I am being perfectly sincere when I claim that Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight is the worst book I’ve ever read all the way through (there are at least a couple of worse novels that I abandoned early on). It has a perfect combination of dreadful prosody, ill-formed characters, an unengaging narrative (in those rare moments when […]

One of my favorite lines from the ever-quotable Casablanca goes like this: the sniveling Ugarte, played by Peter Lorre, is trying to wheedle a favor from Humphrey Bogart’s Rick, and he opens by counter-intuitively asking, “You despise me, don’t you?” To which Rick replies, without looking up, “If I gave you any thought, I probably […]

And now the latest in my irregular series: Man, Communist Governments Hate Good Movies. For a very brief span of time following the end of World War II, China enjoyed a cinematic golden age; like so many countries that got heavily dicked-over by the biggest combatants (and it’s arguable, I think, that China’s decade of […]

Jean-Claude Van Damme. I expect that’s not a name you’ve heard in a while. One of the world’s foremost action stars in the late ’80s and early ’90s, thanks to films like Kickboxer and Universal Soldier, the actor’s fortunes took a sudden, sharp turn for the worse sometime around the release of The Quest in […]

In 1994, Wong Kar-wai made a film called Ashes of Time: a movie of much greater budget than he’d ever been given before, in a genre (wuxia, martial arts) previously unknown to him, with a cast comprising some of the biggest names in Hong Kong cinema at the time. The project became an infamous boondoggle, […]

I’ve never had such a hard time figuring out how to even approach reviewing a movie as I’m having with the documentary Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father. It would be easy if I weren’t wholly impressed with what I’d unreservedly praise as the most emotionally powerful film of 2008, and […]

Swedish vampires! What won’t they think of next? Actually, though it sounds weird the first time you hear it, it’s no stranger than putting vampires in New York or the Louisiana bayou; at least Scandinavia is part of Europe, where the folklore of nosferatu-like vampires originated. Besides that, if there’s one horror subgenre that could […]

I have previously spoken about Mizoguchi Kenji, sort of the “middle child” of the three canonically great Japanese directors* (Ozu Yasujiro started around the same time, but had major hits earlier; Kurosawa Akira came along a good while later), currently doomed to being the least-known of them; about his particular geometry-based aesthetic, contrasting the formalism […]

Author’s note: I have strong suspicions that I no longer agree with much of any of this review, but I haven’t seen the film since it was new in theaters – one of these days I really must revisit it and find out. The career of Danny Boyle has gone more places than just about […]

I’m going to be generous and assume that the creators of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas didn’t mean for their film to end up as contemptible awards-bait, but it did anyway, the kind of sanctimoniously somber Very Important Motion Picture that shamelessly manipulates the audience into believing that if you leave the theater feeling […]

Comedy being notoriously subjective, I can’t just up and say, “Role Models is really funny and for that reason you should go see it,” even though it is really funny, and you should go see it. Fortunately, there is a lazy yardstick I can use: if you, like me, think that Paul Rudd is one […]

So, like a clockwork plague, the year’s second DreamWorks Animation feature has stumbled into theaters, and while this summer’s Kung Fu Panda was a shockingly decent effort for the typically underwhelming studio, I’m sad but totally unsurprised to announce that the resolutely unneeded sequel Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa is not. Though it is, to be […]