Matt Singer is the editor and critic of the website ScreenCrush.com. For five years, he was the on-air host of IFC News on the Independent Film Channel, hosting coverage of film festivals and red carpets around the world. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, he’s been a frequent contributor to the television shows CBS This Morning Saturday and Ebert Presents At the Movies, and his writing has also appeared in print and online at The Village Voice, The Dissolve, and Indiewire. His first book, Marvel’s Spider-Man: From Amazing to Spectacular, is on sale now.
Matt Singer
Watch Steve Carell and Kristen Wiig Deliver the Funniest Moment of the Golden Globes
The Golden Globes have a reputation as a kind of edgy awards ceremony. (Well, edgy by the standards of awards shows anyway.) But this year’s host, Jimmy Fallon, is about as edgy as sphere, and his monologue lacked the bite of other previous hosts like Ricky Gervais. The only really funny moment of the night came during one of the awards presentations, when Steve Carell and Kristen Wiig took the stage to give out the Golden Globes for Best Animated Feature.
You Will Not Believe the Movies the Golden Globes Have Nominated for Best Picture
The Golden Globes are a lot of fun. The stars show up to the Beverly Hilton in their most beautiful clothes. The host makes some jokes, the alcohol flows, and invariably, by the end of the night, someone does something a little foolish. What’s not to love? It’s all great.
Our Almost Definitely Wrong 2017 Golden Globes Predictions
Don’t let anyone tell you they know who is going to win the Golden Globes. Who knows what the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, a group of about 90 international journalists from all over the world, are going to do? (Seriously; their official site says they have “about 90 members.”) Predicting what any awards voting body is going to do is tricky to begin with; picking what a small and largely anonymous voting body with notoriously idiosyncratic taste is going to do basically impossible. Trying to pick the 2017 Golden Globe winners is like trying to predict the weather six months from now or who will win the Super Bowl in 2026. Unless you’ve got telepathic powers or the Grays Sports Almanac of Movie and Television Awards, you’re screwed.
The Craziest, Cage-iest Moments of Nicolas Cage
The first weekend of 2017 will also give us the first Nicolas Cage movie of 2017 (but by no means the last; according to IMDb, Cage will appear in at least five more films this year). It’s called Arsenal, and in most respects it is a fairly standard DTV crime thriller; Adrian Grenier and Johnathon Schaech play brothers who get entangled in the criminal underworld and have to fight their way out.
25 ‘Rogue One’ Rumors That Turned Out to Be False
The following post contains SPOILERS — both real and fake ones that got shared online — for Rogue One.
18 Moments From the ‘Rogue One’ Trailers That Aren’t Actually in the Movie
NOTE: The following post contains SPOILERS for Rogue One. Mostly, though, it contains spoilers for things that aren’t in Rogue One.
‘Office Christmas Party’ Review: A Comedic Lump of Coal
Too many Hollywood comedies, Office Christmas Party included, seem to expend all their creativity in the casting office. Filmmakers assemble these impressive lineups acting talent — and Office Christmas Party has as good a collection of actors as any comedy this year — and then sets them adrift in dumb stories with no jokes, hoping their evident charisma and endless improvisations will deliver enough laughs to fill out a decent trailer. The people in this movie are funny, but the movie would be a lot funnier if it gave those people some clever material to perform.
‘The Founder’ Review: Bah Dah Bah Bah Bahhhh, I’m Not Lovin’ It
A meal at McDonald calls to mind words like “processed,” “synthetic,” “safe,” and “familiar.” The Founder, the story of the man that transformed McDonald’s from a regional burger chain into a fast-food juggernaut, is not a particularly compelling biopic, but it’s not a bad cinematic translation of what it feels like to eat at Mickey D’s. Every beat comes straight out of the great-but-complicated man movie biography playbook. Each element seems selected to fulfill the audience’s expectations for this kind of film. In one scene, the title character screams at a McDonald’s franchisee for deviating from the company’s strictly mandated burger toppings: two pickles, a sprinkle of onions, and a squirt of ketchup and mustard. This particular owner dared to break the rules and put lettuce on their burger. Lettuce! The Founder is a movie with no lettuce.
The Best Movie Posters of 2016
Our ongoing celebration of the best from the world of film in 2016 continues with our ranking of the finest movie posters of the year. In the gallery above you’ll see our picks for the 25 best. They range from massive hits to to tiny indie releases; we decided not to limit our list just to huge commercial successes. We don’t determine a movie’s quality by its box office totals. Why should we determine a poster’s quality that way?
The Best Movie Trailers of 2016
December is officially upon us, and so is year-end list-making season. We’re kicking things off by looking backwards and forwards: By ranking the finest teasers, trailers, and coming attractions of 2016. To qualify, only the trailer had to be released in this calendar year; you’ll see trailers below for movies that haven’t even been released yet and can’t be judged next to the films they represent. That’s as it should be; beyond their function as pieces of advertising, trailers should stand alone, as bite-sized entertainments and even, in a few rare occasions, as works of art. Here are the ten trailers of 2016 (plus a few honorable mentions) that came closest to that lofty ideal.
What Is Bad Santa’s Real Last Name? No One Seems to Know
I’ve seen a lot of stuff in over a decade covering the movie business, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen this before: A main character from a movie with two different last names, used interchangeably online.
‘Bad Santa 2’ Review: Objectively a Worse Santa Than Before
The opening of Bad Santa 2 feels exactly right The first movie gave its degenerate, safe-cracking mall Santa a glimmer of a happy ending, an absurd outcome for a man who had screwed and robbed and drank and cursed his way across a large swath of the Phoenix metro area. 12 years later, Bad Santa 2 finds its antihero back at rock bottom; alone, drunk, and broke. In a despairing voiceover, Billy Bob Thornton croaks out a treatise on the absence of happy endings in life — or any endings at all. Life, his Willie Soke muses, just goes on and on, consistently sucking forever. Then he writes a suicide note on an old pizza box and sticks his head in an oven.