Reader Geoffrey Moses – better known as regular commenter GeoX – upon donating to the Carry On Campaign, directed me to review a movie he vaguely and ominously described as “interesting”. It’s at least that, a fascinatingly, willfully dysfunctional action thriller that I’d always avoided on the assumption that it was as boilerplate as it […]

Unknown – not the first film by that title, not by any means, but the only one that’s a Euro-thriller starring Liam Neeson – as I was saying, Unknown ends with a hokey, hackneyed twist that you can undoubtedly see in the abstract if not in the particulars from miles and miles away. I begin […]

It’s not exactly the case that Gnomeo & Juliet is bad. That’s not at all the right word. It’s a lot more damn bizarre than it is bad. The part where it recasts Romeo and Juliet into the world of living garden gnomes from two neighboring yards, that’s nothing. Anybody who has made it to […]

I’m not sure that I’ve ever specifically liked Jennifer Aniston in anything: she has a pleasant enough demeanor, true, and she’s quite attractive, and there’s a prickly-soft thing she has going on that makes her a solid foil for just about every actor she’s been stacked against in any movie, and she has machine-precise comic […]

When the Walt Disney Company fell under the control of Michael Eisner and company in the 1980s, one of the biggest changes they made to corporate culture – and this is, in hindsight, so utterly self-evident that it hardly bears me saying it – was a new emphasis on movies that would make lots of […]

I’m not certain how ashamed I’m meant to be that I didn’t find Sanctum to be at all bad. Mind you, I didn’t find it particularly good, but it feels like the sort of movie one should hate with a full-throated hate. Thing is, the film only really sets out to do one thing, and […]

With his contribution to the Carry On Campaign, Stephen Swartz set me the task of doing his dirty laundry: watch a movie he couldn’t bring himself to try. That was a long time ago, and I’d guess he’s seen it by now, but frankly, I didn’t want to watch it either. Still, I guess I […]

It would be presumptuous to declare that in the first weekend of February, we’ve already found the worst film of 2011 – a year that will see the release of Transformers: Bang, Zoom, To the Moon, lest we forget – but The Roommate encourages that kind of presumption. A trashy crypto-remake of Single White Female […]

Upon reflection, I’m a bit surprised it took this long for Jason Statham to star in a Charles Bronson remake. They fill the same niche in the Action Movie Star ecosystem: perpetually pissed-off tough guy who looks kind of scary no matter what he’s doing, and kills people with more a sense of brutality than […]

It’s lazy to attack a genre film for being a genre film. That is to say, there’s no point in complaining that a movie hews too closely to well-worn tropes when it’s those tropes that make us want to see a film in the first place. “That Western has too much gorgeous landscape photography!” “That […]

There’s a notion that every one of us has fallen into at one point or another: great art is depressing. It’s what drives the Oscars, film festival praise, top 10 lists (if you can think of any critics who explicitly or implicitly declared insightful relationship tragedy Blue Valentine to be superior to insightful relationship action […]