Eric Melin

My Top 10 Thanksgiving Movies list celebrates the warm and the weird. Originally posted Nov, 20, 2007. Enjoy!

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Top 10 Movies of 2019

by Eric Melin on December 29, 2019

in Top 10s

As Scene-Stealers.com enters our 15th year of bringing you unique perspectives on current movies, we polled our critics for their own Top 10 list of 2019’s best movies, and these are the ones that made the cut.

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“1917,” Sam Mendes’ look at a secret mission during World War I, was named the Best Film of the Year by the Kansas City Film Critics Circle. The film also took home honors for Mendes’ direction and for its cinematography.

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‘Yesterday’ is a clever and fun “what if” fantasy … until it’s not.

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‘Late Night’ is a perceptive, funny comedy built on an unsound contrivance.

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‘Avengers: Endgame’ is an affirmation of Marvel Studios’ storytelling strategy of connecting its films in a shared universe, but maybe more significantly, it’s proof that the franchise’s consistent release schedule gives the viewer better short-term recall and deeper emotional investment.

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Hype is a strange thing. It can create anticipation or it can just as easily wear you down. In this case, I found myself adjusting expectations on an almost scene-by-scene basis.

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There’s long been a case for the idea that great art can be found in the margins, and ‘Detour’ is a perfect example of this.

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‘The Hummingbird Project’ is an interesting enough, if predictable, rumination on the current state of the American dream.

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‘Climax’ is a powerful and unique experience that showcases all the external beauty, wonder, and hope that new opportunity can bring, and how those concepts are always just one thin wire away from chaos and madness.

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KC Oscar Party 2019

by Eric Melin on January 31, 2019

in Blogs

The 91st Academy Awards are Sunday February 24, 2019 and your pals at Scene-Stealers and Screenland Armour are hosting the coolest movie party in Kansas City for the seventh year in a row. And, as always, it’s free! This is your chance to see Hollywood’s best and worst dressed, watch the Academy Awards broadcast on the big screen […]

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[Rating: Minor Rock Fist Up] The body-horror movie Piercing lives up to its name both figuratively and literally. It opens with one of the most shocking images one could think of—Reed, a father, holding an ice pick above his baby—and it’s a fair warning for what the viewer can expect from there. To fend off […]

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If Sarah Paulson’s Dr. Staple is looking for a character with delusions of grandeur in this film, she might not have to look further than the director himself.

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Susanna Bier and Sandra Bullock’s ‘Bird Box’ sadly has more in common with the M. Night Shyamalan disasterpiece ‘The Happening’ than anything else.

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The new Halloween was never going to live up to the legacy of its predecessor. But it does evoke the original and take into consideration how audiences have changed since then, which is a minor miracle, I suppose, and it is light years better than the nine films in between.

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