Dailies is a round-up of essential film writing and other highlights from our colleagues across the Internet — and, occasionally, our own writers. If you’d like to submit a piece for consideration, get in touch with us in the comments below or on Twitter at @TheFilmStage.
Time Out New York compiles a detailed list of the top 100 animated films:
Chances are the first movie you ever saw was animation. Exuberant, colorful and full of wonder, animation is the stuff of childhood. It introduces us to the magic of cinema, and there’s no doubt that, as we researched the 100 best animated movies of all time, the nostalgia factor was overwhelming.
Then again, as we polled over 100 experts in the field—from directors like Fantastic Mr. Fox’s Wes Anderson, Ice Age and Rio’s Carlos Saldanha, Wallace & Gromit’s Nick Park, to critics and hardcore fans alike—it became clear that animation doesn’t just mean kids’ and family movies. Worldwide innovators have adapted the form to include action, politics, race and sex. Animation has grown up, sometimes uneasily, right before our eyes.
Listen to Tilda Swinton‘s guest DJ set at KCRW, including Marilyn Manson, David Bowie, Bjork, and more.
At Grantland, Amos Barshad details the oral history of the rap battles in 8 Mile:
When 8 Mile hit theaters in the fall of 2002, it was a minor revelation. We hoped it’d be good — we had no idea it’d be that good. Eminem and his unlikely collaborator, director Curtis Hanson — fresh off a whimsical Michael Chabon adaptation, Wonder Boys — loosely approximated a few hard days of Marshall Mathers’s come-up in rough-and-tumble ’90s Detroit. Rendered in muted blues and grays, obsessively authentic, and boldly understated, the result was, quite possibly, the best rap movie ever made.
Men’s Journal counts down the top 20 movie theaters in the world.
Read an excerpt from Janet Maslin‘s The Selected Letters of Elia Kazan at New York Times:
Elia Kazan’s 1988 “A Life” arguably remains the most raw, soul-searching memoir ever written about a career in show business. And his story remains polarizing, whether for his naming names to the House Un-American Activities Committee or for his candor about the pain he inflicted on those who loved him.
Alexander Huls talks to Josh Spiegel on one of his favorite films, Singin’ in the Rain.
Bilge Ebiri on the history of art-horror films at Vulture:
Under the Skin, starring Scarlet Johansson as an alien come to Earth in human form, is being billed as a science-fiction film, and it is, on some level. But with early scenes structured around Johansson’s “stalking” of various humans and a finale that echoes back to Frankenstein, director Jonathan Glazer’s film hews closer to horror. Even as that, however, it’s clearly something different, with a narrative and a visual and aural strategy that belong more to the realm of the experimental. In his review of the film, our own David Edelstein said it “takes the horror genre in infectiously strange new directions.” And he’s right. Glazer clearly has more on his mind than telling a tale about something that comes to Earth and harvests men. His film could be interpreted as a meditation on human sexuality, on modern alienation, on the existential chasm between flesh and being — all conveyed through a filmic style that privileges the physical, even as it (mostly) keeps the viewer at an emotional distance.
Creative Director at Drafthouse Films, Evan Husney, is stepping down to produce films full-time.