Get Ur Petition-Signing On!

Take some time out of your day to support a worthy cause.

Nathan Coflin's ingenious petition to have a Confederate monument in Portsmouth, Virginia replaced with a statue of Missy Elliott has already received over 30,000 signatures! I have yet to hear a convincing argument as to why keeping these statues in public areas is anything resembling a good idea. I'd much rather honor someone whose singular voice has produced artistic daring for over two decades rather than an ideology that has continued to spread hatred and ignorance for well over a century. There's no downside to this becoming a reality!

Happy Eclipse

2016 Little Fox Movie Awards (Part 5): Top 16 and Individual Winners

I've had about seven months to sit on this list, so I feel pretty good about most of these. I wanted to watch American Honey, Silence, and Toni Erdmann again before releasing a finalized version of the list, but they're each in the three-hour range and, as you'll see, I'm very much a fan of all three, so I'll just watch them on my own time. So yeah, I'd say I'm pretty content. Otherwise? Everything I said at the start of this venture remains true. Here's the Top 16 Films (yes, I'm extending it to a Top 16) of 2016.

Top 16 Films of '16

1. 20th Century Women (Mike Mills) - No film held me as warmly while stoking a distant, curious, graceful affection for its characters.

2. Things to Come (Mia Hansen-Løve) - Such a subtly precarious vision of entangled ideals/individual choice, the ways in which they do/don’t liberate.

3. Moonlight (Barry Jenkins) - Artful control of a very rare milieu and character-type, even as psychology and drama constantly shapeshift.

4. The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos) - Singular vision of totalitarian compatibility and self-isolating rebellion; open to which is a more dubious fate.

The remaining titles on the Top 16 are after the jump:

2016 Little Fox Movie Awards (Part 4): Acting

We're already halfway through 2017 and I still haven't finished my year-end lists for 2016. I'm putting the final touches on the Top 10, which will hopefully be up within the coming days if my schedule permits it. But for now, enjoy my favorite performances of last year! Behold:

Best Actress in a Leading Role

Annette Bening (20th Century Women) - Communicates a million shades of hilarity, resentment, openness, and reticence within single reaction shots and line-readings.

Sonia Braga (Aquarius) - Who appears 30+ years/30+ minutes post-prologue and achieves a sense of enduring ease necessary to survive.

Viola Davis (Fences) - Backgrounding Rose with attentive care in first-half scenes and wearily finding her voice in the second.

Sandra Hüller (Toni Erdmann) - Sustains and brazens through Ade’s precarious comedic tone/setpieces, fluidly transitioning from chagrin, amusement, self-containment, and self-abasement.

Isabelle Huppert (Elle & Things to Come) - Two specific women, equal forms of restraint and nerve, both confounded and intrigued by their reactions.

Matches with Oscar: 1/5. (Viola nominated in Supporting; Bening M.I.A.)

Runners-Up: Portman (Jackie), Stone (La La Land), Steinfeld (The Edge of Seventeen) Adams (Arrival), Negga (Loving), Field (Hello, My Name is Doris), Beckinsale (Love & Friendship), Hightower (The Fits)

Top 25 of the 21st Century

I know there are other projects I need to be working on and that we seem to have had a new "best of the decade/century" list pop up around every new quarter of the past three years or so, but that didn't stop The New York Times from making a new one. But since I enjoy list-making so much and I haven't had an opportunity to discuss some of these movies, I thought I'd show you some of my favorites from 2000-present.

Quick note, before I reveal my own picks: I've put this list together on one previous occasion and it doesn't look anything like it does now, so these are subject to change as certain movies grow or shrink in estimation. For example, I'm not quite comfortable putting any of my favorites from 2016 on here just yet, since: 1. I haven't even revealed my Top 10 yet, and 2. am I ready to say I love 20th Century Women or Moonlight as much as, say, Mulholland Drive or Talk to Her? We'll get to last year's best shortly, but for now here are my 25 favorite films of the 21st century so far:

2016 Little Fox Movie Awards (Part 3): Direction and Screenplays

If you're tired of seeing so much 20th Century Women and Moonlight then you'll be sorely disappointed by these nominees, though perhaps you'll be excited by some of my other favorites that are finally getting mentions:

Best Director

Kleber Mendonça Filho (Aquarius) - Harnessing film's length, images’ energy, and Braga’s magnetism to pinpoint a personal history and its intrusions.

Mia Hansen-Løve (Things to Come) - Few stylistic risks, but understated intersectionalities and frictions of radicalism, disappointment, and freedom are bold feats.

Barry Jenkins (Moonlight) - Synthesizing a triptych of experiences, filtering their reverberations through filming-styles rarely seen within this narrative type.

Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster) - Exuding total confidence in his humor, frames, actors, and vision by embracing the bleak, slippery ambiguities.

Mike Mills (20th Century Women) - Seeing in Bening a mother’s ambivalence, and rooted in that ambivalence a whole ancestry of paradox.

Matches with Oscar: 1/5.

Runners-Up: Villeneuve (Arrival), Arnold (American Honey), Ahn (Spa Night), Larraín (Neruda), Audiard (Dheepan), Verhoeven (Elle), Ade (Erdmann), Almodóvar (Julieta)

2016 Little Fox Movie Awards (Part 2): Visual Categories

 Click here to see Part 1 and my reasons for starting so late. Remaining categories will commence within the coming days.

Best Cinematography

American Honey (Robbie Ryan) - For the tight, hemmed in corners of its 4:3 frames, binding intimate, sprawling, and social-realist textures.

Arrival (Bradford Young) - For resourceful ingenuity of communication scenes, Tarkovskian wit of clairvoyant memories, and boxed-in framing of Adams.

Jackie (Stéphane Fontaine) - For symmetrical candor at odds with forceful preservation of heritage, and that tricky balance of macabre/elegance.

Moonlight (James Laxton) - For an exciting array of palettes, light, movements, and surfaces, smartly cohering through specific emotional/visual energies.

Silence (Rodrigo Prieto) - For revealing a decidedly austere world less through severe images/content than through metaphysical light and landscapes.

Matches with Oscar: 3/5.

Runners-Up: Lion, Things to Come, The Light Between Oceans, Embrace of the Serpent, Cemetery of Splendor, Café Society, Francofonia, The Lobster, Captain Fantastic