The good news: Tammy isn’t entirely about making fun of fat people for being fat fatties who eat the fuck out of food when they’re not falling down on their fat asses for being so fat that they can’t even stand on their fat legs. And as such, whenever future cinephiles are attending Melissa McCarthy […]

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: Tammy is about being desperate, broke, screwed over by a man, and looking to solve it all by taking […]

Years of intense critical re-evaluation, from Marxist theorists, feminist theorists, queer theorists, and structuralists, have brought the career of German emigrant Douglas Sirk to a level of respectability and significance that he was not generally accorded in the 1950s, when he was regarded as one of several nobodies churning out “women’s pictures”, and producing what […]

It has been more than three decades since Hell Night premiered in the summer of 1981, and it has only slowly developed a cult following over those years. Truth be told, I don’t know if even now it has a reputation as generally being a crap slasher film from an era when crap slasher films […]

The first wave of 3-D did not last very long. The first film to showcase the new Natural Vision technology, Bwana Devil, was released in November, 1952; in 1955, only one movie, Revenge of the Creature, was released in the United States in 3-D. In between those two points was a flurry of activity that […]

The thing about the Bible epics of the 1950s is… I don’t even know what the thing is, other than that they’re one of the most curious, weird genres that ever existed, in no small part because of how aggressively they eschew being weird in any minute way, shape, or form. It’s as square as […]

Everybody thinks everything is overrated or underrated. That’s the fun of it: it’s why we get to latch onto certain books or movies or video games or whatever as the objects of our special, private passions, and why we get to feel superior to all the people who like… that. In the career of Stanley […]

The next time you’re at a cocktail party, and the hostess stands up tipsily and imperiously like Rosalind Russell in Auntie Mame to demand that everybody share their favorite actor-director team,* I want you to do me a favor. Overlook the obvious (De Niro and Scorsese), the tasteless (Depp and Burton), the snobby (Ullmann and […]

There comes a time when you start to think, “Am I really going to start ranking the Transformers films?”, and the answer turns out to be “apparently”. Because there’s a lot of chatter out there about how Transformers: Age of Extinction is so godalmighty awful, and it’s really not, actually. Now, Transformers: Revenge of the […]

There is no spectacle quite like the spectacle of the musicals made by MGM’s A-list production unit under producer Arthur Freed. Glowing Technicolor, some of the most talented song-and-dance experts ever put on screen, enormous budgets spent on enormous sets: these are the ingredients to make a lifelong fan of the musical genre. Curiously, the […]