January 06, 2019

2019 Golden Globe Awards Predictions

January 06, 2019/ Matt

The marathon of awards season kicks off in earnest tonight with the presentation of the 76th Annual Golden Globe Awards!

Hollywood's best and brightest (or in some cases just newest) stars of ALL the screens will gather Sunday night dressed in their second finest frocks for the second most important red carpet of the year. The awards will be handed out by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, whose membership numbers only around 100, so their choices do make for the occasional head scratch, eyebrow raise, or spit take. Jeff Bridges will receive this year's Cecil B. DeMille Award, and Carol Burnett will be awarded the inaugural lifetime achievement award for television, fittingly titled the Carol Burnett Award.

Read on for my sure-to-be-inaccurate predictions, and tune in starting at 8pm ET on NBC as Sandra Oh and Andy Samberg co-host this year’s drunken soiree!

January 23, 2017

Final 2016 Oscar Nominations Predictions

January 23, 2017/ Matt

The day we've all been waiting for has arrived!

November 3, 2020!?

Sadly, no. The Oscar nominations will have to do for now. The 89th Annual Academy Awards nominations will be announced Tuesday morning at 8:18am ET (you can view a live stream of the announcement via the Oscars website). On hand to reveal the nominees in all 24 categories: actors Jennifer Hudson, Brie Larson, and Ken Watanabe, writer/director Jason Reitman, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezski, and Academy President Cheryl Boone Isaacs.

2016 certainly had its ups and plentiful downs, but it was a pretty decent year for film (if you knew where to look). I expect this year's Oscar nominations to mostly reflect that quality (though full disclosure, we here at CineMunch think awards behemoth and Oscar frontrunner La La Land was good, but wildly overrated). Our own personal top ten lists and choices for the best of the year will drop next month. In the meantime, let's guess what the Academy will deem the best of the best.

Read on for my final nominations predictions.

October 08, 2016

2016 Fall Movie Preview: Most Anticipated Films

October 08, 2016/ CineMunch

It's October!

Keep your pumpkin spices and knitwear, give us great cinema for adults. Yes, these are exciting times. We're looking to add to our favorites of the first half of 2016, make up for a mediocre summer season, and crown new frontrunners in the all-important Oscar race. Below you'll find the twenty films we're most anticipating between now and the end of the year. Clicking on a film's title will take you to the trailer. To see what we were looking forward to last year or the year before (as a basis for our judgment), click here or here.

Now bring us prestige or bring us death.

May 31, 2015

CineDrunk: Favorite Actress Showdown - Part One

May 31, 2015/ CineMunch

We here at CineMunch love actresses. Probably more than we love movies themselves. Possibly more than we love the Oscars, cheese, or our cats, Tilda & Scout, but let's not get too carried away here. In CineDrunk's latest podcast, we come out as proud actressexuals (a term popularized by the incredible Nathaniel R. from The Film Experience).

We could've spent an eternity rhapsodizing on and obsessing over our favorite cinematic ladies, so we needed to set some boundaries and narrow the field. The criteria for our epic (three-part!) showdown was as follows:
1. The actress must still be alive (sorry, Bette Davis - we love you!).
2. They must still be working in cinema (apologies to you, Angela Lansbury!).
3. They must be Oscar nominated (one day soon, Scarlett Johansson!).

September 14, 2014

Fall Movie Preview: Our Most Anticipated Films

September 14, 2014/ CineMunch

Now that we've returned from a little post-Labor Day getaway, it's time to accept that facts are facts. It's fall, y'all, and summer's not coming back.

While we may miss the sunny weather, carefree spirit, and hot garbage smells of the past few months, we're entering an even more exciting time for cinephiles: prestige film season! It's a problem that seems to get worse every year: studios release their awards ponies later and later in the year, until the last trimester is so full of must-sees that no one has time to see or make sense of them all. And when it comes time for awards voters to vote? It's that much harder to remember anything before early September. Final trimester films get the votes, and the cycle continues.

Despite our qualms about studios' release date shenanigans, a bevy of (mostly) quality movies is a bevy of (mostly) quality movies. AND WE SHALL SEE THEM ALL.

After the jump, check out our most-anticipated films for the remainder of 2014, and let us know what films are on your list!

February 01, 2014

Best Picture Cheeses: 'American Hustle'

February 01, 2014/ Nathan

First, an explanation. This is CineMunch, where the Cine veers decidedly toward the Oscars and the Munch nearly always involves cheese. So why wouldn't we choose a cheese for each of this year's Best Picture nominees? We wouldn't not. Here's installment #1.

Ameribella is stinky. It's what cheese people call a washed rind, the term for cheeses washed in a saltwater brine (or beer, or wine, or cider) as they age. Washing encourages the proliferation of Brevibacterium linens, the friendly neighborhood bacteria that imparts all manner of pungency to a cheese. Depending on the make process, the type and character of the milk, the conditions in the aging room, etc., B. linens will manifest as body odor, rotting fruit, or gym socks. Alternatively, you might detect sulfurous eggs, wet newspaper, or barnyard. If you're lucky, all of the above and more will come shining through, singing their ballad of stench through your nose and palate.