Thursday Movie Picks: Post-Apocalyptic World

Thursday is upon us. It's the end of the world as we know it, and I'm feeling fine...and like showcasing some funny movies.

Post-Apocalyptic Movies can get a little bit heavy, and I haven't seen enough Mad Max movies for them to qualify. I also didn't want go Hunger Games-Divergent-Maze Runner on this one, nor did I want to get into the darkness of something like The Road.

So, another week of Wandering through the Shelves' Thursday Movie Picks.

Speaks Reviews Rants: The Hateful Eight

★★ 1/2** out of ★★★★

Do I have to? Ugh. This is gonna be hard.

Because I Love David Bowie,...

...here's the best use of his music in a movie.

In Movie Lines (with Movies from 2015 and Fantasy Football): January 3- January 9

Movies I've Watched

January 3rd - January 9th, 2016

Speaks Reviews: The Revenant

★★★★ out of ★★★★

The Revenant is a painful, punishing film heightened by an obvious level of dedication from its cast and crew rarely seen in modern cinema. It is also graced by the visual touch of Emmanuel "Chivo" Lubezki, the finest cinematographer in recent movie history. It is, for director Alejandro González Iñárritu, a work on the level of the best epics of the wilderness, reminiscent of the type of maniacal filmmaking achieved by the likes of Werner Herzog with Aguirre, The Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo or Francis Ford Coppola with Apocalypse Now.

Thursday Movie Picks: Downstairs People

A New Year is upon us! This also means a new year of Thursday Movie Picks. I'm stoked, and I am resolved to post every week. Here's hoping...

This week's theme...Downstairs People (in relation to Downton Abbey/movies about live-in domestic workers)...was a challenge for me. I know the familiar titles but few have I seen. I ultimately went with three that I feel are about as close as I can get. So, without further ado...

Speaks Reviews: Strong Women Edition

I was raised by a single mother. She has five sisters and no brothers. All of my aunts have daughters. I am one of two boys on my Mom's side, as far as biological cousins are concerned. Let's just say strong women outnumber strong men in my family. I've known the struggles, the fights, the good times and bad and everything in between.

Top Ten Movies of 2015 (That I Saw in a Movie Theater)

Let's be clear. I have a good deal in place as far as getting to see new movies. I publish reviews in a newspaper that pays me in movie tickets and meals. I contribute to the brilliant pop culture site Pop Depravity, which hooks me up with a little scratch. For those opportunities, I count myself lucky. This has been a great year. But this is not my job. I have a full-time job outside of my writings on movies, so it's not always easy to see as many movies as I'd like in a given year.

Like most of us, it will be March (at least) before I see most of the biggest movies of 2015 (and I'll never get to all of the them, especially the small ones). I only saw 30 movies at a movie theater in 2015, but almost all of them were good.

Thursday Movie Picks: Snowy Winter Movies

So many of my favorite movies are set in a cold, bleak winter. My favorite comedy of all-time, Groundhog Day, exists in a perpetual winter, its hero reliving the same grey, slushy day just before a blizzard. My favorite drama of all-time, Fargo, is a meditation on criminal behavior in the land of the nice, nice even though they are buried in snow and frozen with cold. Perhaps my fascination with snowy movies is the fact that I live in a place where it doesn't snow that much (with this past winter as an exception to that rule).

Of course...I've used both of those titles before, so I had to go with the rest of my brainstorm, which, believe it or not, contains several more of my favorite movies.

So, Good Thursday! New Year's Eve. The last Thursday of 2015 and for Wandering through the Shelves' Thursday Movie Picks this year. This week's theme...Snowy Winter Movies.

Speaks Reviews: The Big Short

★★★★ out of ★★★★

A Speaks Movie Review

Not only is The Big Short the best movie of 2015, but it is also the most important. (Yeah. You read that right.)