I opined when it came to Up that it’s hard to judge the Pixar canon because there are so few missteps, but when it comes to favorites, everyone’s got to have one. You have to at some point think of which one you love the most. It’s not like they’re your children. Though a case can be made for almost every single one of their films, the one that gets me the hardest, and the one that always works me over like a sap is Monsters Inc. My review of it after the jump.

Lloyd Dobler. This name resonates for those who love Say Anything because if you make a list of great cinematic romantic characters, Lloyd Dobler is one of the few truly resonant male characters in the genre. Soulful, but not weak, Dobler is an outsider smart enough to know what he doesn’t want. Cementing the appeal of John Cusack for generations, even with some classic characters in Better off Dead and the series of comedies that followed, Cusack was a light comic actor. Here he takes it to the next level. My review of Say Anything after the jump.

Chris Columbus used to have a magic touch. Sure, you might not have liked the movies, but he was the hand behind the first two Home Alone movies and the first two Harry Potter films. He’s had misfires, for sure, but his first major script was Gremlins. Gremlins. But when you look at his filmography he goes from highs to lows, but there’s something of a chance-taker in him too. He was the guy who wanted to direct Rent, for god’s sake. And though his plastic hands have released such odious affairs as Stepmom and Bicentennial Man, he’s not a filmmaker to write off. My review of his latest - I Love You Beth Cooper - after the jump.

We’re done with Sacha Baron Cohen’s most famous creations, cinematically speaking. When Da Ali G show hit it was a sensation in England, and a cult hit in America, and ignitied some stateside interest in this great prankster. On the show he played the daft Ali G (which was turned into the film Ali G Indahouse, released DTV stateside), the foreigner Borat (which was turned into runaway hit Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan) and the gay German fashionista Bruno (turned into Bruno). With the huge success of Borat, the possibility of Cohen being able to prank people got smaller and smaller, and so Bruno is the last shot until Cohen turns himself into something new, or hides for a while. My review of Bruno after the jump.

It’s A Wonderful Life is a wonderful film.  Does that sound cliché? Well, too bad, because it has been voted the number one most inspiring film of all time by the American Film Institute (AFI).  Frank Capra’s film holds up to the hype, and that’s a very difficult thing to live up to after so many years and years of fanfare.  Broadcast every holiday season, this film is considered a “Christmas movie” though it’s not really about Christmas at all.  It was continually shown during the holiday season, as the rights had fallen into public domain, so TV stations ran it endlessly during the holidays without having to pay a royalty.  The aggressive broadcasts assaulted the public, happily creating several generations to take notice.  Though it may have always been regarded among only film buffs as a great film, television is responsible for it its rediscovery, and for crowning it one of the royal classics, along with Gone with the Wind and the Wizard of Oz. My full review after the jump:

I remember when Clerks was announced. It was a Sundance favorite and trailered along with Pulp Fiction. Having had some counter experience, and being a Star Wars nerd, Clerks looked like sweet elixir. And I went to see it opening weekend (in a double feature with Stargate), and was in the Kevin Smith. Revisiting his films Clerks, Chasing Amy and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back on Blu-ray in the Kevin Smith collection is a chance to wrestle with what makes Kevin Smith great and somewhat terrible. My review after the jump.

Hollywood has figured something out, which is that even if you spend a shit-ton of money on a film, that in and of itself can attract an audience. It’s hard to look at the relative success of Waterworld at the box office as anything more than rubbernecking on the freeway, and it was worthwhile for many who had grown tired of Kevin Costner. My review of Waterworld after the jump.

Wings of Desire is one of those films that I’ve always wanted to see, but been weary of getting around to watching. Sure, it’s a well-respected classic of its time, often cited as one of the great films of the  1980’s, and held the cache of “the foreign film people who don’t watch foreign films love” much like films like Amelie or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. But when the film came out Pauline Kael decimated it in her review. And I hate being the movie guy who doesn’t like films that everyone else likes, which is often the case. My review after the jump.

Catalog titles FTW. I am one of those rare people who enjoy being “double dipped.” I like upgrading to Blu-ray if I love a film, because you only get to watch a movie for the first time once, and so a different and better transfer is a reason (at least for me) to get excited about a film you’ve seen a number of times. When I would go see something in the theater on multiple occasions, I’d often go to different theaters (or failing that, different seats). My reviews of the Blu-rays of Heat and Logan’s Run after the jump.

When talking about the latest Pixar, it’s easy to fall into superlatives. Really, there’s only one modestly bad apple, and that’s Cars. The other film singled out as less than is A Bug’s Life, but that’s a solid film in its own right, and probably their most underrated. So is it fair to call Up a masterpiece? Yes. Yes it is. My review of Up after the jump.

The journey of Sam Mendes is an awkward one. A talented stage director, his first film came to win best picture, and fueled a (not undeserved) backlash against him. His second film was coolly received, while his next two pictured showed a lessening presence. Revolutionary Road was delayed for a year and was not the academy bait that was hoped for. For the summer of 2009 his most personal, and most satisfying film was released, Away We Go, and it shows a mellowed director dealing with personal issue is a way more satisfying way. My review after the jump.

Going back to the old masters, going back to the classics is always illuminating. Someone like Alfred Hitchcock knew how to frame a film. He knew where he was putting his camera, and why it was there. As in North by Northwest he achieved one of the great visual representations of sex. Cary Grant lifts Eva Marie Saint up to bed, and then a train enters a tunnel. Not exactly subtle, but undeniably brilliant. My review after the jump.

When you walk into Natural Born Killers, you wonder what drugs the makers were taking. And maybe for a little bit you might want to partake as well, but it’s probably best to not. Regardless of one’s sobriety whilst watching Natural Born Killers, there is no denying that is both a trip and a ride, which is fair enough as much of it is a road picture. My review after the jump.

To American audiences, the late producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory are best known for their trio of E.M. Forster adaptations - which is telling for careers spanning 40 years and nearly 30 films together (almost all with writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala), making their Forster output roughly ten percent of their body of work. But then again, the names “Merchant and Ivory” are a sort of cinematic shorthand used to denote British films about boring people. My review of Howard’s End after the jump.

There are two things it’s hard to get away from when discussing Woody Allen: the first is that his output is so constant, there’s going to be winners mixed with losers. Over the last couple years, Allen’s talent has been scattershot to say the least, but then he might surprise you with a film like Match Point, or Vicki Christina Barcelona. Even his early funny period had some misfires, but that leads into the second point, which is that Allen has not been strong for a long time. You can never count him out, but the 21^st century is easily his weakest period of cinema. Whatever Works, however, was written a very long time ago, and it shows, so it combines early funny with later Woody. My review after the jump.

Considering the worldwide phenomenon Wallace and Gromit have become, it’s something of a mystery that the stop-motion duo’s latest adventure, the Hitchcockian “who-donut” A Matter of Loaf and Death, would go straight to home video in the States (as opposed to overseas, where the BBC debuted the film to through-the-roof ratings on Christmas Day). The upside of the arrangement is that it gives American fans an excuse to snag the entire W&G collection on Blu-ray, complete with commentaries, extras and a host of “Cracking Contraptions” shorts.

As it turns out, Loaf and Death is actually something of a letdown, trading the retro-styled charm of their three previous shorts and feature-length adventure Curse of the Were-Rabbit for faster pacing, a fair amount of CG and a bunch of recent blockbuster references (after operating in a 1940s-style time capsule all these years, does the series really need references to Aliens?). It seems unfair to complain, given the overall quality of any given Aardman effort, but chock it up to the fact that W&G creator Nick Park and his team got it so right with 1993’s The Wrong Trousers. More after the jump: