The first film Frank Borzage made for William Fox, more than ten years into a career that would ultimately brush against the half-century mark, was Lazybones, adapted from a moderately successful novel and subsequent stageplay. It’s the story of Steve Tuttle (Buck Jones), the local layabout in a small American town. A man who’d rather […]

I’m having a hard time thinking of a way to get more bang for your bad movie buck than 1979’s Roller Boogie, which possesses what must be one of the most efficiently lousy stories in cinema history: it’s all but impossible to imagine a 103-minute narrative that includes a broader range of the mustiest clichés […]

Bryan Singer’s new thriller Valkyrie has a significant language problem: too many of them, thrown together with too little reason. Of course, it’s traditional for movies set in foreign countries to feature the producer’s native language, and in English-language films set in European countries, there’s an equally robust tradition that most of the people speaking […]

Once upon a time, Frank Miller was among the finest writers in the comics medium; that would be right around 1986, when The Dark Knight Returns was published for the first time, revolutionising the world of superhero literature. In the years that follow, Miller started to slide a bit into weaker and weaker stories, then […]