
The Social Network
The film that got the internet age right before anyone else did: Sorkin's dialogue moves faster than you can follow, and the loneliness underneath it has only aged better.

The film that got the internet age right before anyone else did: Sorkin's dialogue moves faster than you can follow, and the loneliness underneath it has only aged better.

Proof that a summer blockbuster can be genuinely difficult: Nolan stacked four levels of dream on top of each other and audiences argued about the last shot for years.

Written with Paul Epworth in one afternoon after a breakup, and the credits list stiletto heels as percussion.

Pixar took a third film in a series somewhere nobody expected it to go: the toys end up far from a toy box, and the last act is genuinely harrowing.

Rihanna sings the hook, Elton John plays piano, and West spent two years stacking fourteen singers behind the horns.
If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you'd have invented Facebook.

The Coens went back to Charles Portis's actual sentences and rationed contractions almost out of existence: a fourteen-year-old girl hires a drunk marshal to avenge her father.

Aronofsky filmed ballet as body horror and somehow made it work: a dancer's discipline turns on her, and Natalie Portman trained for a year to make it convincing.

Animation has never conveyed the physical sensation of flight this well: Roger Deakins consulted on the lighting, and a Viking boy who cannot fight befriends the creature he was raised to kill.

A maid hid 264 Japanese carvings in her mattress while the Nazis stripped the Vienna palace of the Ephrussi bankers. De Waal, their descendant, follows the objects through his family's rise and ruin.

Cut in Aaron Dessner's Brooklyn garage, a horn part stripped out late, leaving that rolling drum pattern and Berninger's baritone.

The marble Washington was a performance: Chernow finds a man of hot temper, sharp ambition, and constant calculation underneath, and follows him from surveying to Mount Vernon's slave quarters to the presidency.

Cut at Wondaland with Big Boi guesting, a horn-driven groove Monae wrote about staying level under praise and criticism.

Bonnie McKee rewrote it repeatedly until Benny Blanco suggested studying a Teenagers single, and one word cracked the chorus open.

Ratatat cut the beat before Cudi arrived, MGMT added vocals, and Steve Aoki's remix made a song about intoxication ubiquitous.

Twinkling piano, bumping bass, the Smeezingtons doing sixties Motown, and a typography video that went viral on release day.

Alex da Kid's beat, Skylar Grey's demo hook, Rihanna's vocal cut in Dublin, seven weeks at No. 1.

Jennifer Lawrence was eighteen and unknown when Debra Granik cast her: a girl in the Ozarks has a week to find her father or lose the house, and nobody local will help.