Man on Fire

Maintains its status as one of the best movies to ever grace my eyeballs. Denzel's performance here is something to behold and his chemistry with tiny Dakota Fanning is one of my favorites ever to be put from page-to-screen. It's been my go-to whenever someone asks my favorite movie recently when I used to go on and on about how I didn't have a favorite. I don't know, all of this just works as a single cohesive brilliant unit that obviously harkens to a curdled horrifying tapestry of Bush-era political violence but you can see that same anger against it pulsating through every suicidal thought that we see behind Denzel's eyes and every bullet that fires out of Creasey's gun, I miss when we had sweat in movies, I miss when movies didn't look like they used the same LUTs 1000x over, I miss when we could have a variety of editing styles in the same creative marketplace, I miss when scholars of film production actually cared about how to light a scene rather than just say "it's hard, let's just not try to learn and make everything look like shit," I miss when movies didn't need to telegraph every single thing to get its point across (we're slowly moving away from that again, thankfully), and FUCK do I miss Tony Scott.