When people like me are pressed to justify our love of those nasty, horrid exploitation movies of the 1970s – and I should mention that people like me are never actually pressed to make this justification, for the other people, not like me, are usually content simply to ignore people like me and dispose of […]
Originally planned for an Oscar-friendly release last autumn, The Soloist has finally debuted and we can finally learn what Focus Features was so ashamed about. I kid! The Soloist isn’t very good, but it’s certainly no worse than plenty of the godforsaken 2008 Oscarbait films that did get released on target. Based on true events, […]
There is one good reason to see the lifeless new thriller Obsessed, and his name is Idris Elba. I should immediately qualify that: Elba decidedly does not bring his A-game to this project (his A-game being immediately familiar to anyone who witnessed his tremendous performance as Stringer Bell in HBO’s The Wire, among other fine […]
The shamelessly tragic Bette Davis vehicle Dark Victory is a perfect example of everything that the Hollywood system at its height could achieve when everybody involved was working at the top of their game. The result may be naught but a torrid melodrama, but oh! what a humdinger of a melodrama it is! It’s films […]
Director Kurosawa Kiyoshi has built a reputation for himself in the last decade or so as a director of horror movies – indeed, one of the directors of horror movies, a veritable patriarch of the contemporary J-horror film. Thus, it’s at least a touch surprising that his latest movie, Tokyo Sonata, sees him working in […]
It’s probably the case that the individual’s response to 17 Again is primarily a condition of said individual’s response to teenybopper idol Zac Efron: how charming and cute does one find him, how satisfying a comic actor, how generally appealing &c. I base this belief on the fact that Efron is in a very, very […]
The passage of almost three years has done nothing to temper my embarrassing enthusiasm for Crank, the Jason Statham vehicle where he plays Chev Chelios, a hitman given an exotic poison that forces him into all sorts of ridiculously contrived situations where he must do something outlandish to keep his heart rate up. So I […]
And now, the notorious Pier Paolo Pasolini makes his first appearance in this blog! The Italian filmmaker of the 1960s and ’70s known best for his unabashed Marxism and his late run of movies so outrageous as to border on the grotesque and pornographic, culminating in the infamous Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, […]
Let’s briefly review the history of the zombie film, shall we? Sometime in the early 1930s, during the period when American studios were first really playing around in the horror movie sandbox, some smart person stumbled across the Haitian Vodou religion, and particularly a fairly minor component of that tradition, the idea of a sorcerer […]
I know nothing about the much-loved manga series Dragon Ball, and my exposure to the two anime series derived from that manga consists of, at best, some three or four episodes. I am, that is to say, no expert in the field of Dragon Ball. However, I like to think that I am, if not […]
A few weeks back, I made myself a promise: from here on out, for the rest of 2009, whatever movie is #1 at the box office, I’m going to see it and review it. A pledge born from my exceedingly misguided guilt that I’d managed to skip both Paul Blart: Mall Cop and Madea Goes […]
Ramin Bahrani is a 35-year-old North Carolina native of Iranian descent, a writer-director-editor of three films that are essentially unknown outside of the art house and festival set, and another feature that – as far as I can figure out – has never had any kind of real release anywhere in the world, and he […]
