A review requested by Vianney B, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. This was the opening film of the 48th Cannes International Film Festival, on 17 May, 1995 – more on the 1995 Cannes Festival project. The two biggest problems with 1995’s The City of Lost Children are […]
Overhype is a deadly thing, and I don’t want to contribute to it. So let’s just leave it at this: if you’re on the fence about Mad Max: Fury Road, I think you should see it. Go now, and do not be overhyped. If you’re sticking around to find out why I think you should […]
A review requested by Eric “Sssonic” Mason, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. There is a certain kind of film that has existed ever since the first generation of film school students began to direct features, and which came to its fullest prominence beginning in the 1990s, in […]
Making a sequel that significantly improves on a strong original is a feat that few enough filmmakers have ever achieved; asking those filmmakers to try their luck by doing the same thing twice in a row is clearly beyond reason. So it’s hardly a slight against Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome that it fails at the […]
Mad Max 2 is, maybe, the perfect sequel. And if you’ll let me pause on that very ebullient sentiment, a note on usage. The film is known by that title everywhere in the world except for North America; the original Mad Max had received a virtually invisible release in 1980, the victim of immensely poor […]
There’s no way around it: Mad Max is an astonishingly impressive movie. It was made for pocket change by a bunch of of amateurs: director and co-writer George Miller was a medical doctor, of all things, before he and producer partner Byron Kennedy made the short Violence in the Cinema, Part 1. And that was […]
A review requested by Robert K, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. I’m greatly pleased that, when the time inevitably came for me to write about The Apple, it would be in the context of a fundraiser for the American Cancer Society. There’s a deep connection between this […]
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: the high concept behind Hot Pursuit is counter-programming, of course, but it’s also the latest in Hollywood’s cynical attempt […]
A review requested by John Smith, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Against all reason and the evidence of the film itself, Our Miss Brooks is one of the most singular movies I’ve ever had occasion to talk about. As far as I can tell, it’s the second […]
I wish Under the Skin wasn’t so recent, because I’d love for the declarative statement “Ex Machina is the best science fiction film since Under the Skin” to mean something more profound and impressive than “Ex Machina is a better movie than Chappie“.* But you plant flags in the soil you’ve been given, not the […]
A review requested by Max, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. The hook of 2005’s Little Manhattan is, to begin with, absolutely baffling, though if you just glance at it really quickly it might seem to make a kind of intuitive sense: hey, what if we did a […]
A review requested by Robert Lovejoy, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. In all the annals of unclassifiable films, I can’t think of anything quite as unclassifiable as 1973’s F for Fake, the penultimate completed feature of Orson Welles’s directorial career (only Filming ‘Othello’ followed it). It’s customarily […]
