In 2004, a 23-year-old French woman named Marie-Leonie Leblanc reported that she had been attacked by North African immigrants who hurled anti-Semitic slurs at her. That Leblanc was not Jewish was merely the first head-scratching moment in a narrative that quickly unraveled in the span of a month, when it was found that she had […]

Maybe I was easy to please after Necropolis, but Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave didn’t depress me to nearly the same degree. It’s still the second-worst film in the franchise, but only by a little; just a few tweaks and it would be every inch as good as Part II. Which […]

Eight years elapsed between The Return of the Living Dead and Return of the Living Dead III; it then took a further twelve years before somebody finally worked up the unmerited bravery to take the series out of mothballs for one last bow. It was not, as you could probably guess, worth the wait, although […]

Let this not be the spot for grousing about the Academy Awards, save for mentioning in the most off-hand way I can that I’ve now seen four of the five nominees for the 2009 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, and the winner, The Secret in Their Eyes, is the fourth-best of them. I phrase […]

Part of the problem, I’m certain, is a major case of expectation failure: when a film has been assiduously marketed as a superhero comedy, it’s not the act of an unreasonable man to assume that it will, in fact, be a superhero comedy. This is not the case with Matthew Vaughn’s Kick-Ass, adapted from the […]

It’s well-known that George A. Romero’s Dead films are works of cultural inquiry: each of them filmed in a different decade (until, that is, Diary of the Dead), each of them taking a hard look a the social mores and movements of the day, bringing them to bear under the light of sometimes gentle, often […]

There came a point where I felt like I could no longer put off watching The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on the hope that eventually, I’d get around to reading the late Stieg Larsson’s massively popular international best-selling crime novel it’s based on, so that’s the first confession: I write from a position of […]

Werner Herzog is not, in the best of times, a director who especially cares if you (yes, you personally) particularly like what he’s doing in a given movie or not. Which means that when he goes full-bore and makes a film that seems to spend its entire running time ensconced firmly in his own head, […]

Tina Fey and Steve Carell are two of our best comic actors, particularly of a Thursday night, when they each reign supreme for 30 minutes on NBC. Their first big-screen teaming was therefore something of a big deal to fans of top-notch sitcommery; one of those rare occurrences where for just a brief moment, you […]

The Return of the Living Dead was, in its teeny-tiny way, a watershed moment in horror cinema: besides being the first really successful zombie movie made in America in the 1980s, it was also – as near as I can tell – the first of the great modern horror-comedies: preceding Evil Dead II by two […]

An earlier version of this review can be found here. Once again, the newest Miyazaki Hayao film was accompanied by the newest announcement of the writer-director’s retirement. And following the 2004 release of Howl’s Moving Castle, he stuck to it for a good year; not counting a few shorts for the Ghibli Museum, he didn’t […]

I would not want to be responsible for writing the screen story for the title Hot Tub Time Machine. There are certain ideas which are so awesomely stupid-amazing that no matter what, the execution cannot possibly match the film that the viewer will dream up just upon learning of the project. Recall Snakes on a […]