By no reasonable standard is Paul Blart: Mall Cop a good movie. It is perhaps even a very bad movie, and a largely unamusing comedy. That’s even adjusting for the already questionable comic standards of the “fatty fall down” genre, one of the loudest and most obnoxious of all possible subgenres. So it is bizarre […]
A review requested by a contributor who wishes to remain anonymous, with thanks for donating to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. As I write these words in the spring of 2015, the 2012 French animated feature The Day of the Crows has no distribution plans in North America, nor even an announced […]
Adaline Bowman deserves a better movie than The Age of Adaline. And she probably deserves a better actor than Blake Lively, though this is vastly better work than Lively has done anywhere else in her career. Adaline, as we are told by the authoritative, detached narrator (Hugh Ross, who filled the same role, and with […]
A review requested by Alex D, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. More than a decade and a half after its underwhelming theatrical performance that sneakily begot one of the most omnipresent movie cults of the early ’00s (I was in college in those days; the film was […]
A review requested by Ben Verschoor, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. The 2001 video game adaptation Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is a bad movie. I apologise for the redundancy. But it’s not just bad, the way that other entries in its peculiarly benighted subgenre are, like […]
A review requested by John Grimes, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Scout’s honor, I’ll get to the review part of the review in a minute, but I can’t go into without getting something off my chest, which is that Foodfight! is monstrously unattractive. I would swear at […]
All due respect to the recent spate of high-profile horror movies to be critically fêted on account of being actually good, but one of the things that The Babadook and It Follows have in common is that they’re both immensely well-made versions of something that’s already been done. Now, quite unexpectedly, we have the opposite, […]
A second review requested by K. Wild, with thanks for contributing twice to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Like just about anyone born after 1970 who loves musical theater, I had my Phantom of the Opera phase. I’m not sure when or how it ended, exactly, but it was well before December, […]
A review requested by K. Wild, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. The 1996 feature film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s musical Evita is, generally speaking, just fine. It’s biggest limitation, frankly, is that it’s an adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s musical […]
A second review requested by David Greenwood, with thanks for contributing twice to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Knowing, as one can’t help but know, that Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom is the most god-damned notorious art film of them all for its grotesque displays of violence, warped sexuality, and […]
A review requested by David Greenwood, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. L’âge d’or, an hour-long 1930 feature, is the second of the two collaborations between France-based Spanish surrealists Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, and it is certainly less jam-packed with iconic “every film buff alive knows this […]
A review requested by Brian Malbon, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Two things at least can be confidently stated about Meet the Feebles: it’s a movie that goes to great lengths to be the most fully-expressed version of itself possible; and Peter Jackson’s career would have been […]
