The 1980 slasher film Prom Night is not a particularly memorable entry in its field: save for a reasonably satisfying lead performance by Jamie Lee Curtis in her scream queen years, and a notorious five-minute disco breakdown right about the time that the viewer is just about ready for the climax to kick in, there’s […]
The initial response to Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York was fairly unanimous: it was a failure. Time has been fairly gentle on this film, but it’s not hard to see why audiences and critics in 1977 were so disappointed: if nothing else, the director’s earlier films like Mean Streets, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any […]
The success or failure of any work of art is a result of many factors all interconnecting with each other: luck, talent, money, personality, timing. Which is to say, it’s not very often that you can point to one factor as the reason that e.g. a film was e.g. extraordinarily bad. I bring this up […]
The recent films of Martin Scorsese have shown a distinct tendency to be flabby and aimless – I’d not exclude his Oscar-winning The Departed form either of those charges – so it’s with a feeling akin to a spiritual rebirth that I come to praise his new Rolling Stones concert film Shine a Light as […]
It’s a bit of a pity that Zak Penn’s second feature as a director, The Grand, is getting only the smallest of releases, because it’s actually a pretty fun little movie. Probably not good enough to get particularly exercised about its release platform, though. There’s nothing under the surface of the comedy, although it’s rarely […]
May we cut to the chase? The Ruins is fucking awful. I’m sorry if that was indelicate, but sometimes it just does not do to pussyfoot around things. There’s really nothing in the film of any entertainment value, not even the inadvertent sort. It’s powerfully stupid in concept and execution – I am told by […]
Writing a lukewarm review of Leatherheads has to count as my first truly heartbreaking disappointment of the movie year. George Clooney starring in and directing an homage to the screwball comedies of the 1930s was the sort of high concept that’s had me drooling ever since the film was first pushed back five or six […]
I had something else in mind for this weekend (I’m not saying what, in case I end up watching it later), but when I saw The Tingler would be playing on Turner Classic Movies, I knew that I didn’t have it in me to pass up my only chance to review a William Castle picture […]
From among the Video Nasties In the fall of 1978, even before it opened in its native United States, George A. Romero’s horror-satire masterpiece Dawn of the Dead was substantially re-edited by Dario Argento for the Italian market, and retitled Zombi; because hey, that’s a good title for a zombie picture, and there hadn’t been […]
It’s easy to find faults with Stop-Loss: with the sometimes unconvincing narrative, the frequently bland characterisations, the dumbfounding ending. But here’s why I’m not going to try very hard to dig up those flaws: one character in Stop-Loss says, very angrily, “Fuck the President,” and with 289 days left for one of the most unpopular […]
There is no earthly reason that a film about gorgeous young people making vast sums of money in Vegas, spending it in the most conspicuous and glamorous ways possible, generally making a mockery of the story’s nominal moral about losing yourself to the dark lord Mammon, should be even a little bit tolerable. But damned […]
Run Fatboy Run is a paradox: it is a pretty good movie that is not good at all. Basically, the situation is that a team of really fine actors, led by the entirely reliable Simon Pegg and the desperately under-appreciated Thandie Newton are out there giving really solid performances in a script by Pegg and […]
