See cinema differently
I thought I'd keep something I could update on a semi-regular basis on here, showing my favourite films from each calendar year, separated by year of production (differing from my end-of-year lists, which favour UK release). I'm going back as far as 1940 for now, largely because the number of films per year that I've …
Continue reading "List: Top 10 Films Of Every Year, By Year Of Production"
Let us continue then. Compiling this list hammered home for me the diverse nature of the beast at hand. Horror has so many subcategories. Vampire pictures. Zombie pictures. Portmanteau films. Found footage. And horror arrives at different tempos. There are the zany comedies. The restrained chillers. The gonzo gorefests. The brutally nihilistic. And, as in …
October, capped as it is by Halloween, is the month most routinely turned to for horror. Some of you out there may even be entertaining yourselves with the 31 days of horror challenge that rattles routinely around social media this month. I've been contemplating a best horror films list for quite a while now, always …
"They don't make 'em like they used to," people often decry, citing the lack of ideas in modern movie making. And that's a fair criticism of some circles (see the ouroboros of the Hollywood machine, where big bucks outclass big ideas too often). But there's plenty in modern cinema worth celebrating. Here then, are 100 …
Continue reading "100 Great Films Of The 21st Century – Part 1"
Without further ado or the ambling opening paragraph, let's do this. 25. Earth - Angels Of Darkness, Demons Of Light I My personal favourite of Earth's tremendous 'second phase' which started with 2005's Hex: or Printing In The Infernal Method. There's a dusty slowness to AOD, DOL I. Great. So what, right? That's what Earth do. …
Continue reading "What I Listen To: 50 Albums Of The Decade So Far Pt. II"
I live in two minds about award ceremonies. On the one hand picking the best anything is an act of futility. Taste has so much to do with it. So because of that they seem indulgent and overblown, at worst self-congratulatory acts of excess when so many more vital things warrant the cost and attention. …
Day Five. The top 20. My desert island films. I could watch pretty much any of these films any time. The reasons for their appeal vary; I'll get into that a little bit. But these are the ones that, for whatever reason, stir my spaghetti. Okay, enough prerequisite preamble. Let's just do this! 20. The …
Day Four brings us right up to the edge of the top 20, so the movies featured here are prized, one and all. This is also, perhaps, where the list gets most personal, identifying the titles that particularly make me tick (however damning that may be...) But, before we continue, a brief word on the notable …
Day Three and we're into the top 100... As previously I'd like to stress that this is a personal list of the films that make me tick. It's not meant to be the final word in what's worth seeing. More a statement of my taste at this particular point in time. Making lists is fun. …
Day Two of this mammoth, self-indulgent countdown and I'd like to address a fair criticism of both Empire's list and certainly of mine. Both sets of films lean heavily on recent releases. It'd be nice to be fair, give equal share to decades past. Have as many movies from the 30's as from the 00's. …
So, Empire magazine recently performed a reader's poll for their 301st issue, taking the public's temperature on what are the best films of all time. As expected the results were varied and - such is the nature of a public vote - heavily skewed to crowd-pleasing blockbusters, especially in its top section. There's nothing wrong …
Not everything is always about movies here at thelosthighwayhotel. Some stuff's about TV. TV, especially American TV, is increasingly indistinguishable in quality from feature films. True, there's still an awful lot of dross out there, but over the last 20 years or so we've seen TV aspire to greater things. Indeed, the serial drama offers …
