Category: 25 in ’25 (Countdown to the 25 Best Movies of the Century)
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25 in ’25 #20: “Superbad” (2007)
There are comedies that succeed because they are funny, and then there are comedies that succeed because they understand something essential about the moment in which they appear. Superbad does both—and that dual achievement is precisely why it became an instant classic. Released in the summer of 2007, Superbad didn’t creep its way into cultural memory; it detonated. Almost…
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25 in 25 #21: “The Royal Tenenbaums” (2001)
The Royal Tenenbaums opens with the quiet confidence of a film that already knows exactly what it wants to be. It greets the viewer like a well-loved book—familiar, a little odd, and marked by a dry, knowing humor. From the very first moments, with the instrumental “Hey Jude” drifting over the prologue, the film establishes its…
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25 in ’25 #23: “Top Gun: Maverick” (2022)
Top Gun: Maverick arrived in theaters in the summer of 2022 like a flare shot across a darkened sky—bright, unmistakable, and freighted with a message. After two years of shuttered multiplexes, streaming wars, and the uneasy question of whether the theatrical experience might be fading into myth, here came a film that insisted, without hesitation, that…
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25 in ’25 #24: “Elf” (2003)
Few modern Christmas movies have earned the peculiar dual honor of feeling both immediately contemporary and instantly timeless. Elf (2003), Jon Favreau’s cheery, sugar-dusted comedy about a human raised at the North Pole, is one of the rare entries in the holiday canon that managed to capture the collective American imagination and stay there—year after year, rewatch…
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25 in ’25 #25: “Don’t Look Up” (2021)
Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up arrived in December 2021 like a message in a bottle from a civilization already sinking, a film that felt both uncomfortably prescient and almost too on the nose arriving after the second full year of COVID-19 impacting our lives on a daily basis (this was during the rise of the Omicron variant,…
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