To encourage a bit more variety in my blogging posts and to help distance this site from the one of old, I’m installing this monthly post where I summarize the previous month’s activity in a wraparound that will hopefully give people the chance to go back and find stuff they might have missed, as well as keep them apprised of any changes or news that happened that month.

Speaking of which, I apologize for the length of and/or the information dump in this post — what a month it has been, eh?

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New Posts

Reviews: Divines; Why Him?; Passengers; Lion; Silence; Live By Night; Lost in London (Live); Wiener-Dog; Patriots Day; Split

Blindspot Selection: Defiance (2009) 

Other posts: Just a Quick Thought: Netflix purges 30-for-30?; my Blindspot 2017 list; Thomas J welcome/orientation page; #OscarsSoPredictable

Movie News

Ben Affleck bails on his standalone Batman project . . . . as director, that is.

Forest Whitaker, Angela Bassett, Sterling K. Brown join the cast of Marvel’s Black Panther.

More sad news as related to celebrity deaths, with the passing of John Hurt, Miguel Ferrer, Mary Tyler Moore, among others . . .

Blogging News 

“Hm, ‘T-h-o-m-a-s J,’ that’s a weird way to spell Digital Shortbread, but okay.”

Yes, indeed I have overhauled the blog in an effort to better reflect my goals as a blogger and to give a new lease on the life of this URL. More perceptive readers will have noticed that that has still not changed but it will be soon. (I found that by changing the URL name means necessarily buying out another domain.)

There will be a few tweaks to the site but in general I don’t do well with radical change so you’ll be familiar with the way my reviews are formatted. The rating system I am changing, however. Films will now be scored on a 5-point scale, with 5 indicating an outstanding achievement in whatever genre it happens to be in — I will try my best not to skewer my ratings based on such things but who knows. I might just be in a good mood that day, too.

This site will still prioritize new releases over anything else, so that will remain the focus of Thomas J. I am yet undecided whether to revive old features such as Throwback Thursday or Bite Sized Reviews and/or to turn them into something else or if I’ll abandon those concepts completely. Stay tuned on that . . .

With the complete disappearance of all ESPN Films’ 30-for-30 installments on Netflix I am also unsure if I will feature those documentaries with any degree of regularity this year. They may pop up every now and then but I am going to have to see whether it is worth pursuing that still.

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OH — ONE LAST FAVOR: if you do have me listed in your blog roll or anywhere on your site, please change the name to Thomas J, if you would be so kind. I am now forever indebted.