Honestly, I could feature almost any movie from Kevin Smith’s View Askewniverse here, but Dogma is easily one of my all-time favorites—and Chasing Amy is a damn good movie in its own right. While Jason Lee and Ben Affleck are fantastic in Chasing Amy, it is a total crime that Joey Lauren Adams isn’t a household name. Her performance in that film alone proves her absolute mastery at conveying complex, raw emotions all at once.

Dogma holds a deeply personal place for me. I was raised to question authority at all times, and my relationship status with organized religion will always be "It's Complicated." I've always admired the way Kevin Smith managed to celebrate genuine spirituality while fearlessly challenging rigid dogma at the exact same time.

On a personal level, during a screening of Clerks III, I noticed Kevin Smith mention in the closing credits that his movies have become generational—parents passing them down to their kids. My mother was a huge Kevin Smith fan, and she had passed away just a few months before Clerks III came out.

When my sister and I had the chance to meet Kevin Smith a while later, we got to tell him that we brought a piece of our late mom to meet him (my sister wears a necklace containing our parents' ashes). He gave us the biggest, warmest hug. While I have long been a fan, I will cherish that moment forever.

The Wachowski Sisters created a true, undisputed masterpiece with The Matrix. On the surface, it’s a high-octane sci-fi action flick packed with ground-breaking visual effects (bullet time changed cinema overnight), but it's wrapped around some genuinely fascinating philosophical ideas about perception, choice, and reality. I still vividly remember seeing the original teaser trailers back in 1999—I had absolutely no idea what I was looking at, but I knew with 100% certainty that I needed to be in that theater on opening day. And I was, and it blew my mind!

It’s just a shame the sequels never quite rose to that level for me. Honestly, I often joke that it's just easier to pretend there were never any Matrix sequels at all, it hurts way less than acknowledging how much of a letdown they were compared to a standalone movie I love so much.

With my lifelong love of comic books and superheroes, Avengers: Endgame was an easy sell. Infinity Gauntlet was one of the very first event comics I truly got obsessed with, and these two movies did a phenomenal job bringing dozens of character arcs together into one massive, epic finale.

At the end of Infinity War, my daughter, who was 14 at the time, was crying her eyes out in the theater. She genuinely thought that was the end of the story and hated us for bringing her to a movie where so many of the characters she loved were brutally snapped out of existence!

I also love that Marvel didn't just repeat themselves for the sequel; they shifted the tone completely, turning Endgame into a big, fun time-travel heist. And that final battle between Earth's restored heroes and Thanos’ forces remains just about the most epic spectacle I’ve ever seen on the big screen.

I know a lot of people struggle with the MCU after Endgame, and honestly, I get it. When you build up to a double-feature climax this incredible, topping it was always going to be an impossible task.

For a long time, Pixar’s core formula seemed to be: “Let’s take something kids dream about and turn it into brilliant storytelling.” What if toys came to life? What if cars had personalities? What does a bug’s world actually look like?

So it was a total no-brainer for them to ask: What if the monsters under a kid’s bed were just working-class guys scaring children to power their society? It’s such a simple, brilliant concept (and always felt like a spiritual expansion of Little Monsters a movie I was obsessed with as a kid).

Monsters, Inc. . works on every single level. It’s a fantastic children's film, a sharp workplace comedy, and a beautiful story about genuine friendship. Billy Crystal and John Goodman have incredible chemistry together. And my wife and I love this movie so much so that "If I Didn't Have You" was actually our wedding song!

Since I was born in 1979, it probably goes without saying that Star Wars was a massive part of my childhood. While I didn’t get to see the original trilogy in theaters during its initial run, I distinctively remember having Return of the Jedibedsheets and a collection Star Wars action figures.

What has always drawn me to Star Wars is its "lived-in" universe. Unless a story is explicitly set in a dystopia, so much sci-fi ends up feeling sterile and pristine. Star Wars , on the other hand, embraces the grit. The technology is beat-up, rusted, and you can practically hear the engines misfiring. Beneath that aesthetic, it’s fundamentally a timeless tale of good versus evil, but the extended universe media has done a fantastic job of exploring the nuanced, morally gray corners of that galaxy.

On a personal level, I’ll always hold a special fondness for Star Wars because my sister and I used to write fanfiction set in the universe. As close as we are, we didn’t often write together,, making those shared storytelling sessions memories I'll always cherish.

“How did we get here, Skitch?”

“I led you here, for I am Spartacus!”

That exchange became the traditional way my friend Casey and I started our tabletop RPG sessions back on the old AOL sim boards, born out of our shared love for That Thing You Do! I’ve used the handle Skitch (or SkitchNM, for New Mutants) ever since.

What I love most about this movie is that there really is no villain. In almost any other film, Tom Hanks’s character, Mr. White, would be an evil record manager waiting to exploit and ruin the band. But in the end, he’s just a professional doing his job.

Towards the end of the movie, Mr. White tells Skitch, "The Wonders are in breach of contract." Sensing the sudden terror on Skitch’s face, he immediately softens it with a warm, comforting, "Well, don't worry—no one's going to prison, son." It makes me smile every single time.

That scene is a huge part of the reason I write character dynamics the way I do. Most people aren't cartoonish villains; they're just normal people with their own agendas that happen to clash. Conflicting goals don't automatically make someone evil.

I actually don’t think this movie has aged all that well, but it ties so directly into my own origin story that I had to include it here.

When I was a baby, I was apparently terrified of Superman—and Grover from Sesame Street, which made Super Grover a double-threat nightmare for me. One night, my parents were trying to watch Superman on HBO, and baby-me would not stop screaming and crying.

Instead of turning the movie off, my parents simply turned my high chair around to face the wall so they could keep watching. And they freely and proudly told that story for years!

Given that core memory, it’s honestly amazing that I grew up to be such a huge comic fan, it feels like the kind of childhood origin story that should have turned me into a supervillain instead!

Because of my lifelong love of Star Wars , Spaceballs was naturally one of my favorite movies growing up. I didn’t know much about Mel Brooks’ broader body of work until years later, but as I grew older, I completely fell in love with his films and sharp sense of humor. Around the same time, my mom introduced me to the film Fatso, which was directed by his brilliant wife, Anne Bancroft.

A few years ago at New York Comic Con, I had the chance to meet their son, Max Brooks. I told him that I was a massive fan of both of his parents and their work. He was so incredibly kind, he signed a book for me with the inscription: “Thank you from my entire family.” It remains one of my absolute most cherished possessions.

I am hugely looking forward to Spaceballs: The New One. May the Schwartz be with us all!

Because it came out the same year as Frozen, Big Hero 6>/i> tends to get overlooked, which is a real shame. I think it’s a film with a lot to say about grief and what truly makes someone a hero. The scene where Hiro is so overcome with grief-fueled rage that he pulls Baymax’s healthcare chip, willing to let him kill the villain, is surprisingly raw and incredibly powerful.

This movie also highlights a distinction I find myself explaining to people all the time. During a crucial scene where the team is trying to retrieve a mask from the villain, Wasabi repeatedly asks, "What’s the plan?" The response he gets back is simply, "GET THE MASK!"

No!! That is not a plan! That’s a goal. You need an actual plan to reach that goal. Having experienced this exact frustration so often in life, at work, and in Scouting, I feel a deep kinship for poor Wasabi.

I used to watch a lot of horror movies with my mom growing up, a tradition I’ve proudly carried on with my daughter, Abby. Growing up in the '80s meant having all kinds of big tentpole horror franchises and iconic villains, Jason, Freddy, Chucky, and later Ghostface. But my personal favorite has always been Michael Myers and Halloween, especially the original film, before the franchise got completely wild about what is and isn’t canon. The original is simple, deeply creepy, and Jamie Lee Curtis is the ultimate scream queen.

As you can probably tell by now, most of the movies that matter to me come with their own personal stories, and Halloween has a couple of great ones.

When I was 16, I was packing for a family vacation the next morning, having spent the entire day hanging out with my girlfriend (who is now my wife). It was late at night, the apartment was completely dark, and I was up by myself. Halloween came on HBO, so I decided to watch it, even though it was a movie I had already seen dozens of times.

Suddenly, there was a sharp tapping on the window.

Panic set in. I sprinted into my parents' room and woke up my mom, who was a tiny woman, fully terrified. I had decided Michael Myers was here, and I needed some backup. She sat up and looked at me like I was completely insane, wondering why her 16-year-old son, who was significantly bigger and stronger than her and theoretically able to defend himself, needed his mommy. But look, sometimes you just need your mom to protect you!

It turned out to be my girlfriend, who had come back to drop off the wallet I’d left at her house earlier that afternoon. To this day, no one in my family has ever let me live that story down.

Another time, I had dragged my younger sister to see Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers in theaters. She is not a horror person by any stretch of the imagination (she literally watched The Blair Witch Project while hiding behind the theater seats), but she loves going to the movies, so she came along.

The theater was packed, and the only open seats were in the absolute front row. Next to my sister sat a group of kids, she was probably 10 or 11 at the time, and they were a few years older. They were being loud, obnoxious, and disruptive. At one point, I turned to look over and watched my sister calmly reach out, yank the sneaker off one of the kids' feet, and chuck it across the entire theater.

The kids stared into the raw, unbridled fury in her eyes, panicked, and ran out of the auditorium.

The moral of both of these stories? Never mess with the women in my family.