I beg your pardon, but Only God Forgives is complete bullshit. I’d like there to be a more intellectually suitable way to put my feelings than that, but I’d also like it if Only God Forgives wasn’t such an artistically denuded, pointless waste of time and talent. That’s what’s awful about it, really: this is […]

The byword of the Canadian Summer of Blood has been that there’s Just Something Special about Canadian horror filmmakers: even when their films are no “better” than the analogous United States productions, there’s some kind of increased sense of maturity and intelligence. That is, they are frequently shitty-ass slashers and all, but they are shitty-ass […]

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: the year’s third superhero movie, and the last of the summer, The Wolverine finds the title character traveling to […]

With The Fan, we arrive at a very curious question that isn’t really as interesting as I probably think it is: can a performance be too good for a movie? The reason I ask this is because The Fan pairs the slick manipulations of a Tony Scott-directed thriller with the Method acting of Robert De […]

2013 has been a remarkably mediocre year for American animated features, but even in the company of Monsters University and Despicable Me 2, there’s something special about Turbo, the second and final DreamWorks Animation project of the year (following The Croods, which is starting to look like an elder statesman). It is mediocre; unabashedly so. […]

Inasmuch as it’s possible to feel sorry for a movie, I do feel sorry for Pixie Hollow Games. Originally pitched to be the fifth and last of the Disney Fairies features, with a release in 2012, it ended up being swapped with what was then being called Tinker Bell and the Mysterious Winter Woods, sliced […]

I’m going to name a game, and I want you to think for a moment about the person who plays it. Dungeons & Dragons. I guarantee, with 99% confidence, that you’re thinking of a stereotypical nerd. There is literally one reason for you to be thinking of anyone else, which is because you’re a D&D […]

To me, Crimson Tide has the feeling of being a homecoming of sorts for director Tony Scott: in large part because it returned him to the comforting bosom of producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, five years after Days of Thunder. There are plenty of just fine movies that Scott made without those producers; there […]

Inevitably, “the first movie ever rated R just because it’s so damn scary” creates expectations that cannot be met, not by The Conjuring, probably not by anything. In fact – allowing that “scary” is the only thing even more personal and subjective than “funny” – I don’t even suppose that The Conjuring is the scariest […]

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: ghosts in a haunted house, demonic possession, it’s all fair game in The Conjuring, a giddy old ghost story […]

The organising principal which brings us to this point is a retrospective for director Tony Scott; but 1993’s True Romance is special in being the child of two auteurs, and its historical reputation undoubtedly owes less to the man who directed it than the man who wrote it. For the film’s script was by none […]

I had been warned in advance by many, including regular commenter and generally savvy student of animation Trish, that the third movie of the Disney Fairies line, Tinker Bell and the Great Fairy Rescue, was thematically problematic. So I was prepared, and ended up finding the movie not as massively irritating as I think I […]