About

Film criticism and a living Oscar ledger.

Lunara Film is two obsessions that turned out to be one. The first is criticism: long-form, spoiler-free reviews that make an actual argument about the movie — something you could disagree with, something worth disagreeing with. The second is the Lunara Oscar Ledger: more than 12,000 nominee and winner records across every Academy Awards ceremony since 1927/28, structured so that films, people, categories, and ceremonies all connect — to each other, and to the reviews.

That last part is the point. Most places give you either the take or the database. Here, a review of a Best Picture winner walks you into its place in ninety-eight years of Oscar history, and a ledger profile tells you what we actually thought of the film. Judgment and the record, in the same building, on speaking terms.

Every review ends the same way: the Debrief. Score, year, where to watch, and three pairings — a Theme Echo, a Counter-Program, and a Career Context pick — each one chosen because of the argument the review just made, not because an algorithm noticed you watched something with the same actor in it. The promise underneath it all: you’ll never have to wonder what to watch again.

Masthead

Dalton Johnson — Founder, Lead Critic

I built the site I always wanted to exist. May 10, 2005: the “End of Wars” spot for Revenge of the Sith premieres on TRL, and I’m a kid bolting upstairs to the one computer in the house to watch it again — then trying to download it over a connection that took its sweet time delivering sixty seconds of Anakin, like the kid in Back to the Future doing the math on what his family doesn’t have. That’s the engine, and it never switched off.

A lot of my most precious memories at the movies are films the consensus shrugged at — De Palma’s Mission to Mars, Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes and an ending I have never once forgotten — most of them in a theater seat next to my dad. Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka, which I will hear no argument about. I never outgrew the kid who gets excited about a trailer, a casting announcement, the right director landing the right project. Everything on Lunara comes out of that: reviews that argue instead of summarize, a Debrief that hands you three things to watch next and a link to where they’re streaming, an Oscar ledger deep enough to back up the history I love to talk about, and a journal for the industry noise I can’t stop following.

No film school — just a lifetime of paying attention to the screen. And I’m not precious about how the work gets made: if a tool makes it better or faster, I use it. That’s true of me in every corner of my life, and it’s true of this site — the editorial policy lays out exactly how.

Lunara Film is independently published. The whole operation answers to exactly one editorial standard, and you can read it: the editorial policy.