Jeff Goldblum’s delivery, hesitant, self-interrupting, apparently improvised, is so distinctive that it has become the thing he is hired for. It was already fully formed in The Big Chill and The Fly.
The Fly is the performance that proves the rest. Playing a man disintegrating physically over ninety minutes, he keeps the character funny and articulate until he cannot be, and the film works because the audience liked him first.
Independence Day and Jurassic Park made him a blockbuster fixture, and his Ian Malcolm is the delivery given a mathematics degree.
The late career, in Thor: Ragnarok and Wes Anderson’s films, has leaned fully into the persona, and he has become a public figure somewhat separate from the work.
Bryce Dallas HowardJurassic World Dominion (2022) rates 2 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. The previous film ended with dinosaurs released into the world, which is the only genuinely new idea the series ever had, and this one is about locusts…
Benedict CumberbatchWhat If...? Season 1 (2021) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. An anthology is the correct form for a franchise this size, because each episode can end somewhere unrecoverable. The Doctor Strange episode is the darkest thing…
Anjelica HustonThe Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Anderson's least loved film and his saddest. A failing documentarian on a converted research vessel, hunting a shark that may not exist, and the…
Geena DavisDavid Cronenberg's body horror about a scientist whose teleportation experiment merges his DNA with a housefly. The Fly is David Cronenberg's 1986 American body-horror film, a substantial remake of the 1958 Kurt Neumann original, depicting a scientist whose teleportation experiment…
Donald SutherlandInvasion of the Body Snatchers exists in four major film versions across fifty-one years, each of which reflects the political anxieties of its era while. Don Siegel directed the 1956 original.
Christopher LloydBuckaroo Banzai is one of the strangest films Twentieth Century Fox released in the 1980s and one of the most beloved cult artifacts of that decade. Peter Weller plays Buckaroo Banzai, a neurosurgeon, particle physicist, samurai, race car driver, and…
Bill PullmanDean Devlin co-wrote with Emmerich. The film established Will Smith as the dominant summer blockbuster star of the late 1990s, set up Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin's career-long partnership producing disaster spectacles, and refined the destruction-of-iconic-landmarks visual template that subsequent…
BD WongDavid Koepp and Michael Crichton adapted Crichton's 1990 novel. The film made approximately one billion dollars worldwide on a sixty-three million dollar budget.
Anthony HopkinsTaika Waititi's tonal pivot that broke the Thor character and signaled the MCU's slide into decorative comedy. The 6 reflects honest evaluation of a film that is funny in its individual moments but represents a structural betrayal of the Thor…
Brooke AdamsThe 1978 Body Snatchers remake improves on the 1956 original in one key respect: it doesn't flinch at its own ending.
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