2017 might be done with us, but we’re not exactly done with it. In traditional Playlist form, it’s never quite clear if the world has moved on from the last year during the early days of January, but regardless, we seem to exhaust all possibilities examining, breaking down and parsing the previous year in film.

It might have been a shit show of a year, but movies and quality Peak TV provided us riches and escape.

Continue reading The Best Films Of 2017 You Didn’t See at The Playlist.

Aliens, robots, holograms, fruit, gods, demons, aquatic mystery creatures and shambling doppelgangers potentially occupied by the spirit of long-disappeared FBI agents trapped between dimensions — yes, it can only be our roundup of the year’s best sex scenes! To be fair, we’ve included a couple that have human participants, but only for form’s sake. Maybe it’s because it’s a global trend, maybe because The Playlist is a hotbed of perverts, but it seems to us the movie and TV year in sex was more than usually characterized by interspecies, mystical, plant-based and/or supernatural sex, and quite a few of the more ostensibly “traditional” sex scenes that impressed us did so for very unsexy reasons (we’re not naming names, but Yorgos Lanthimos).

Continue reading The Best Sex Scenes Of 2017 at The Playlist.

The horror films resurgence of the last few years has been a remarkable thing to watch: some of the most exciting new filmmakers to emerge have been working in the genre, and plenty of masters have been doing some of the best work of their careers. And, unsurprisingly, given that waking up every morning in 2017 has been like stepping into a John Carpenter nightmare, the last 12 months has seen the horror boom bigger than ever.

Continue reading The Best Horror Films Of 2017 at The Playlist.

Well, here we are, in the brave (terrifying) new (still terrifying) world of 2017. Whatever else we have to expect in the 363 days to come (and actually, the first 48 hours have been pretty good on the whole), it promises to be a good year for the movies, as you might have seen from our 100 Most Anticipated Movies piece a month or so back. But somehow, that was just the tip of the iceberg.

Continue reading The 20 Best Movies Of 2017 That We’ve Already Seen at The Playlist.

If there is one concept that defines Amat Escalante‘s Silver Lion-winning Venice title, it’s “ginormous horny alien sex octopus.” But if there’s one other, it’s risk — “The Untamed” is a brazen leap of faith for any filmmaker; for a rising arthouse star coming off a Cannes Best Director win for “Heli,” his gruellingly downbeat surgical strike on Mexican social inequity, cartel culture and corruption, it’s borderline kamikaze.

Continue reading Amat Escalante’s Strange, Salacious, Award-Winning Alien Sex Movie ‘The Untamed’ [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

We try not to be partisan, but every year when the end of summer rolls around, it’s hard to ignore the slightly unseemly bunfight that breaks out between the various fall festivals trying to snag high-profile premieres. Venice, of course, has the advantage of coming first (indeed, the way it wraps around Telluride and overlaps with the first and biggest weekend of Toronto can make it feel like it goes on forever).

Continue reading The Best And Worst of the 2016 Venice Film Festival at The Playlist.

Next week, the first of the big fall film festivals kicks off, in which hordes of international journalists will surely threaten to sink the 11km-long sandbar island that is the Lido di Venezia. The Venice Film Festival is always bracketed with the boutique-y Telluride Film Festival and the behemoth Toronto International Film Festival, and there is famously significant competition between the three for premieres and high-profile titles. But Venice has certain advantages: it comes first on the calendar; it has a long, venerable and glamorous history; and… it’s in Venice.

Continue reading The 20 Most Anticipated Films Of The 2016 Venice Film Festival at The Playlist.