Who’d have thought it would take three direct-to-video sequels to get the Silent Night, Deadly Night franchise back to its roots? Not psychopaths dressed as Santa: that playfully tawdry premise had run itself out with the first movie, and wasn’t coming back, because that might result in some kind of decent horror picture, and there […]

First the easy, if depressing part: Django Unchained is easily the least impressive feature film yet made by director Quentin Tarantino. Nothing to do with what it does or does not say about racism in America, or the liberties it takes in turning a very tender period of history into a violent exploitation film, or […]

After three movies, the Silent Night, Deadly Night franchise had apparently exhausted itself – in point of fact, it had done so after the first Silent Night, Deadly Night, but it took people a couple of horribly misjudged sequels to figure that out – because 1990’s Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: Initiation found the series […]

Promised Land is a better movie than it seems. Or maybe it’s a worse movie than it feels. It’s difficult to say: for you see, what it is most of all is a very nice movie on a very old-fashioned model that purrs along like a well-oiled kitten until it gets to the end, and […]

With 1989’s Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out!, the Silent Night, Deadly Night franchise made a jump that was not uncommon for horror around the start of the ’90s: onto VHS. Usually, the shift in a series from theatrical releases, even very trifling, meaningless ones, over to direct-to-video productions is the clearest sign […]

The worst thing about Rust and Bone is that it was directed by Jacques Audiard, and that’s also the best thing: the best, because it is nothing shy of miraculous that the director could navigate such difficult, borderline trashy material (whale trainer amputee meets, loves underground boxer who doesn’t know how to be a good […]

Thank the movie gods for Miguel Gomes and his Berlinale prize-winner Tabu for coming along at the eleventh hour to save the 2012 film year. The best prestige release season in years was fine and all, but one does start to get to putting together the ol’ Top 10 list and relalise with disappointment how […]

In an ironic twist that could only be seen coming by everybody, the film with the extravagantly notorious reputation – the film that was protested right out of theaters in one of the few times such a trick actually worked for the morally outraged protestors – ended up generating so much interest that, instead of […]

It’s a bad habit to review the reviewers, but I can’t let a few of the things that have cropped up in almost all of the bad and most of the mixed reviews of the long-gestating film adaptation of 1980s mega-musical >Les Misérablesi by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg go by without… without countering them, […]

Christmas! The bloodiest, most vicious holiday of them all! Or at least that is what the preponderance of yuletide horror pictures would have you believe. Clearly, I cannot let such an important day for death and destruction go by with just a single review, and thus I no a launch a full week with the […]

The biggest question I had going into the long, long-awaited movie version of Jack Kerouac’s generation-defining 1957 novel (written in 1951) On the Road was whether it was going to have anything of value for someone who has not read the book, as I have not (like The Catcher in the Rye, it inspires the […]

In truth, there’s no good reason to review The Core of all movies in honor of the fact that we didn’t all die a horrifying death on 21 December, 2012, but I’d already watched it, and by God, I was not going to write that off as time wasted. The one thing you don’t fucking […]