I have not read Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, a widely-praised 2005 novel about life of a certain sort in a dystopian Britain in an alternate 20th Century. But I sort of feel as though I have read it, thanks to the new film adaptation written by Alex Garland (a sometime-collaborator of Danny Boyle), […]
Save for Michael Douglas’s deservedly iconic barnburner of a performance as the oily arch-capitalist Gordon Gekko, the 1987 film Wall Street is not particularly good, nor is it particularly bad. Its new sequel, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, is not particularly good. Conceived before the 2008 economic meltdown, and massively retooled to adjust for The […]
Index of episode reviews Episode 1 – “Enter Lil’ Slugger” Episode 2 – “The Golden Shoes” Episode 3 – “Double Lips” Episode 4 – “A Man’s Path” Episode 5 – “The Holy Warrior” Episode 6 – “Fear of a Direct Hit” Episode 7 – “MHz” Episode 8 – “Happy Family Planning” Episode 9 – “ETC” […]
The party line on Machete is that it’s a romping, stomping throwback to the exploitation films of the 1970s, and this line exists, I have no doubt, because the film was born as one of the four fake trailers created for 2007’s Grindhouse, itself probably the most entirely self-aware throwback to the exploitation films of […]
Three years ago, middleweight actor and celebrity Ben Affleck stunned us all by proving he was a crackerjack director with Gone Baby Gone, a pretty darn fine and more than a little bit harrowing crime drama set in the rundown quarters of Affleck’s beloved Boston. It took a while for him to brave the helmsman’s […]
Whatever single adjective describes Short Sharp Shock, Head-On, and The Edge of Heaven, it is assuredly not “frothy” – and yet here we are, with director Fatih Akin making himself a breezy farce about restaurant management and the joy of food, Soul Kitchen, and it is simultaneously a great deal frothier than any of those […]
After Magical Mystery Tour imploded with critics and fans, the Beatles were mightily disinclined to make another feature film; for had not the shooting of Help! been a massive nightmare for all involved? and now their labor of love had been widely, even universally derided as an indulgent, impossible mess. But there was a single […]
Notwithstanding the heroic amounts of marijuana consumed by its stars, the set of the Beatles’ second feature, Help! was not a happy set. And that is why the band took a bit of a break from making movies, dedicating their time instead to assembling records with silly names like Rubber Soul and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely […]
A Hard Day’s Night being one of the most profitable movies of the 1960s, it was a matter of necessity that there was going to be a second Beatles feature. It’s to the band’s credit that it was no mere retread, though a retread might have ended up making a bit more sense than Help!, […]
Mark Clemens made a simple request with his donation to the Carry On Campaign: that I must review either A Hard Day’s Night or Help! Being something of a Beatles fan – oh yes, I am quite a trendsetter – that got me to thinking about what a good idea it would be to review […]
Nick Davis probably didn’t think that he’d be using his Carry On Campaign donation as a means of extending the Summer of Blood, but that’s just how things work ed out. At least he had the sense to pick the mostly weirdly artsy film to ever be branded a scum-sucking horror movie. From among the […]
From among the Video Nasties When I hit upon the idea of a Video Nasties retrospective, I had little in the way of a planned schedule, but one thing was always clear, from the first instant: it had to end with Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust. Almost certainly the most widely-banned film in history, and notorious […]
