All things being equal, I am pleased that Home didn’t turn out to be the movie to kill off DreamWorks Animation. I’d have been even more pleased if Home could have managed that feat while not sucking, but then, there had to be a reason why DreamWorks ended up on a cliff’s edge in the […]
A review requested by Jackie Theballcat, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. NB: Thanks to the work of curator Garrett Gilchrist, this film can be seen in nine parts at the indispensable Thief Archive on YouTube Nothing titled Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure should have the […]
A review requested by K. Rice, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. In requesting a review of Paheli as part the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser, K. Rice noted that I’ve never once in almost ten years reviewed a Bollywood film, and wondered if that was […]
A review requested by Gabe P, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Spoilers are going to be crawling up and down this post like ants. If you haven’t seen Mulholland Dr., know that I give it a perfect 5/5, and if I were making a list of the […]
The original sin of the anthology film is that no matter how tightly controlled it is, no matter how thematically tight, and no matter how aesthetically consistent, there’s always going to be a segment that isn’t as good as the others, and it’s going to feel like it showed up in the worst possible place […]
A review requested by Pip, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. The story goes that J.J. Abrams, along with other chief creative minds involved in the making of the 2009 Star Trek reboot, claimed that one of their collective favorite films in the series up to that point […]
The best thing that I could possibly will myself to say about Divergent is that it was by whatever thin margin the more watchable of 2014’s two virtually indistinguishable post-apocalyptic YA adaptations about the Enormously Special Snowflake whose pluck and to-heck-with-your-rules-man attitude helps to knock the legs out from underneath an inscrutable and preposterously contrived […]
A review requested by James Cronan, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. It’s entirely possible that Tokyo Story isn’t the best movie ever made. But I suspect that it might be the most perfect. Its construction is unthinkably good – not one single shot is wasted, and every […]
A review requested by John, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Almost Famous of the year 2000 is surely the Cameron Crowest of Cameron Crowe films. Not just because it’s also the most baldly autobiographical of Cameron Crowe films, though I suspect that fact informs everything else that […]
One cannot hear pans of a movie like those which greeted The Cobbler at its Toronto International Film Festival premiere in 2014 without becoming morbidly curious. Not pans. That’s not a strong enough word. These were the hushed, strangled whispers of people who had seen something too traumatising to ignore, but also too traumatising to […]
A review requested by Michael R, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Let’s not dick around here: Candyman is the finest American horror film of the 1990s. Now, admittedly, those who’ve been hanging around this blog for all that long are aware that for me to make this […]
To its credit, Chappie very quickly announces itself – not just how bad it is going to be, but also the ways in which it is going to be bad. The beginning is some talking heads describing an artificial intelligence with hushed, earnest tones. Then the film cuts back to “18 months earlier”. And 18 […]
