If I may: Jesus Christ, Zac Efron. I think The Lucky One finally, definitively proves it: he is the dullest, least charismatic of all the twentysomething kinda sorta vaguely movie stars but probably not really. Even Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart, fuck, even Taylor Lautner have an easier time making the camera love them. In […]

Ordinarily, the lede paragraph is where I’d put a hackles-raised jeremiad of disputable racial sensitivity, complaining about how we have all of these really terrific African-American actors, and because of the rather nasty segregation that goes on in movie casting offices, the only movies where they have big leading roles are dodgy Tyler Perryish exercises […]

With The Last Days of Disco writer-director-etc. Whit Stillman solidified the pattern that had begun with his 1994 sophomore effort Barcelona of taking four years off in between his breezy, talky comedies: four years that were very well spent, though I do not know and to be honest do not care if the time was […]

Holy balls, The Last Song is a terrible movie. Should this be surprising? No: Miley Cyrus + Nicholas Sparks + the autocratic hand of the Walt Disney Company. But am I surprised? I don’t know. Maybe. A little. Stunned is a better word, perhaps; like taking a frisbee to the back of the head and […]

I can’t even remember the last time that we had a horror movie that became such a talking point across such a wide range of cinephiles, so praise be to the long-delayed The Cabin in the Woods for that reason all by itself; though whether it’s actually categorically responsible to refer to The Cabin in […]

Some fun facts for y’all: Dear John, the first of two Nicholas Sparks adaptations from the first quarter of 2010, and the fifth overall, was the very first to open in the #1 at the U.S. box office. In doing so, it became the Lost in Space of the 21st Century, by standing proud and […]

Released in 1994,Whit Stillman’s sophomore film Barcelona came out four years after its predecessor, Metropolitan. In the context of his later career, this can be described as pretty quick turnaround. On the other hand, four years is a whole lot of time to work on a second feature, and given how pointedly artificial and fussy […]

Since Ordet is all about the Big Questions, I don’t see any reason not to lead off my review of it with Grand Statements all my own – though since the movie is anything but hyberbolic, I do so with a fair and appropriate degree of shame. First, it is the greatest movie about religion, […]

Nights in Rodanthe, the novel, is a holy terror, and possibly the worst book of Nicholas Sparks’s “early” period, though I really don’t have any idea where I’d set the end date on such a epoch, any more than I know if we’re presently in Sparks’s “middle” or “late” period, with my pessimistic suspicions favoring […]

With Mirror Mirror, I should like to accentuate the positive: at least Eiko Ishioka is dead. Hang tight, I did that wrong. I mean to say, of course, that since Ishioka passed away in January, 2012, it is a pleasing thing that the legendary Japanese artist, designing costumes for only her eighth theatrical film in […]

The Notebook is by most any objective standard the pinnacle of Nicholas Sparks adaptations. It made the most money, for one, which is almost certainly why it’s the one that is almost always used in the ads for Sparks adaptations (i.e. “From the author of The Notebook“). It remains the best-reviewed by professional critics, and […]

Allow me to begin with a surprising revelation, followed by a qualification. The surprise is that American Reunion, despite the seemingly insurmountable difficulty of being the first theatrical American Pie picture in nine long years (discounting a canonically dubious franchise of spin-offs released direct-to-video and featuring none of the main cast), is not just the […]