The Tree of Life, which led the Online Film Critics Society nominations with seven, was the big winner at the 15th Annual Online Film Critics Society Awards. The film took home the prize for Best Picture as well as trophies for Best Director (Terrence Malick), Best Supporting Actress (Jessica Chastain), Best Editing and Best Cinematography. No other film won more than one award.

The other three acting winners were Michael Fassbender winning Best Actor for his performance in Shame; Tilda Swinton’s work in We Need to Talk About Kevin won the award for Best Actress; and Christopher Plummer received the Best Supporting Actor prize for his work in Beginners.

The full list of winners of the 15th Annual Online Film Critics Society Awards:

Best Picture:
The Tree of Life

Best Animated Feature:
Rango

Best Director:
Terrence Malick – The Tree of Life

Best Lead Actor:
Michael Fassbender – Shame

Best Lead Actress:
Tilda Swinton – We Need to Talk About Kevin

Best Supporting Actor:
Christopher Plummer – Beginners

Best Supporting Actress:
Jessica Chastain – The Tree of Life

Best Original Screenplay:
Midnight in Paris

Best Adapted Screenplay:
Tinker Tailor Solider Spy

Best Editing:
The Tree of Life

Best Cinematography:
The Tree of Life

Best Film Not in the English Language:
A Separation

Best Documentary:
Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Special Awards (previously announced):
To Jessica Chastain, the breakout performer of the year
To Martin Scorsese in honor of his work and dedication to the pursuit of film preservation

Founded in 1997, the Online Film Critics Society has been the key force in establishing and raising the standards for Internet-based film journalism. The OFCS membership consists of film reviewers, journalists and scholars based in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Latin America and the Asia/Pacific Rim region. For more information, visit the Online Film Critics Society at ofcs.org.

For Seattle cinema lovers, 2011 was a good news/bad news year. For the bad, there was the May closure of the Columbia City Cinema and the February conversion of the Neptune into a music and events hall. The empty Uptown reminded us of another neighborhood theater with history gone dark. And the rush to digital projection in the minimally manned multiplexes left too many screens getting dimmer because of 2-D digital prints run through 3-D splitters (no, it’s not your eyes going bad) and more digital prints replacing 35mm screenings of classic films. But let’s not forget the good. Here are the 10 best reasons for movie-loving Seattleites to celebrate this year.

1) SIFF saves the Uptown! And in the same year the Seattle International Film Festival left its McCaw Hall time-share for its own year-round theater/permanent headquarters at Seattle Center. The Uptown deal came together more quickly (over the past year), and its October reopening gave SIFF four screens with both film and digital capabilities. Two blocks apart, the two venues will expand local access to the kinds of foreign, art-house, and independent films that other cities can experience only on Netflix and VOD.

2) The Cinerama 70mm Festival. Paul Allen just gave his pet movie palace a costly new renovation, and brought in independent management (Greg Wood of Portland’s Roseway Theater) to replace national operator AMC. So while it can and does show big blockbusters and digital 3-D, the Cinerama celebrated its makeover in September with 16 days of 70mm and Cinerama prints of classic films (the original high-def). Change is inevitable, but every movie lover deserves to see the texture and color of actual film.

Continue reading at  Seattle Weekly

The 2011 Village Voice Film Poll is out and I once again was invited to participate.

The only disappointment for me is that I was unable  to see two of the films that made the Top Ten compilation list: Margaret (still hasn’t screened for Seattle critics and no Fox offered no DVD screeners) and A Separation (that did screen in Seattle, but only after the poll deadline).

On the bright side, my top four films all placed in the compilation Top Ten. Which ones are those? You’ll have to can see my list here.

Just for the record, and because it’s no surprise, The Tree of Life took the top spot, just as it did for the Indiewire survey and the MSN poll.

The 2010 World Poll from Senses of Cinema is now up. I contributed a list (with comments) here, and I finally got to include my favorite film screening of 2010 in a list: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (which opens in the U.S. in 2011).

The Online Film Critics Society (of which yours truly is a member) announced the winners of the 14th Annual Online Film Critics Society Awards on the morning of Monday, January 3. And here they are…

Picture: The Social Network
Director: David Fincher, The Social Network
Actor: Colin Firth, The King’s Speech
Actress: Natalie Portman, Black Swan
Supporting Actor: Christian Bale, The Fighter
Supporting Actress: Hailee Steinfeld, True Grit
Original Screenplay: Christopher Nolan, Inception
Adapted Screenplay: Aaron Sorkin, The Social Network
Foreign Language Film: Mother (South Korea)
Documentary: Exit Through The Gift Shop
Animated Feature: Toy Story 3
Cinematography: Roger Deakins, True Grit
Editing: Lee Smith, Inception

The complete announcement is at the OFCS website here.

Best-of lists are by their nature subjective things, and even more so when it comes to DVD/Blu-ray. What makes a DVD release the “best”? The movie itself? The video and audio quality of the mastering and presentation? The supplements? Rarity of the title? Scope of the collection? Critical acclaim? Cult demand? Some inexplicable balance of some or all of these?

Well, I guess the latter is the closest we’ll come to quantifying the mysterious process, which is why rather than the usual Top Ten list, I’ve broken my picks into categories, so I can celebrate a box set achievement separately from a brilliant home video debut separately from a landmark restoration. Which is not to say this list is not run through with my own subjective judgments, simply that I have found my own way to spread the love around (including naming runners-up as my whims take me). I reviewed most (though not all) of these on various websites (including Parallax View) and have linked to these longer pieces wherever possible.

And for the 2010 release that I love most, allow me to present my…

DVD Release of the Year

Three Silent Classics by Josef Von Sternberg (Criterion)

Josef von Sternberg is the great stylist of the thirties, a Hollywood maverick with a taste for visual exoticism and baroque flourishes (which prompted David Thomson to dub him “the first poet of underground cinema”), but step back into his silent work and you’ll find a storyteller of unparalleled talent and one of the great directors of silent cinema.

Continue reading at Parallax View.

Once again, I was honored with an invitation to participate in the annual Village Voice / LA Weekly Film Critics’ Poll. (It went live earlier this week but I’ve been out for Christmas and let things slide a bit.) The list is slightly different from my MSN list, and even though it was published after the MSN poll, its deadline was earlier, so this was a bit more spontaneous, a little less worked over.

The introduction to the poll and its results are here. The compilation results are here, but you can go here to jump directly to the individual lists. My lists (top ten films plus picks for best performers, directors and others) are here.

Go ahead. Make my list.

I’ve been slow updating the DVD pages here because I’ve been pouring through end-of-the-year releases and writing up lists and essays to go along with them.

The first of those lists is now up at MSN, where I joined twelve other critics and film writers in a collective survey of the best of the year. The feature, which counts down the compilation list with accompanying essays, starts here.

My piece is here (no spoilers from me; you’ll have to click through to find out) and you can view the individual lists (not just mine, but lists from friends and colleagues Jim Emerson, Richard T. Jameson, Glenn Kenny, Kim Morgan, Kathleen Murphy and others) starting here.

More to come as the screenings continue and I watch (and rewatch) the 2010 offerings.

Happy April Fools Day. For years I have been pitching pieces to MSN for the April Fools Day edition of the Entertainment site. This year they accepted my modest tribute to this magnificent holiday: The Top Ten Films of the Next Decade. Think of it as a speculative list, based on careful reading of the careers, themes, artistic aspirations and economic models of the present, which I then tossed out for all this made up shit. Enjoy. Also note, this top ten list has twelve entries.

You can’t make this stuff up. Well OK, you can make this stuff up, and that’s the fun of looking ahead. I mean, why wait until the last minute to make a 10-best list? To get a jump on the rush, we’ve put on our prognostication caps, hit the flash-forward button and come back from the future with this snapshot of the 10 best films of the 2010s. We were just as surprised as you at the results.

“The Matrix: Devolution” (The Wachowski Brothers Siblings)
After the bizarre journey of Larry Wachowski’s transformation into Lana and a hermitlike retreat following the debacle of “Speed Racer” (only recently resurrected as a subversive blast of cinematic surrealism), the Wachowski Siblings relaunched their brand with a return trip to the virtual world that made their fame and fortune. Drawing liberally from the New Testament, the New Wave and various volumes of “Chicken Soup for the Soul,” “Devolution” pairs the messianic Neo with a sassy Southern society lady (Sandra Bullock, back with Keanu Reeves for the first time since “Speed“) who gets caught in the program while playing what she thinks is a cutting-edge version of fantasy football. Impressed with his ability to surf the Web and dodge bullets at the same time, she tries to adopt the jacked-up orphan and ends up marrying him rather than face deportation. The virtual romantic comedy of cyber-geddon took the country by storm: “Titanic” meets “Tron” with a dose of Southern comfort and a flashback soundtrack that turned “Freedom of Choice” and “Mongoloid” into anthems for the new generation of techno-rebels.

Read the entire piece at MSN here.

I confess that I’ve been both proud and chagrined at the winners of previous Online Film Critics  Society awards. This year, I couldn’t be more proud to put my name behind the list of winners. They’re not all MY top choice, but they do make a statement that I’m happy to stand behind.

The awards, announced on the evening of January 5, 2010, are as follows:

Best Picture: The Hurt Locker
Best Director: Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker
Best Actor: Jeremy Renner, The Hurt Locker
Best Actress: Melanie Laurent, Inglourious Basterds
Best Supporting Actor: Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds
Best Supporting Actress: Mo’Nique, Precious
Best Original Screenplay: Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds
Best Adapted Screenplay: Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach, Fantastic Mr. Fox, based on a book by Roald Dahl
Best Documentary: Anvil!: The Story of Anvil
Best Picture Not in the English Language: The White Ribbon
Best Animated Feature: Up
Best Cinematography: Robert Richardson, Inglourious Basterds
Best Score: Michael Giacchino, Up
Best Editing: Chris Innis and Bob Murawski, The Hurt Locker

The complete press release can be found on the OFCS New Blog here.

I did the conventional “Best of 2009 on DVD and Blu-ray” for MSN here but I’ve been having some fun exploring the less heralded releases of 2009 for Parallax View. In fact, many of the reviews originally appeared on this blog but I’ve organized them into something resembling a series of features. If you feel like revisiting some of the releases that flew under the radar of the mainstream DVD coverage, check out these pieces:

Ten DVD Releases That Made 2009 Great

DVD Discoveries and Rediscoveries 2009

TV on DVD 2009 – The Great, the Rediscovered and the Timeless

Good Things in Big Packages: DVD Box Sets of 2009

The Village Voice / LA Weekly Year End Film Poll results are in and The Hurt Locker is the consensus pick for the year’s best film. I couldn’t agree more; it was my pick as well.

The compilation list (with point totals) is here and you can check out the individual lists on this page here. My list (which is only slightly different than the one I compiled for MSN) can be found here.

The Hurt Locker