And so, after all the hype and the best trailers for any tentpole of 2013, it turns out that the movie directed by Zack Snyder and written by David S. Goyer feels like a Snyder/Goyer collaboration. This should be neither surprising nor disappointing, and yet it’s both, somehow. Man of Steel is a basically fine […]
Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: Man of Steel has brought the grandaddy of all superheroes back to pop culture life, 2013-style. For, of course, […]
1981 – I have said before that it was the best year for slasher movies, and I see no reason not to go right ahead and say it again. It was the year of Friday the 13th, Part 2, probably the best entry in that unmatchably important, though confessedly poor franchise; it was the year […]
Really, how is anybody supposed to cope with something titled Disney Princess Enchanted Tales: Follow Your Dreams? It sounds like the direct translation from the Japanese of an anime series that finds the Disney Princesses joining forces to fight their robot doppelgangers on a floating island in outer space. Or at least like Disney’s long-forgotten […]
There is literally zero reason for This Is the End to work as well as it does, and I say this as someone who has entire run out of anything except for sullen tolerance for at least three members of its six-man lead ensemble. For anybody that can hear the name “James Franco” and not […]
There is one thing worse than a generally bad movie, and that is a bad comedy; because you can laugh at a bad sci-fi action picture, or a bad historical drama, or whatever, but a bad comedy, by definition, isn’t funny. And now I find that there’s something even worse than bad comedy, which is […]
Call it Stockholm Syndrome, poor judgment brought on by lowered standards, or a boiling rage against all of Disney and a desire to see it burn to the ground. Whatever the reason, I was actually quite taken with Cinderella III: A Twist in Time. To save my very soul, I don’t think I could say […]
Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: when it’s not busy blowing Google, The Internship attempts to draw broad, crowd-pleasing laughs out of the very real […]
There is something irreducibly special about slasher films from the year 1980. It is the one totally innocent year of the genre: prior to that, there simply weren’t enough of them for it to register as a distinct genre instead of just a narrative skeleton that a few scattered horror films had employed to largely […]
Now You See Me opens with a wonderful gambit that could not possibly fit the movie any better: arrogant Chicago-based street magician J. Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg) asks a woman just off screen to pick a card as he flips extremely quickly through a deck. A moment later, he apologises for flipping through so fast […]
Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha is a love-letter to his girlfriend, indie darling Greta Gerwig, and in this respect it is easy to admire it: for Gerwig is a natural-born movie star, and though we’ve had evidence of that before, there hasn’t yet been a film so carefully designed in so many details to showcase the […]
Star Trek: Nemesis was built, more or less explicitly, to be the final story to feature the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation, trumpeting its overbaked finale-ness in everything from the first scene (excluding a prologue) to the climactic death of a main character which, in best mainstream sci-fi tradition, is implied near the […]
