Ranking the Men of "L.A. Confidential"

We're revisiting the 1997 film year in the lead up to the next Supporting Actress Smackdown.  Here's Ben Miller on L.A Confidential

For my money, Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential is a bonafide masterpiece. Despite nine Oscar nominations and a Best Supporting Actress victory for Kim Basinger, the ample group of fine male actors missed any sort of accolades. It doesn't mean some of them didn't deserve it.

Here are my picks for the 10 best male performances from that film...

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Happy Birthday to... Me

me chillin' with the boyfriends cat. my #1 favourite relaxation technique

Hello dearest readers. Today is my birthday (I want no gifts for myself other than donations -- here's our fundraiser since we'd love to go to Venice again and keep active through the fall film season. Or if you'd like to subscribe you can see that in the sidebar and choose a small monthly donation amount). 

Let's have fun with lists, shall we? Obviously movies aren't made with any one person in mind -- that would be insane -- but have you ever felt like a movie was made just for you or was just what you needed or found yourself unable to not obsess? Because nostaglia has struck me, herewith are the (mostly) movies from each year from 1989 forward that felt (at the time) like personal gifts to me...

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Ranking the International Feature Film Winners

by Juan Carlos Ojano

From De Sica to Hamaguchi, the past two years of hosting the podcast The One-Inch Barrier has allowed me to watch all that films that were selected by the Academy for its International Feature Film category - 74 winners and 337 nominees (all but one title). While this category has had its issues over the years, it has also put an international spotlight on non-English language cinema on Hollywood’s biggest night. While the category has  always been far from a perfect encapsulation of world cinema, it's a great jumping off point as noted in the series finale.  (Cláudio Alves did a beautiful summary of our discussion - video included!). 

Here is my personal not-that-definitive ranking of the winners of the category. Things are very fluid especially in the midsection... 

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Happy Mothers Day + 'Mother' Recommendations

Nicole Kidman posted this beautiful image this morning to celebrate. Look at baby Nic! Happy Mothers Day to all readers especially the mothers. And happy mothers day to everyone, retroactively, who ever birthed someone who helped bring the world movie magic. 

And for fun after the jump, 12 favourite movies with mothers in the title...

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Counter-Point: The 50 “Best” Rom-Coms (Pre-’90s)

by Mark Brinkerhoff

That sound you heard this week? It likely was #FilmTwitter collectively reeling from reading The Ringer staff’s list of the 50 “best” romantic comedies of all time. What prompted such a breathless response, however, was that only one of the films on the instantly infamous list pre-dated the 1980s, and it *wasn’t* Annie Hall. No, that Best Picture-winning, genre-redefining classic didn’t make the top *50*, Harold and Maude did. 

Now far be it for me to quibble about anything the late, great Hal Ashby made (namely Harold and Maude) but the otherwise ignorance of literally more than half a century of not only the very best rom-coms, but some of the finest films of all time—period—can’t go unnoticed. So with that, here’s a non-exhaustive, chronological list of the “best” rom-coms from the genre’s Golden Age in the ’30s through its modernization in the ’70s/’80s with links to where you can watch them...

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