I am happy to present this feature’s second Altman film, and the first not to hold the distinction of being the worst thing he ever made. Robert Altman was good at many, many things, but one of his stocks in trade was the genre-bender: making a war movie, or a film noir, or a Western, […]

If someone had said to me, “So there’s this movie out that plays exactly like a blend of Dogme 95 and the French New Wave,” I would surely not have seen that movie. And as it turns out, I would have therefore missed one of the very best films to be released in America in […]

Actors are very weird people. I can say that; I have actor friends. But they’re really a bit like hobbits: you can learn all of their ways in a month, and after a hundred years they’ll still do something that just confuses the fuck out of you. In other words, why oh why did Anthony […]

I was already worried about having Psycho flashbacks just from the premise of Vacancy, in which two people are terrorized by the weird proprietor of a tiny hotel miles off the main highway in what appears to be California, so when the main titles started up, looking very reminiscent of the work of the late […]

Mid-autumn, 2001. Myself and a couple dozen other Northwestern University sophomores were in the midst of our first film production class, thrashing about for ideas. My team of bright young things came upon the brilliant idea of parodying the French New Wave, of all damn things. We were film students, you must understand; it had […]

From the files of: “Hey, I’ve owned that DVD for more than a year, I should really think about watching it!” And now, the Golden Delicious apple. Come back with me to the late 1940s. World War II is over and America celebrates by inventing Suburbia, as both place and attitude. The ideal of this […]

There’s a great big gulf separating “this Gen-Y riff on Rear Window is not nearly so bad as I expected” and “this Gen-Y riff on Rear Window is in fact good,” but you take what you can get from a movie like Disturbia, which in addition to its eye-rolling premise (“a Gen-Y riff on Rear […]

Author’s note, January 2017: Boy, does this one need to be revisited. There was a time when I disliked Total Recall? What the hell, 25-year-old Tim. Like many Americans, my exposure to the films of Paul Verhoeven has been…limited. And like most Americans, I’ve been woefully underimpressed by the likes of Total Recall and Hollow […]

I think that it is easiest to begin with a statement that is probably objectively true: you will like Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters if you liked the parent series; and the more you like that show, the more you will like the feature. To go any further is the get […]

For a simple gangster film, I find that there are almost too many angles by which one could discuss John Mackenzie’s The Long Good Friday. But one must start somewhere, and I shall start here: this is a film much concerned with keeping as much information from the audience as possible. At the most basic […]

The confluence of Easter and Grindhouse was not easy for me to ignore. Which is why, in looking for this week’s classic movie review (and as it turns out, “classic” is used here in the loosest possible definition), I had two criteria: -That, in honor of Easter, the movie involved resurrection from the dead. -That, […]

Part I: A Masterpiece of the Post-Aesthetic I hope you’ll humor me in a bit of indulgence, if I find it necessary to begin with a discussion of an annual bad movie marathon that takes place every January in the suburbs of Chicago. It’s impossible for anyone who has never been to B-Fest to understand […]