A fourth review requested by Andrew Johnson, with thanks for his many contributions to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. One would think that an action picture from Cannon Films titled Runaway Train would be a certain thing, and and one would be wrong as hell. Even going into the film armed with […]
A version of this review was published at the Film Experience There’s a good movie to be made out of Pixels, and it would be the easiest thing in the world to get there. First, keep all of the visual effects setpieces from the movie as it exists, for they are surprisingly beautiful and convincing […]
There are many horror movies that are good until the last act, when they turn into such complete shit that it’s frankly hard to remember what was good about everything up to that point. Many horror movies. The Last Exorcism, from 2010, is not necessarily distinct within that company; it does not start at the […]
All this happened years ago, and it’s long since time to get over it, but it’s really and truly baffling that Warner Bros. saw fit to handle Trick ‘r Treat so shabbily. Having taken on the feature directorial debut of Bryan Singer’s protégé Michael Dougherty (who co-wrote both X2 and Superman Returns for the director), […]
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 notorious insta-flop Pixels is an adventure about a group of competition-level video game players. It’s also pandering to […]
A third review requested by Andrew Johnson, with thanks for contributing yet again to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Personal anecdotes aren’t criticism, of course, but in this case the anecdote shall lead us to criticism, I promise. The thing is, when I was a wee cinephile, I was quite addicted to […]
I have named this penultimate leg of the final Summer of Blood “Horror in the Late 1990s”, but the quick-witted will notice that Final Destination was released in 2000. And no, this isn’t some enormously pretentious “you see, decades begin in the year ending in -1 and end in the year ending in -0, so […]
A review requested by Marc Lummis, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. There are many indisputably great films that it’s clearly impossible for any normal audience member to complete unpack in all their nuances without the aid of some highly specialised arcane knowledge, but even then, writer-director Bernardo […]
The late 1990s were a deeply insincere moment in American pop culture. Emboldened primarily, I suppose by the enormous success of Jerry Seinfeld’s famous stand-up and television comedy about nothing, every facet of music, movies, and television were infested by a great desire to indulge in something that was not, in fact, irony, but was […]
A version of this review was published at the Film Experience Ant-Man is maybe the most typical film yet made in the now 12-picture Marvel Cinematic Universe. It is up to the individual viewer to decide if that’s a compliment or a vicious & lacerating criticism. But it’s really hard to think of it as […]
A review requested by André Robichaud, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. The apparent subject of Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky’s second feature, Andrei Rublev, is indicated right in the title: it’s a story of the life of the most renowned painter of icons in medieval Russia, Andrei Rublev […]
At a certain point fairly early in Urban Legend, the character Damon Brooks (Joshua Jackson) turns on the radio, and a couple of bars of the 1997 Paula Cole single “I Don’t Want to Wait” play, at which he becomes overly flustered and scrambles to turn it off. The younger of you among my readers, […]
