There’s a lazy critical shorthand that goes thusly: “Movie X is like Disparate Element A meets Disparate Element B!” It is a contemptible way to reduce movies to their most superficial elements, playing as little more than the writer’s way of proving his superior knowledge of art history. Lazy and contemptible or not, I’m about […]

It’s one of the underappreciated privileges of life to admit that one was wrong, which is why I am absolutely delighted to tip my hat to director James Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell, best known for creating the infamous Saw, and confess my admiration for their newest collaboration, words that I never would have guessed […]

We appear to be in a boom cycle for science fiction-tinged love stories with a nifty conceptual hook that gets buried by the filmmakers’ desire to entertain adults; first The Adjustment Bureau, now Source Code – the latter of these being altogether a stronger, tighter work, though they share a similar weirdness about apparently believing […]

I will assume that you have been unable to avoid the omnipresent advertisements for Hop, and that you have formed an opinion of it. I will further assume that you have anything like taste, and that your opinion is not positive. In fact, I suspect that you think Hop looks bad – absolutely dreadful, even. […]

There’s a temptation to over-praise I Saw the Devil on the grounds of sheer novelty: it takes a basket of ripe clichés and mixes them into something that you simply do not ever see in American cinema, however much each ingredient is individually over-worked to the point of moral indecency. 1) Serial killer 2) who […]

One of the points where film bloggers are often said to hold an advantage over print critics is our privilege of selection: not being obliged to write about any specific film or subject, we can focus only on topics that are interesting enough to deserve it. This is a lovely notion as far as it […]

Repulsion is British production by a Franco-Polish director, headlined by an up-and-coming French starlet, with a hallucinatory visual scheme that’s equal parts Eastern European surrealism and Italian phantasmagoria. A combination that could only come about in the ’60s, and really, every element of the film is so utterly perfect for its instant in the Zeitgeist, […]

It has been my experience that there is no such thing as a bad Abbas Kiarostami movie; many people have had a different experience altogether of course, for it’s fair to say that Iran’s best-known director is among the most contentious and divisive of modern filmmakers. But I’m not going down that rabbit hole. Again, […]