Whatever Works is brilliant.

The DP on Nightcrawler was Bob Elswit, not Lubezki.

Just watched "Wreck-It Ralph" with my kids and was pleasantly surprised. A lot of fun in-jokes to the video game world, as well as a more fun take on the Tron-esque type world.

Also, the ending is a bit of a tear jerker, kind of in a Monsters Inc. way.

9/10

If I were an Oscar voter who had to vote for Best Picture from the crop of nominees they provided, I'd vote for Grand Budapest Hotel, hands down.

Aliens was my favorite movie of all time for the longest time. That's changed over the years, but man is it an awesome piece of work, absolutely insane given the budget. I will say, on last viewing, it suddenly wasn't clicking for me the way I remembered, and all the marine banter started to feel uncomfortably close to some of the bad writing in Avatar. I'd like to give the Theatrical version a shot (I've basically always watched the extended), because as much as I like the sentry gun sequence, I do think a shorter run-time helps the movie, and that 1st hour in the extended cut starts to drag.

It does shock me how 30 years later, pretty much no-one has come close to matching the level of intensity of the final hour in Aliens. Video-games have imitated it to hell and back, but I can't think of any movies that have been able to match that relentless "everything is fucked we need to run" level of pacing and pull it off. T2 arguably, parts of The Descent, The Matrix maybe? Nothing feels like it matches up. That's crazy to think about for a movie that cost $16 million