On paper, everything about The DUFF seems calculated to make it seem like the most dire of slogs, beginning with its capitalisationally overdetermined, visually ugly title. And it only gets worse upon learning that said title is a slang term (which feels like it probably doesn’t actually exist in the wild) meaning Designated Ugly Fat […]

If the 2014 taught us all just one lesson, I’d like it to be that Eva Green is an international treasure. It’s one thing to be, allegedly, the one spot of pure bright light in the TV show Penny Dreadful (of which I have not seen a single episode), but quite another to survive two […]

Joseph L. Mankiewicz is not a bad director. But he’s not a truly great one, either; he’s not worthy, anyway, of being the second of only two men to have won a pair of back-to-back Best Director Oscars (John Ford was the first). He didn’t, in general, do anything unexpected with his camera; he rarely […]

To begin by asking the least burning question of them all: is Song of the Sea better than The Secret of Kells? I’m inclined to say no. There’s the ol’ “form follows content” argument, which would have it that Kells uses a visual aesthetic that is intimately derived from its primary subject, the illuminated Book […]

With what I can only call the most admirable clarity, the monumental biopic Patton, Best Picture Oscar winner of 1970, opens with a kind of thesis statement that lays out everything the rest of the film is to contain. I don’t refer to the main body of its legendary opening scene, in which famed World […]

I am very happy to kick off the reviews for the 2nd Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser with this special dedication – Tim H. would like to wish Marty and Melanie a very happy wedding today, with this review of Marty’s favorite movie. And so would I. I have in the past waxed some […]

Fifty Shades of Grey is a monumentally boring motion picture. Whatever value there is to a smash hit movie written, directed, and produced by women, and pitched to an audience of women as a way for them to enjoy an expression of sexuality; whatever damage the film threatens to do by seriously misrepresenting the (healthy) […]

If, for whatever reason, you wanted to make the most ice-cold, vagina-drying, boner-killing movie about sex in all of cinema history, you would first have to confront the fact that Exit to Eden already exists, and it has set that bar inordinately high. It’s no surprise, really, that nothing good could should come of a […]

Like a great many films that were birthed in controversy, time has somewhat mellowed opinions towards Cruising since its notorious first release in 1980. Once a film universally condemned by gay rights groups for its apparent series of transitive arguments that male homosexuality = the leather/S&M scene = self-hating gays murdering everybody, the film has […]

To the best of my knowledge, at the time of this writing, 1976’s In the Realm of the Senses has never been shown uncensored in its home country of Japan. The easy gag is to go for the “ye gods, it’s too explicit for the country that invented tentacle porn?” angle, except that glosses over […]

I do not, in general, believe in the phenomenon of actors being the solitary saving grace of an otherwise disposable movie, but I’ll say this: Jeff Bridges is clearly the solitary reason that Seventh Son is an absolute blast of a bad movie, the kind that immediately upon departing, I wanted to start listing the […]

Returning to Secretary more than a decade after it was new, my first reaction has nothing to do with its content or story, but is one of rampant nostalgia: remember when we had indie movies like this? Because I had, in all honesty, kind of forgotten. Such a marvelous age, the late 1990s and early […]