A moment, if I may, of personal reflection. I do director-a-thons a lot. Not on the blog, obviously; but in setting up the ol’ Netflix queue I tend to stack the same director’s work in bunches, chronologically – I find this makes for a generally more satisfying intellectual experience, laying the development in a certain […]

The late-’90s slasher film renaissance that reached its highest popularity with the Scream trilogy collapsed in on itself after the turn of the century. Absent a few very special examples – many of them featuring Jason Voorhees – there have been surprisingly few pure slasher films made in the ’00s. At the same time, the […]

On 6 August, Roger Ebert posted a jeremiad decrying the rising idiocy of film audiences. On 7 August, A.O. Scott published a less-alarmed but even more dejected essay on the same topic. It is quite unlikely that either of these fine critics was responding directly to G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, a film that […]

Making full use of the doors that the 1986 Cannes Film Festival had opened for her, Jane Campion produced her first theatrical feature in 1989, and managed at the same time to create her first full-fledged, no-doubt-about-it, stone-cold masterpiece. Titled Sweetie, it’s a confounding, undefinable, frequently unpleasant and wholly brilliant look at a woman whose […]

There’s a moment in 2000’s Scream 3 that exemplifies the whole damned picture to me: one character, a movie director, is bitching about the fact that he’s making a tawdry, cash-in horror sequel, and among his complaints is the observation that he didn’t want to do a horror film, anyway: it was just a contractual […]

I liked Funny People more than I can possibly defend. It is a monumentally flawed film, with one structural problem in particular that adds a completely extraneous subplot that drags it out to an unforgivable length, and that’s not even its greatest sin: no, that would be writer-director Judd Apatow’s resolute unwillingness to bend even […]

It is sometimes the case that when a promising filmmaker, having directed a much-heralded short film or two, is given the keys to a feature-length project, the results could be politely described as “hackwork”, and unpolitely as “whoredom”. Neither of these words apply whatsoever to Jane Campion, who followed up her highly successful run of […]

Here we are, as promised: the first in a month-long examination of the films of Jane Campion, arguably the most prominent female filmmaker currently working, as well as one of the chief artistic ambassadors from the countries of Australia and New Zealand, although which of those she is more readily aligned with is a matter […]

I really don’t know why I’m bothering: the film came out over a week ago (a geological age in Summer Movie time), nobody in the proper age bracket who would want to see it is at all likely to stumble across this blog, and money’s snug enough that I should just as soon not fritter […]

Now, let’s make things clear: I have seen many stupid movies in my life. But I Still Know What You Did Last Summer would still count among the stupidest, had I seen twice as many movies in half again as many genres. It’s just So Goddamn Dense, in a rarefied way that transcends any other […]

Seven medical students are vacationing over Easter weekend in a remote cabin in the mountainous wilderness outside the small town of Øksfjord, Norway. Anxious to do some drinking, screwing and general goofing-off, they pay little attention to the crazy, creepy local man who comes along at night to warn them of the dangers in those […]