Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

The existence of a third Bill & Ted movie in the Year of Our Lord 2020 is both inexplicable and inevitable. The first two movies – Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, from 1989 (though it was intended for 1988) and Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, from 1991 – are a pair of films incredibly of […]

The Bill & Ted series is made up of nothing but miracles. 1989’s Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure obviously intended to be nothing but a disposable lark, mocking some cultural trends of the day on the way to being forgotten by the world at large; instead, based really on nothing I can point to except […]

Typically it’s bad form to drag in a film’s ad campaign to talk about the finished product, but Like a Boss needs all the help it can get, so: if you, like me, thought that the trailer for that film was one of the most apocalyptically bad things released into movie theaters in 2019, it will […]

If we weren’t through the rabbit hole before, we sure as hell are now: DreamWorks Animation has made a film that is literally about potty humor, sixteen years after their Shrek normalised fart jokes in animated features, and about how people who don’t like potty humor are joyless assholes, and it is the sweetest, nicest, […]

A review dedicated to T. Rice, as part of the to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. In 1966, stand-up comic and television comedy writer Woody Allen wrote a new dub script for the 1965 Japanese spy comedy Key of Keys, at the behest of U.S. distributor American International Pictures. The result (somewhat […]

If I were to tell you that a movie called Zombeavers is one of the most thoroughly enjoyable experiences I’ve had with a 2015 movie (it’s been kicking around since the first half of 2014, but its commercial release was slow in coming), and you were to call me a piece of shit, no good […]

A review requested by Brian Malbon, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Two things at least can be confidently stated about Meet the Feebles: it’s a movie that goes to great lengths to be the most fully-expressed version of itself possible; and Peter Jackson’s career would have been […]

There’s no dignity in spending all of one’s time complaining about how contemporary art isn’t as good as old art, which is why I do it a lot less than I’d like to. And while we are not, by any stretch of the imagination, living through a golden age of cinema right now (those of […]

There is one thing that I can say in praise of >Dumb and Dumber To, so I might as well lead off with it. It has a certain casual, easy comfort to its style. That is to say, it’s a film that picks up the baton of mid-to-late-’90s comedy filmmaking quite effortless and without strain: […]

The first thing the writer on film must do is to confess to all biases, and here is the one that matters the most for me: the 1980s are my least-favorite decade in the history of American film. Masterpieces can be found – masterpieces can be found in any era, of course – but the […]

The good news: Tammy isn’t entirely about making fun of fat people for being fat fatties who eat the fuck out of food when they’re not falling down on their fat asses for being so fat that they can’t even stand on their fat legs. And as such, whenever future cinephiles are attending Melissa McCarthy […]

Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: seven films into a 14-year-old franchise, X-Men: Days of Future Past trots out everybody’s favorite hackneyed genre trick, time […]