Intentions be damned, Traitor is an appallingly cynical film. Though born from what I’m sure was a very sincere wish to show how Muslims are as diverse and conflicted as any other group of people, and that Islam is nor more all good or all bad than any other religion, the film’s story runs screaming […]

Bangkok Dangerous! What a wonderful phrase! Is it a grammatically-challenged warning? A nickname? A mixed drink? A rare example of a proper noun being used as an adverb? One thing’s for sure, it makes for a great curse – “Bangkok dangerous! They towed my car!” Would that the film were a tenth as deliciously bad […]

Sometimes, you have to wonder if the censors in the Soviet Union just plain hated art. It seems, doesn’t it, that just about every great filmmaker to come out of that country had at least one of their films stomped on by the House That Stalin Built, whether that film could be properly called “counter-revolutionary” […]

Perhaps I’ll be reamed for saying it, but I am absolutely flabbergasted by the vitriolic hatred that’s met Mathieu Kassovitz’s Babylon A.D. (as of right now, 4% on Rotten Tomatoes, 26 at Metacritic), and the oft-repeated cry that it’s “confusing”. It could be that I’m just a fucking genius with a supernatural ability to derive […]

Scholarship is a living, breathing animal. Go back a few years – not that many, maybe not even a full decade – and you’ll find this conventional wisdom about the rise of European “Art Cinema” in the 1950s: Ingmar Bergman, master of the form, burst out fully formed with his 17th and 18th features, The […]

When last we saw Michael Myers, his head had been neatly snipped from his body by his long-lost sister Laurie “Keri Tate” Myers Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), in an ending that was obviously designed to give us – us being the fans, I suppose, for whom Halloween H20 was allegedly meant – a good and […]