It’s the eve of the 88th Academy Awards, which means we’re up to our necks in Oscar prognostication. Will Leo finally nab that Best Actor award? Is Mad Max: Fury Road getting any recognition? And what will host Chris Rock say about another year of whitewashed nominees? Awards predictions are a dime a dozen, yet the far …
It’s the end of January and, as such, all the movie chatter is centered around what will win Best Picture at this year’s Academy Awards. Every year presents a new lineup of polarizing choices, but 2016 really took the cake with a severe lack of diversity. The Revenant and its 12 nominations were acknowledged, but …
Far be it from me to disagree with our staff, but I would hard-pressed to name 30 films from 2015 that I would consider among the “best” of the year. The same can’t be said for film music, though. As predictable as each superhero template or franchise reboot may have been this year, composers keep …
2015 was yet another strong year for movies, so much so that we had over 100 films submitted by our numerous contributors for consideration. In the end, these are the 30 that made the cut for PopOptiq’s Best of the Year. Enjoy! 30.) Shaun the Sheep Aardman Studios is the stop-motion clay animation equivalent …
It is a sad indicator of how mainstream studios fail to cater for female audiences that led to the creation of the term “woman’s film”, a brand of domestic melodrama that reached its cultural and commercial peak during the Second World War. Instead of being widely accepted as additions to the canon of quality American …
It begins and ends with a look. In that look is hesitance, longing, desire, confusion, confidence, conviction, hope. Even love. On NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour, writer and critic Glenn Weldon described real chemistry between actors living in the look, elaborating on the attraction manifesting in the movement of the eyes.
Film scores are pretty ephemeral to a large chunk of the movie-going populace, where music isn’t noticeable unless a triumphant fanfare or sweeping ballad draws enough attention to itself. So if scoring is already the film industry’s unappreciated middle child, how silly is a list about ones that haven’t been released yet? Very silly. Oftentimes, …