There is much to love in Her, and there is a little bit to be hugely frustrated by, though on the whole the concept and world-building is beguiling enough that getting through the rough patches en route to the terrific stuff is no real chore. But there is a flaw so obvious and basic that […]

Bradford Young! Say it soft, and it’s not really at all like praying, with those two shovey “D”s and all, but it’s still an exquisite and important name to get to know. I feel as if Young has been my big discovery of the year, which is bad on me, since 2013 is not also […]

Here’s a switch: Latitude Zero of 1969 was the first, and I believe only, Toho tokusatsu (effects-driven film) shot in English, for an English-speaking market, and only groomed for Japanese release afterward. So the “proper” version of the movie, and the longer cut (by 15 minutes), is the English language one. And it’s that one […]

Sometimes, one’s biases are simply so great that it’s impossible to do anything but acknowledge them and move on. Here, then, is mine: I saw Tracy Letts’s Pulitzer-winning play August: Osage County during its 2007 premiere run at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater, playing in the space it was written for and starring actors that, in some […]

The Wolf of Wall Street isn’t done. That’s the thing that has to be cleared out before we can do anything else at all with it. It might very well be a film that Martin Scorsese can live with for the rest of his life without ever considering for a minute that he and editor […]

There’s an insurmountable argument to be made that, most of a year later, there’s no merit to kicking Movie 43 anymore. On the other hand, writing shell-shocked, visceral pans of fucking dreadful movies is fun, and it’s Christmas Day. So here’s my present to myself, and hopefully to you as well, my readers. God bless […]

The Canadian indie horror film American Mary is good enough that I wish it were better. That’s a weird way of phrasing what’s meant to be a statement of praise; but American Mary is a weird movie. It’s the second feature by filmmaking twins Jen and Sylvia Soska, following the 2009 Dead Hooker in a […]

Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin is in some ways a harsh departure for the filmmaker, one of the reigning masters of Chinese cinema; the quiet gracefulness of his films best-known in the English-speaking world has been replaced by anger and violence, a lingering despair clinging to the movie like a bramble. But at the […]

The English title of Destroy All Monsters – not meaningfully similar to the Japanese title, which I’ve seen translated variously as Charge of the Monsters, March of the Monsters, or Attack of the Monsters – very nearly proved to be prophetic, for the 1968 film began its life as an intentional finale to the Godzilla […]

Miller’s Crossing may or may not be the Coen brother’s “best” movie. I think that argument exists to be made, but it’s hard to get all the way through it with Barton Fink and Fargo over there in the corner, flexing their muscles. It is, though, almost certainly their most elaborate and dense movie, both […]

In the waning days of the mid-’60s surf fad, and the short-lived but intense burst of beach party movies that tagged eagerly along, the brains at American International Pictures came up with many new ways to prolong the life of that cash cow which they had largely invented, each more weird and strange than the […]

Everything about King Kong Escapes is inexplicable. It’s… no, let’s wait a second. Look at that Japanese poster there. I mean, really look at it. Bask in it. It is only descriptive of the things actually to be found in the movie it’s advertising, as giddily pulpy and inane as those longs would appear to […]