Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

As of the year of our Lord 2024, there have been three complete film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel Dune, which is a decent number for a book widely regarded as “unfilmable”. One of these, the 1984 Dune directed by David Lynch, is almost completely ineffective as a narrative film, but it sort of […]

69 years after Hondo Ishiro’s masterpiece Godzilla created the most iconic non-human monster in the history of world cinema, a period that has seen the release of 32 feature films starring the great lizard from Japan and a handful from Hollywood, as well a multiple television programs, it takes very little actual effort to have […]

The Woman King suffers from only one seriously unanswerable flaw, in my estimation, and it is unfortunately a pretty significant one given what the film is. Namely, its scenes of 19th Century warfare, using a mixture of guns, traditional African tribal weaponry, and what I greatly suspect are some weapons much too fanciful to be […]

In the thirteen years since James Cameron’s last new feature, Avatar, I have increasingly come to treasure his particular mode of popcorn filmmaking, which I feel didn’t used to be rare, but basically has been dead as dead can be for all of those thirteen years. It is a mode of complete, unyielding sincerity, mixed […]

Erich Maria Remarque’s undying 1928 anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front has the uncommon fortune for a major literary classic to have been adapted into a major cinematic classic, and this happened almost immediately: the U.S.-produced adaptation that would go on to win the Academy Award for Outstanding Production (i.e., Best Picture) at […]

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: at a sufficiently far remove, Thor: Love and Thunder is ultimately based on the legends and mythology of Northern […]

In a career spanning 45 years and nine feature-length films, the great Terence Davies, one of Great Britain’s finest living directors, has made only three kinds of films: autobiographies, wordy literary adaptations, and biopics of poets. His newest feature, Benediction, is sort of all three of these things in one body. Officially speaking, it’s only […]

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. Last week: Top Gun: Maverick presents a story about the fraught business of telling young aviators they have to go on […]

If movies are magic, and magic is misdirection, then…well, you can finish the syllogism yourself. Few things are more satisfying than discovering that apparent miracles have been performed with the left hand while our attention was drawn to the right, and learning in detail exactly how the sleight of hand (or eye) was achieved can […]

Categories: war pictures

“Why didn’t you make this other movie I would have liked better, instead of the movie you did make?” is one of the shabbiest angles a film critic can ever play, and I do not deny that in my time I have played it, to my shame. But it’s rare to find a film that […]

Quo vadis, Aida? takes place over a few days in July 1995, in the small town of Srebrenica in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and if that date in connection to that place has any meaning to you, you already know more or less exactly what kind of movie you’re in for. And also, maybe you don’t. […]

At this point, in the third decade of the 21st Century, “terrible late-career comedies starring the formerly great actor Robert De Niro” has become its own genre, and I don’t think there’s a person among us who would claim that it’s a good one. Even so, The War with Grandpa is impressively terrible. The warning […]