Watch List Weekly Recap 12/9/22

This is the Friday recap of Ty Burr’s Watch List postings for the week. If you’d like to receive this weekly email ONLY, please go to your account page and under “Email notifications” uncheck every box except “Weekly Digest.” If you’d prefer to not receive it at all, uncheck just “Weekly Digest.”

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The week started off with some thoughts on Sight and Sound magazine’s once-a-decade poll of the greatest movies of all time and the “difficult” French film that topped the list for the first time and set a lot of people’s noses out of joint. Does “Jeanne Dielman” mastter? You bet it does.

Is "Jeanne Dielman" the Greatest Movie of All Time?

Every decade since 1952, the British Film Institute’s magazine Sight and Sound has polled film critics, filmmakers, curators, academics, and others on what they consider the “greatest films of all time.” The result has been a rarity in this onrushing, list-obsessed popular culture: A Top 100 (and a Top Ten, which is what most people pay attention to) that provides a long view of shifts in tastes, fashion, subjects, and filmmaking styles. As you’d expect, there’s always controversy. The dethroning of decades-long No. 1 choice “Citizen Kane” by “Vertigo” in 2012 occasioned much handwringing from staunch upholders of tradition and/or those who thought Hitchcock’s most achingly personal meta-melodrama was too weird or too boring. And when the 2022

Ty Burr's Watch List

Mid-week, I wrote about the late Aline Kominsky-Crumb and her wide and lasting legacy. “There are trace elements of Kominsky-Crumb’s DNA in performers like Lena Dunham and Amy Schumer — any woman who hammers her sexual and social neuroses into the weapon of comic art. But at heart, she remains the foundational role model for any teenage girl who picks up a Faber-Castell Pitt artist pen and starts putting all that mess inside her onto a clean, white page.”

Aline Kominsky-Crumb 1948-2022

The art of Aline Kominsky-Crumb was a raucous, lacerating laugh at herself, at the world, and at a legendary husband she gleefully (and collaboratively) brought back down to size. Would she have a place in the pantheon of graphic storytelling and comics (or comix, if you will) if she hadn’t been the wife of

Ty Burr's Watch List

As we race to the end of the year, I’m racing to catch up with the season’s new movies as well as all the well-regarded 2022 releases I haven’t had the time to watch yet. Reviewed: “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐, above), “All the Beauty and the Sadness” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2), “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐), and more.

Friday Film Housecleaning

’Tis the season: Do you have a movie fanatic in the house or on your holiday gift-giving list? Someone who’s up on all the latest releases and festival buzz, loves the classics, does deep dives into genres and director filmographies? Or maybe only wants something to watch on a Friday night and gets brain-freeze from looking at the Netflix on-demand menu…

Ty Burr's Watch List

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