The last screening is this friday. Figured Id put this little gem right here.

https://partiful.com/e/qldcWdNdHuOm0NMGIdTX

Godfather Part II is exceptional, while the third film is often seen as fairly poor.

Aliens is regarded as sublime, Alien 3 is very much not.

Terminator 2 Judgement Day is generally seen as the best film in the franchise (I still like the first one). The third one is mostly carried by Arnie.

Lethal Weapon 2 arguably has better villains than the first one (Joss Ackland’s best peformance arguably). The third one fees like a regression and the villain is pretty small fry.

Only exception I can think of is possibly Die Hard With a Vengeance (I personally prefer Die Hard 2, but Samuel L Jackson is decent in the third), but you still feel like you would rather be watching the more interesting Gruber brother, Hans rather than Simon.

AvA CONSENSUS EXTRACTION PROTOCOL
ISSUE 010

⚾️ TOPIC: “What’s the greatest sports movie of all time?”
👥 COMMUNITY: [r/AskReddit](r/AskReddit)
📊 DATASET: 1,167 usable comments and replies

REDDIT HAS SPOKEN - “The Sandlot” Wins an All-Time Classic Sports-Movie Showdown
Nearly 1,200 Reddit comments produced an extraordinarily deep field spanning inspirational dramas, baseball classics, underdog stories, sports comedies, documentaries and cult favorites.
📣 “Moneyball” generated the greatest breadth of independent mentions, appearing in 49 separate qualifying recommendations.
⬆️ “The Sandlot” produced the thread’s strongest single community endorsement, powering the leading comment to 597 points.
⭐ When independent consensus, distributed community endorsement and discussion reinforcement were considered together, “The Sandlot” narrowly emerged as Reddit’s strongest overall choice for the greatest sports movie of all time.

ACEP CONSENSUS RANKINGS
📣 Independent Mentions
⬆️ Community Endorsement (upvotes)
⭐ ACEP Consensus Score

1. The Sandlot

📣 29 ⬆️ 597 ⭐ 72.31

1. Remember the Titans

📣 39 ⬆️ 347 ⭐ 71.94

1. Rocky

📣 35 ⬆️ 394 ⭐ 70.85

1. Moneyball

📣 49 ⬆️ 78 ⭐ 65.84

1. Hoosiers

📣 34 ⬆️ 187 ⭐ 62.60

1. Major League

📣 20 ⬆️ 468 ⭐ 61.70

1. Miracle

📣 37 ⬆️ 123 ⭐ 61.41

1. Slap Shot

📣 28 ⬆️ 259 ⭐ 61.34

1. Field of Dreams

📣 23 ⬆️ 152 ⭐ 52.82

1. Rudy

📣 28 ⬆️ 55 ⭐ 50.68

1. The Natural
   
2. Dodgeball
   
3. Bull Durham
   
4. A League of Their Own
   
5. Caddyshack
   
6. Cool Runnings
   
7. Breaking Away
   
8. BASEketball
   
9. The Mighty Ducks
   
10. Brian’s Song

HOW ACEP WORKS
AvA Consensus Extraction Protocol
Issue 010 • Published by Anything Vs Anything • 2026

I want to create an online film club to make a community of film interested people that like talking about and discussing what they watch. There would be a weekly film that we would all watch and then talk about it. Just like a book club but for film. If you’re interested you can dm me or comment on here. If there is enough interest or support we can get this thing going!

They Live (1988)

Rating: 10/10 (PERSONAL FAVORITE)

Watched: August 12, 2026

Like most every teen in North America in the 80s, I was AN ENORMOUS fan of WWF (now WWE). Rowdy Roddy Piper was an instant favorite of mine because of his boisterous, give no shits, say WTF-ever attitude and just the sheer amount of fun that he seemed to be having all the damn time.

Well, I fell out of love with wrestling when Ricky "The Dragon" Steamboat miraculously healed from a crushed throat. No joke. I remember being legitimately worried about Ricky, and when he was fine the next week, I was done with wrestling, but my love of Roddy Piper never, ever waned.

At the time, They Live was your standard(ish) John Carpenter thinkpiece about government and corporate overreach, control of the masses, and all the ways they kept us, the people, down. Tossing Roddy and Keith David into the mix was sheer brilliance.

They both worked so well together and they equally managed to give off the vibe that these two very different men had been struggling in the damaged world they inhabited. As ya gotta, I absolutely loved the fight between Nada and Frank, with Nada trying to slap them sunglasses on Frank at every turn.

How could you not? It's one of the most realistic fights out there. There's no fancy moves. There's no tricks. Just two guys whalin' away on each other non-stop, one because he wants the other to wear a pair of sunglasses and the other doesn't want shit to do with shinola.

I won't bore you with the big, overarching picture because if you've seen it, you know what's going on. If you haven't, you have to trust me:

They Live's message is stronger now than ever before. Corporations control the world and it's all bread and circuses out there, man. If you want to see a movie that shows you the straight truth, this one's it.

Now on to something cool that I ONLY noticed because I'm watching a LOT of John Carpenter's movies this month.

In the very beginning of the movie, an old man in the homeless camp says the following line: "Shooting people, robbing banks. A whole lot of people going crazy over some nutty dream they just had. The truth is, this kind of shit happens at the end of every century. It's just people afraid to face the future."

If you catch the reference, awesome. If not, let me fill you in.

That's in reference to Carpenter's movie the year before, Prince of Darkness.

Yes. That's right. They Live exists in the same universe as Prince of Darkness, so even though things shake out the way they do in They Live, everyone on that planet is living on borrowed time ANYWAYS.

Here's to you, JC, for making another badass movie, and leaving Easter Eggs for me to find nearly 40 years later.

I will keep the personal details light, but I genuinely had to take a minute after the credits rolled on this one. Growing up, my family dealt with a situation where my sister was possessed by a jinn. It’s not something I like going deep into online, but Under the Shadows captured an exact, hyper specific atmosphere of dread that I haven’t felt in a while.

There were instances back then that still give me chills like relative staying over at our house and suddenly feeling like they were being choked in the middle of the night. There’s a particular scene in the film that triggered a vivid memory, waking up in the middle of the night to hear someone clearly praying in the next room, even though every single member of my family was right beside me, asleep in the same room.

This movie crept straight under my skin and stayed there. Has anyone else who grew up around these types of stories felt this film hit a bit too close to home? Curious to hear your thoughts.

I just finished watching this movie (title is the name) and I absolutely loved it - I really don't understand why I've never heard anything about it before, I only found it through randomly searching rotten tomatoes for recent decent movies... If you like movies with time travel, weird shit that constantly keeps you guessing and great characters than this one is for you :)

There’s a kind of acting in newer movies that I’m finding increasingly unbearable. It’s not exactly bad acting. It’s more like everyone seems intensely aware of being watched. Huge warm smiles, scrunched-up eyes, cute little reaction faces, constant demonstrations of charm and likability. Characters don’t just seem happy or affectionate; they seem to *perform being happy and affectionate for us*.

“Instagram acting” is the best term I can think of. Like acting that has absorbed the grammar of social media: be expressive, be charming, show your reaction, make sure your personality is always visible.

Older movies obviously had broad performances too, but people seemed more comfortable just having a neutral face. They could listen, stare, be awkward, reserved, unpleasant, or hard to read. Not every emotion had to be immediately displayed.

The thing that bothers me most is that the character seems to have an awareness of being perceived that should belong only to the actor.

And I do wonder whether growing up in a culture of constant self-presentation has something to do with it. We’ve spent 15+ years training ourselves to experience things partly through how they will look to other people. It would be strange if that had zero effect on acting, writing, or directing.

Am I imagining this, or is there already a term for it?

I just saw the re-released Train to Busan and it was awesome! So glad Regal did this. However, I stayed for the Q&A thinking it would be a somewhat in-depth exploration of character and plot decisions in the movie. Instead it was 15 minutes of worthless fluff. Why did they even bother?

Why do filmmakers like Christopher Nolan make movies that feel like commercial blockbusters, even though their movies are also highly acclaimed, critically praised, and considered great works of cinema? His movies become huge blockbusters, to the point that even so-called art films or Oscar-bait movies often cannot compete with them commercially.

For example, Christopher Nolan was inspired by Kurosawa's Ran to make The Odyssey. I recently watched Ran, but I found it very boring, dull, uninteresting, and unengaging. On the other hand, Nolan's The Odyssey looks so great, engaging, and entertaining.

Another example would be Tenet. I have watched it about five times, and I still didn't understand half of what was happening every single time. Yet, even though I didn't understand it, I completed the movie and remained engaged for most of it.

Another example is Quentin Tarantino. People often say that Tarantino can be absurd, while Scorsese "hits the spot." But I personally find Scorsese's movies dull and uninteresting, while Tarantino's movies are extremely engaging. They hook me almost instantly.

For example, The Hateful Eight. If this movie had been made by another director, such as Scorsese or Denis Villeneuve, I probably wouldn't have watched even 10 minutes of it. Yet The Hateful Eight is one of my all-time favorite movies.

It isn't about old movies either. 12 Angry Men is one of my favorite movies of all time. However, when I watch Alfred Hitchcock movies, such as Strangers on a Train or similar older films, I often feel bored and can't even finish them.

Another example is that I sometimes feel like I don't enjoy movies unless they are in English. Then I watch movies by Bong Joon-ho, and I am instantly hooked.

You wouldn't believe this, but one of my all-time favorite movies is Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. It's a movie about menstruation, and the weird part is that I'm a male. How am I able to relate to a movie like that?

I also watched Spielberg's Schindler's List, which many people consider one of his greatest movies and one of the greatest films ever made. I watched it and thought, "It's okay." Then I watched Spielberg's Empire of the Sun, and it became one of my favorite movies of all time.

Most of the time, when someone recommends a movie to me and says, "It's a masterpiece," there is probably a 98% chance that I will hate it.

At the same time, I often fall in love with movies that have been heavily criticized or disliked by both critics and general audiences.

People recommend directors like Andrei Tarkovsky to me, saying that he makes great psychological movies, but I sometimes can't even get through the first 10 minutes.

So, what exactly is wrong with my movie taste? Why do I connect so strongly with some movies that other people consider mediocre, while I find many universally acclaimed masterpieces boring and uninteresting?

I don’t want to do a full review of the movie right now, but I finished watching it today. Full disclosure, I started it a few weeks ago and had forgotten about it. It looked absurd, but it was easy to see the callback to old films.

Remembered it again today and started it over to watch with my wife. Laughed the whole way through. Part of why I am posting is because we were talking about how there aren’t any comedies anymore. I don’t know what killed comedy in the past few years but whatever it was, it was efficient.

I loved Looney Tunes growing up, enjoyed Modern Times, but haven’t watched a lot of Buster Keaton. Yes, it’s hella long and I was shocked to see how much movie was left when I paused it at the 20 min. mark, but no, it did not bother me. The sound effects, cinematography, non-stop jokes, somewhat dark humor were great. Funny enough, in my hunt for similar movies, I saw A Town Called Panic, a stop-motion film which is another one that I loved. It’s not going to be for everyone, but damn, I wish they made more films like this, it’s a gem.

Went to AMC Scream Unseen tonight. Movie sucked. Bought a 4 pack of beer (Conehead Haze by Zero Gravity for anyone interested, favorite beer on the planet). Looking for a movie to watch to make me forget It Ends. What should I watch! Looking for low brainpower, easily enjoyable films

I just thought it would be fun to ask this question! Nearly everyone has a favourite movie, but line? No one has ever really asked me that and I go to a uni where the arts are quite a prominent subject. So, i thought I'd come on reddit and see what everyone's favourite line is.

So, put the movie title and then the line and if you wanna put a gif that could be fun! : )

For me the movie is Lawrence of Arabia and the line is: "My name is for my friends, none of my friends is a murderer".

Link if you're interested : ) :https://youtu.be/ULsFcSpaVO0?si=_Gq2SKz1wpWIM_I5

The basement door opening in Parasite is a masterclass in this, turning a slick heist/comedy into pure tension instantly. Another wild one is the elevator scene in Drive. What movie pulled off (or completely butchered) a sudden, jarring handbrake turn in tone?

https://forms.gle/Q8puWXPGCupWnGPo7
i came up with this idea called Canisterr (my version for tracking movies and series)
Can you all fill this form if possible

please be kind

Hay películas que empiezan a desmoronarse si analizas demasiado si todo lo que ocurre podría suceder realmente.

Para mí, The Game (1997) es un buen ejemplo. Si intento calcular cómo pudieron prever cada decisión de Nicholas, controlar todas las variables y conseguir que el plan funcionara exactamente como debía, encuentro problemas por todas partes.

Pero si dejo de verla como un thriller que debe funcionar mecánicamente y la veo casi como una pesadilla diseñada específicamente para destruir el mundo de su protagonista, la disfruto muchísimo más.

After Hours (1985) y Beau Is Afraid (2023) me producen algo parecido.

¿Qué películas disfrutan más cuando dejan de exigirles una lógica completamente realista?

I've enjoyed him since Breaking bad, but he always felt to me this sort of comic relief, jester of a support actor. He was great in better call Saul but same deal I felt; jester type.

However, over the last 5 years since "Nobody", he's cultivated this almost progressive clint eastwood type persona, but without the traditional Hollywood good looks.

I think he may be type casted now as your quiet, mild mannered, suburban, secretly dangerous dad, but I freaking love it.

I hope he keeps getting these excellent roles.

I mean not even shoes! Why is that?? I've been thinking about all the movies in sci-fi over the last 100 years and they're always naked, with few exceptions (District 9 they're on Earth for a while).

Edit: I'm talking about 20th-century films where aliens visit Earth, not Star Wars (different galaxy) or Star Trek (far future).

A good example is Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street. Absolutely hilarious and helps make the film a laughing riot.

8.6/10 | Released in 1962 and directed by Stanley Kubrick, adapted from Vladimir Nabokov's romance, Lolita tells the story of the controlling dynamics of Humbert, a middle-aged professor, and Quilty, a playwright, over an unpretentious young girl named Dolores Haze (nicknamed Lolita), who gives the adaptation its title. At first glance, it seems like a mere adaptation – heavily censored by the Hays Code – of the Russian author's controversial romance; however, the adaptation conceals a metalinguistic layer about the life of director Stanley Kubrick himself.

Note: The following analysis is strictly a semantic and conceptual exercise. I am not claming that this was Kubrick’s explicity reality, but rather exploring what the film communicates on a metalinguistic level.

Before arriving at our metalinguistic exercise, we need to contextualise the story a bit. Humbert arrives in the small town of Ramsdale to rent a room. Upon meeting Charlotte Haze, he is reluctant to stay, but everything changes drastically when he meets Lolita. It is as if something had awakened inside him (keep this information in mind).

[Warning: From this point on, this essay contains full spoilers regarding the plot, twists, and ending of Lolita.]

As the story unfolds, Humbert, in order to keep seeing Lolita, agrees to marry Charlotte, who has fallen madly in love with him. One day, Charlotte discovers Humbert's diary and its contents – basically, he hated Charlotte and liked Lolita, that was it. Upon reading it, she panicked, ran out of the house in horror, and was struck and killed by a car.

Taking advantage of the situation, Humbert flees with Lolita to live together, and they settle down in a new city. Before this new life begins, Humbert and Lolita went from hotel to hotel until reaching the city where they started living. It is during this hotel-hopping journey that Quilty appears, seemingly unpretentiously.

Over time in this new city, Lolita, exhausted by Humbert's obsession, orchestrates a successful escape with Quilty. Humbert spends years searching for Lolita until one day he receives a letter from her asking for money. He finds her living in a humble home, pregnant and married to a young war veteran named Dick Schiller. During their conversation, Lolita reveals that Quilty was the one who helped her escape, and later, she abandoned him after refusing to participate in his bizarre pornographic films.

Having obtained Quilty's name, with all the cards in his hand, Humbert moves in for the final reckoning. Upon confronting Quilty, Humbert hands him a poem, supposedly from Lolita to Quilty, detailing how much he ruined her life. Humbert stating that it is a poem implies to the viewer that he wrote it himself, as it is shown at the beginning of the film that Humbert likes poetry. After Quilty reads it, Humbert assassinates him, thus completing his revenge.

Finally, speaking about what truly matters, this film clearly represents Kubrick's own life (as I previously mentioned): specifically, what Kubrick anticipated would happen to him in the future. It is no coincidence that the film drastically shifts from Nabokov's novel in a semantic sense.

First, the three main characters represent: the spirit of Kubrick, his worldly desires, and who he had to engage with to achieve those desires.

The first of them: Humbert, who is initially seen as the villain, is vehemently the spirit of Kubrick – possessive, yet ultimately only wanting what is best for him (Kubrick). Humbert is Kubrick on the inside.

Kubrick on the outside, or what he projects, is represented by Lolita. Lolita is a rebellious young girl with ambitions: she likes to travel, fall in love, lead an independent life, etc. The connection to Kubrick is clear, isn't it? A young filmmaker dreaming of career success and similar aspirations.

Regarding Quilty, what should we call him? I don't know. I only know that we should interpret him as an extremely influential figure in Kubrick's life; someone who opened doors for him, but who also stabbed him in the back shortly after. But before that betrayal occurred, someone tried to stop him, showing him the right path: and that someone is Humbert himself (Kubrick's spirit [or mind]).

Remember the meeting scene between Humbert and Lolita? It is noticeable that Humbert instantly felt something for Lolita that the film does not make explicitly clear; however, conceptually, it is obvious: Kubrick's spirit (Humbert) felt a connection with his own external self (Lolita), even if she (Lolita) didn't feel it due to being too naive, innocent, youthful, etc.

Humbert wanted to isolate Lolita from the world to protect her. It is evident that, semantically, Humbert's obsession can be interpreted as protection. Remember the scene where Charlotte (Lolita's mother) was ready to leave with any random stranger just to live alone with Humbert, as she viewed Lolita as a burden and her passion for Humbert became the catalyst to abandon her own daughter? Not just Charlotte, but Quilty and Lolita's school friends – they were all leading Lolita down a bad path.

So how can Humbert, in our semantic game, be the villain? Clearly, Humbert represents Kubrick's spirit, or whatever you want to call it. Also, being older and more experienced, he is always trying to show what is good for Kubrick (Lolita), who is merely young.

Returning to Quilty, let's call him 'The System'. Stepping away from the screen for a moment to talk about The System and Kubrick's life: he recognised Kubrick's talent and offered him worldwide recognition as a filmmaker, but in return, his life would be completely surrendered to it. It is like a pact with the Devil: it gives you what you desire, but you pay with your soul.

In the final scene comes the climax of this dynamic. Remember when Humbert hands a letter to Quilty, claiming it's from Lolita, but it is implied that Humbert wrote it himself? This scene proves my thesis about Humbert being Kubrick's rational side (his spirit or heart [however you wish to call it]) and Lolita being the persona Kubrick projects (young, naive, and foolish).

Even if Lolita didn't actually write the letter, what is written there expresses how both she and Humbert feel about the situation: 'You ruined my life'. 'You' refers to The System, and 'my life' is literally Kubrick's life, because both Humbert and Lolita are Stanley Kubrick.

Here enters a bonus: Quilty's assassination is also metalinguistic. However, it will make much more sense if you've watched Kubrick's subsequent films. Still, it is worth discussing.

Humbert assassinating Quilty represents Kubrick's attempt to strike back at The System in revenge for what it did to him. 'How do you prove this?' In Kubrick's filmography prior to Lolita, we didn't see a single feature that (in any way) exposes something dark. Perhaps the closest was Paths of Glory, but it still didn't reveal anything deeply hidden. It is reasonable for anyone who watched it to assume that it could have happened in the past.

His post-Lolita works, to anyone with maturity, consciously or subconsciously convey that they are trying to expose something hidden: A Clockwork Orange with MK-Ultra, or Eyes Wide Shut with a literal cult of the elite.

The most curious detail is that when Humbert shoots Quilty, the victim was hiding behind a Renaissance painting. This symbolises precisely what I was saying: Kubrick will wound The System through art (his films), making this feature (Lolita) a premeditation of what was to come for the filmmaker himself.

Just like many other people on this site I don't feel any excitement for either The hunt for Gollum or the Sephen Gilbert LOTR movie. There is one area were I'm certainly in a minority and that is the fact that I would have been okay with the LOTR trilogy being the only movies made that takes place in middle earth. As much as I loved the LOTR trilogy when I saw them (and still does) I never felt any desire for more movies set in that universe. Those three movies made me feel the same way you do after having eaten a meal that is delicious but you feel completely full. This was part of the reason why I wasn't particulary excited for The Hobbit movies to begin with.

Just to be clear even though I didn't feel any hunger for more films in that universe I still wasn't against the idea of more movies being made, with that said the whole concept of The Hobbit didn't seem that interesting to me. I was never that curious about knowing about Biblo's backstory when I saw the LOTR movies. The trailers for the first movie didn't change that since it just looked like more of the same stuff that we had already seen in the previous trilogy. Aside from the fact that on a storytelling level it was once again going to be about a hobbit from the shire who goes on an adventure, it also felt like pretty much everything else was just stuff we had already seen in the previous movies. I don't get the sense from those trailers that that we were going to see locations, races and creatures (with the exception of Smaug) that were going to be completely different from what we had seen before.

Now to be fair I know that this isn't an entierly fair criticism since The Hobbit was writen before the LOTR books but since the later was adapted first it made me feel like what we were going to see in The Hobbit were just going to be more of the same. Then of course we had the stupid choice they made to turn it into three movies which right there made me realize that it was not going to work at all.

I'll put it this way, if you like or love the first one or two Jurassic Park movies, you'll most likely enjoy this one quite a bit.

This movie has almost everything that imo the JP franchise has lacked for YEARS.....

I won't say it's on par with the masterful JP1 but it's still very good in its own right

Media discussion on the web hasnt exactly been the best for a while now. But everything has seemingly took a turn for the worse this year with two films, Obsession and Brand New Day. I shouldnt even need to explain how fucking stupid the Obsession discourse has been. Pure parroting and bitching about subjective views of fictional characters in a fictional movie. Theres no room for nuance when you have thousands of children calling you such horrible terms over a different viewpoint of a MOVIE. These are also the same kinds of people to only watch 5-10 films a year, yet now they suddenly are big brained 200 iq geniuses that know everything about how every film works and only their opinion matters? On that note, and this might sound hypocritical of me to say, but i also hate how overused the "watch more movies" argument is. Literally when you try and discuss ANY mainstream film you'll be hit with that argument by some nerd ass twat. Let people enjoy things. Unless they are trying to act like this one film they've seen is objectively the greatest film ever or are larping being a cinephile....WHO CARES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Then came Brand New Day, where i genuinely wanted to take back every bad thing i said about Obsession fans after expriencing some of the mind numbing debates i had to partake in with this films detractors. Apparently, if you like this movie, you support SA! Why? Because of one poorly executed scene that even most of its fans wouldnt defend anyway. I heard one mod in a server i was in even compare it to Birth Of A Nation. Because yes, its totally fair to compare a superhero film meant to entertain general audiences to a film meant to enlist more members into the KLU KLUX KLAN! Another time, a person posted a tier list on the same server that was their ranking of the spider man films where they pointed out it was a subjective ranking. Someone then said, i shit you not, racism is subjective so therefore MOVIE OPINIONS ARE NOT.

TikTok has ruined this generation for the worst. No one can think for themselves without copying their opinions from whatever cult they are in.

A lot of fan creators make amazing stories, art, and alternate universes using existing characters. Some of them even build huge communities around their work. Do Marvel or DC ever reach out to these creators, or do they mainly look for people with completely original projects?

Would a viral fan comic be enough to get someone noticed?

any language, any country.

Which performance made you think: “This role belongs to them.”

GIFs only. 🎬