There is a movie about a girl in a hospital who frequently lapses into fantastic reverie, which turns the film around her into an explosion of pure spectacle, the kind usually tagged by joyless admen as “visionary”. The movie itself isn’t so much an exercise in style over substance, but style as substance, huge vistas […]
It’s telling that director Zack Snyder’s best film since his debut feature should be a cartoon about warlike owls. Telling of what, though, that’s what I can’t quite figure out: that Snyder’s trademark fetishisation of slow-motion battles scenes works better when it’s in a completely synthetic environment wholly controlled by the director; that there’s so […]
Sometimes, you want to go a local boutique ice creamery, where the milk is thick and fresh, the chocolate sauce is melted down fresh from candy bars so expensive you’d be terrified to eat them plain, and the fruit toppings vibrate with the bright hues of a Technicolor musical; where something as straightforward as vanilla […]
It’s become a sort of theme week: I get to review movies that I don’t particularly care for at the request of people who loved them. In this case, the Carry On Campaign donation that put this particular movie at my doorstep was courtesy of Jonathan Volk, a good human being and friend who at […]
Mike Gibson, in contributing to the Carry On Campaign, gave me one of the richest challenges I’ve ever been privileged to receive as a writer: to explain my dislike for a generally well-regarded movie in clear, thoughtful terms, engaging with it on an honest level, finding refuge in smart argument rather than dismissive snark. Oh, […]
The latest cinematic version of the classic European folk tale Red Riding Hood has come down to us lately, giving everybody a chance to see, on the big screen, the familiar tale of a medieval village gripped by the paranoiac fear of the local werewolf, and the young woman torn between her childhood sweetheart and […]
The onscreen title of Battle: Los Angeles lacks the colon. It is indisputably the case that this fact bothers me more than it possibly should. But it just doesn’t look right. Specifically, it makes the title look more like an imperative rather than a description, and I also can’t help feeling it would be better […]
Ellen Shapiro’s donation to the Carry On Campaign offered a choice: either her favorite movie of all time, or one of the worst movies she’d ever seen. Gratefully, I elect the former – there’s plenty of rarefied crap still to come, and her favorite happens to be a film I’ve always particularly enjoyed. “This is […]
Justin Wiemer’s contribution to the Carry On Campaign included the desire that I should review a movie that, to put it gently, hasn’t ever been terribly much in my favor. I will honestly admit that in rewatching it for the first time in a decade, I was forced to upgrade it from “no damn good” […]
Even if Beastly were a bad movie – which, in fact, it is; a very bad movie indeed – it would still be worth getting excited for the fact that it rings in a brand new subgenre: the Post-Twilight Emo Fairy Tale. Excited? “Terrified”, I meant to say. In this case, we have Beauty and […]
All else being equal, it’s tremendously gratifying to encounter an animated film – and a nominally family-friendly one, at that – which is so resolutely personal as Rango; even if one does not adore or even like it, there’s absolutely no arguing that it comes from the same mentality of test-marketing and formula and commercial […]
I know Josh Hime to be a good man, and I knew this even before he publicly gave to charity in the form of the Carry On Campaign. And yet, this good man has done something terrible to me, in punishment for what sin I do not know. Whatever it was, I am truly sorry. […]
