

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