The responsible critic is supposed to at least give a movie the chance to defend itself, and this I did not do with Bambi II: I approached it with knives drawn, and have only myself to blame for hating it as much as I had every intention of doing. This is not, after all, like […]

As was true for a great many people born at the end of the 1970s or beginning of the 1980s, I suspect, Army of Darkness was the first film in the Evil Dead trilogy that I saw, by a margin of several years. For this exact reason, there’s always going to be a slightly abashed […]

By all means, The Evil Dead and Army of Darkness are grand movies: one terrifying, one wacky, and both a crazy amount of fun. But 1987’s Evil Dead II, the middle film in Sam Raimi’s best trilogy… it’s just well and truly special, a real once in a lifetime sort of movie. Astonishingly, a quarter […]

There are only two kinds of viewers that I can imagine getting much enjoyment to speak of from Oblivion,and I am both of them. The first kind are those people who felt about director Joseph Kosinski’s 2010 debut TRON: Legacy, an unfathomably shallow demonstration of visual and aural style at its most computerised, that it […]

By December of 2005, Disney sequels had been around so long that there was really nothing left for them to do that could possibly shock anybody who’d been paying the least attention to the rampant consumer-baiting that the company had turned into a bottomless ATM, and yet I’m still a little surprised that Kronk’s New […]

It is not, I gather, the fashion to be very enthusiastic about The Lords of Salem. Of course, it’s not really the fashion to be enthusiastic about horror movies in general, but even in the forgiving, self-selecting world of horror lovers, Rob Zombie’s fifth film has been greeted with more than its share of hostile […]

The emergent conventional wisdom is that Trance has a really dreadful script, and this is something I cannot manage to disagree with, though I think the degree to which it’s been slammed is a bit exaggerated. Undoubtedly, it’s silly as hell, and relies on twists that are plainly there more in the spirit of “did […]

I would first say that it’s virtually impossible for me to imagine how anybody could fail to regard To the Wonder as Terrence Malick’s worst film, though “worst” isn’t necessarily a useful word in this context: prior to this, I’d have said that Malick’s “worst” film was The New World, which was so bad that […]

If I were to say to you, a propos of nothing, “the most trenchant satire of American bloodlust and broken-down media culture of the 1970s was produced by Roger Corman,” would you believe me? Don’t bother answering, because I refuse to believe anybody would; I’m the biggest Corman fan I know personally, and I was […]

So… Pooh’s Heffalump Halloween Movie? Are you fucking with me? That’s not a title, that’s just nouns being crammed together inelegantly in a row, like a German compound word. Even Pooh’s Halloween Heffalump Movie would be an improvement; the grammar would be more coherent. But alas, Pooh’s Heffalump Halloween Movie it is, and in all […]

All things being equal, 42 should not be even as good as it is, with the caveat that as good as it is still has some definite problems. But it’s an inspirational biopic, and with the monstrously unprepossessing track record that those have, “good with some problems” is like, just one or two steps down […]

The question of whether Jurassic Park III is a worse movie than The Lost World: Jurassic Park is really mostly pointless, and largely insoluble; both are so extremely far down the scale from the original Jurassic Park that it’s a matter of shading, not true qualitative difference. Or put it another way: one is probably […]