Nearly two years of hype since the film’s 2011 Toronto International Film Festival has promised that You’re Next was a brilliant dark horror-comedy. I will allow the possibility that I’m dumb as fuck, but not one single moment came across to me as comic. The best case scenario is that director Adam Wingard and writer […]

If only by a small margin, Hot Fuzz probably has the stronger reputation; The World’s End is more sophisticated in all sorts of storytelling and filmmaking ways. But from where I stand, the very first feature made by director Edgar Wright, with stars Simon Pegg (who co-wrote with Wright) and Nick Frost, after the three […]

First, let’s clear out the brush: The World’s End, the third genre pastiche about English male behavior by Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg, just isn’t as funny as Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz. Even granting the deeply personal nature of what makes us laugh, I can’t really imagine anybody thinking that claim is […]

I do not know that Woody Allen has ever made a movie that is so much about its central performance, to the exclusion of every other concern, as Blue Jasmine; the most recent film of his monumentally prolific career that even comes close is Another Woman, a quarter of a century old. This isn’t meant […]

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: if we’re being classy about it, overt Twilight knock-off The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones could be more generously […]

This is nitpicky, but I have to get it off my chest: 1992’s Prom Night IV: Deliver Us from Evil is not about prom (which annoys me), but it does take place on prom night, and the main characters are making a specific choice not to be at prom, so it can rightly be considered […]

How to Stuff a Wild Bikini is a film of lasts: the last of the American International beach party movies directed by the series’ animating spirit, William Asher; the last starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, no longer resembling teenagers even to the minute degree they did in the earliest films of the run, but […]

The horror genre was at, perhaps, its all-time low in the early 1990s, and in Canada just as in the U.S. that means it was time for direct-to-video shlock to muscle its way in. Thus we arrive at Prom Night III: The Last Kiss, which is as cheap and as horrendously acted as you’d ever […]

It would be a lie if I said that Lee Daniels’ The Buter was “bad”: it is good, or at least within good’s wheelhouse. But it’s certainly not good in the way that I, for one, was hoping for, and considering the (legally-mandated) possessive right there in the title, is is less of what history […]

A re-review: I have mellowed somewhat in my feelings toward Déjà Vu since it was new, but not enough that I’d feel the need to revise anything I said before, except that my original review, however fair or not fair at the time, has become unspeakably tasteless in light of the manner of Scott’s death […]

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: a twofer! With Paranoia, we have a thriller about a man whose job has unexpectedly thrust him into the […]

One year after Man on Fire, Tony Scott directed Domino, and the vast chasm between the two of those films is telling. Of what, I’m not sure – but man, is it ever telling. Domino, I believe, has its share of passionate defenders, and it ought to: it’s the kind of movie precisely designed to […]