Reading at Recess was started in 2014 as a collective of about a dozen people writing about culture with a wide scope. We covered everything from comic books and video games to poetry and classic film. It lasted about a year. You can read all the posts from those days in the archives in the categories on the side of the site, but keep in mind they are from 2014. You were different and we were different.

I’m Alex Russell, and I edited (poorly, mostly) and wrote (better, I hope) a lot of that stuff. I wrote the series Worst Best Picture, a journey through every movie that ever won Best Picture at the Oscars to compare them all to Crash, the movie I still think was least deserving for that increasingly strange, vestigial award. There were 86 at the time and a few more than that now. I update it every year after a new movie wins the award, but that’s most of what’s happened here for the last five years.

In 2021, I am bring this back from the dead with a new series that I’m calling Best Movie of All Time. Every Monday and Friday we’ll take a look at a movie and answer the really basic question of if it is or is not the best movie of all time. It’s reductive, for sure, but I think it’s a way to take a look at movies from the “canon” and outside of it equally. After watching hundreds of Oscar-nominated movies over the last few years I feel very strange about the whole process, so this is an attempt to step outside of that list and into the bigger world of film. You can force me to watch something by recommending it either on Twitter at @alexbad or through email at readingatrecess @ gmail . com.

There may be more to come this year, but for now, let’s watch some movies together.