The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge out of Water happens to be the very first encounter the present reviewer has ever had with any aspect of the SpongeBob SquarePants universe outside of its dementedly peppy theme song. I lead this fact in the spirit of full disclosure, and also as a warning to the reader: I have […]

Take my hand – or whatever other body part you prefer – and walk with my back to the 1970s, and the Golden Age of Eurosmut. It was a time when the boundary between the glaciated art films developed from the mid-’50s onward and the new world of pornography was as thin and porous as […]

To begin with, Jupiter Ascending is pulp sci-fi of a very ancient stripe, and it is utterly proud of that fact. It tells the story of a secret space princess, set against the machinations of evil space corporations who hire burly lizardmen with bat wings as their guards; characters have names like “Titus Abrasax” and […]

Talking about Predestination without confidently, fearlessly giving away plot points that shouldn’t be given away is enormously hard. The best thing would be to go in totally cold, not even knowing what short story it’s based on (having read the story – it is not at all obscure, though calling it “well-known” might be a […]

The Costnerssaince just isn’t going well, is it? For the latest from our boy Kevin Costner, we turn to Black or White, a drama about race relations in America whose suffocating earnestness is almost enough of a liability to distract one from the film’s clear-eyed assessment of the tenuous state of racial harmony in a […]