'All Of It With Alison Stewart': What's the Bext Pixar Film?

Will and I were back on WNYC to talk about Pixar movies and our Vulture rankings. It was a fun chat, and you can hear it down below.

'Tales From the Loop' Review

Amazon only made three episodes of Tales From the Loop available to critics. (And they aren't even in sequential order.) But I was pretty pleased with what I saw, as I explain in my MEL review.

The Most Romantic Sci-Fi/Fantasy Moments

Happy Valentine's Day. For Debate Club, we highlight the genre movies that have the most romantic scenes. Gotta love a list that features both Upstream Color and Wall-E. Read it all over at SyFy.

'Finding Dory' Review

It's so nice to have him back. Pixar filmmaker Andrew Stanton, the man behind Finding Nemo and Wall-E, returns to the fold to bring us Finding Dory, which you may have quickly surmised is a sequel to Finding Nemo. Fortunately, I was able to get over my grumpiness that, technically speaking, they're not trying to find Dory in the movie -- really, Dory is doing most of the finding -- to see this sequel for what it is: the most purely entertaining and emotional Pixar movie in quite a while. It's just a crackerjack example of everything the studio has done before, all in one comfy-cozy package. I reviewed the film for Screen International.

Summer 2016: The Must-Sees of the Season

Captain America: Civil War is just around the corner. (I liked it.) So now seems a fine time to preview the summer movie season. For The New Republic, Will and I wrote about 15 films worth putting on your radar. (I'm going to hope for the best with the new Ghostbusters.) Check it out.

What's Pixar's Best Movie?

With Inside Out opening on Friday, Will and I put our heads together and ranked Pixar's 15 features. Lots of disagreements, except for what should be No. 1. You can complain about our rankings, but I think our write-ups are on-point. The whole piece can be found over at Vulture.

What's Next for Andrew Stanton, Director of 'John Carter'?

For this week's IFC Fix piece, I did some thinking about Pixar's Andrew Stanton, who (as I've mentioned before) I really like as a filmmaker. That's why I got no pleasure in disliking his latest film, John Carter: I was really pulling for the guy to prove everyone wrong. My article looks back at the making of John Carter and theorizes on how it might have all gone wrong for Stanton. It's pure conjecture, I grant you, but I do think John Carter is a classic cautionary tale about the age-old mistakes that confident, smart people make all the time in Hollywood.

'John Carter' Review

Outside of John Lasseter, Pixar's two biggest creative forces are arguably Andrew Stanton and Brad Bird. Stanton worked on the screenplays for several Pixar films before taking the helm on Finding Nemo and Wall-E, while Bird was responsible for Ratatouille and The Incredibles. Personally, I've always preferred Stanton's films to Bird's: There's a beautiful emotional purity to Finding Nemo and Wall-E that has no peer. (And for all the talk of how dazzlingly kinetic Bird's Pixar movies are, Stanton's are no slouch in the visual department, either.)

Both men have just completed their live-action debut, Bird going first with the impressive Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol. Now it's Stanton's turn... and it's John Carter, the movie that's been plagued with bad buzz for months. Unfortunately, the finished film is a bit of a mess: ambitious but also kinda dull. My review is up at Screen International.

(By the way, in that above image, that's Stanton on the left palling around with his John Carter star Taylor Kitsch. See? The movie was a pleasure to make. Laughs all around! Publicity stills are so weird.)

top 10 movies of 2008

So, at long last, here's my official top 10 films of 2008:

10. Taxi to the Dark Side
9. Synecdoche, New York
8. Shotgun Stories
7. The Secret of the Grain
6. Flight of the Red Balloon
5. Vicky Cristina Barcelona
4. Wendy and Lucy
3. The Class
2. Wall-E
1. The Dark Knight

If you've seen the Oscar nominations this morning, you can see that there's very little for me to get excited about for this year's awards show.

wall-e made me very happy

My review of Wall-E is up at The Simon as part of Consumables. Also in this edition: reviews of The Visitor, Aimee Mann's @#%&*! Smilers, Gonzo, The Edge of Heaven and much more.

ranking the pixar films

Vulture doesn't include Wall-E in its list as it ranks Pixar's eight other films. The bottom of the bunch, not surprisingly, is Cars. No. 1 is a bit of a surprise. For what it's worth, here's my ranking (including Wall-E) with links to my reviews where possible ...

9. Cars
8. The Incredibles
7. Ratatouille
6. A Bug's Life
5. Monsters, Inc.
4. Toy Story 2
3. Wall-E
2. Finding Nemo
1. Toy Story

My review of Wall-E will be up at The Simon tomorrow.