A review requested by Ryan J, with thanks for contributing to the ACS Fundraiser. Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 debut feature and declaration of war Breathless* is a curious case. In hindsight, everything that is most daring about it would be repeated to stronger effect in more interesting movies overall by the same director – most directly […]
A review requested by Scott, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. We live in an age when anime – an imprecise term that I try not to use very often, since it doesn’t inherently mean anything besides “animation made in Japan”, which strikes me as condescending at least, […]
A second review requested by Zev Burrows, with thanks for contributing twice to the ACS Fundraiser. In his two-volume collection of lyrics and personal recollections, Finishing the Hat and Look, I Made a Hat, Stephen Sondheim acknowledges that among his impressive corpus of skills, the ability to construct a dramatic narrative has eluded him. He […]
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: Straight Outta Compton is a full-on biopic of N.W.A., the world’s most dangerous group. Rather than visit one of […]
A review requested by Rich B, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Who knows how these things happen? To an average viewer, Billy Wilder is one of the most well-known directors in pre-1967 American cinema, and James Cagney is one of the most recognisable (or at least memorably-parodied) […]
A version of this review was published at the Film Experience The best and maybe the only compliment I can pay to Fantastic Four, the third unsuccessful attempt at bringing the oldest of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee’s creations at Marvel Comics to the big screen, is that it’s not obviously the worst of a […]
A review requested by Pat King, with thanks for donating to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Recommended musical accompaniment to this review. Obviously, if we’re talk about pure, rancid anti-cinematic imbecility, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is Michael Bay’s worst movie and will almost certainly remain that way, for it’s difficult to […]
A Bug’s Life is the most readily-overlooked of Pixar films, and I’d be lying if I pretended that I couldn’t figure out why. After a decade and a half of riches, the 1998 film (the studio’s second feature) can’t help but seem unduly modest in every aspect of its writing. The story is perfectly ordinary […]
A second review requested by K. Rice, with thanks for contributing twice to the ACS Fundraiser. The 1936 propaganda film Tell Your Children, known far better under its re-release title Reefer Madness, is almost too easy to take cheap shots at. It’s the most infamous of the peculiarly robust cycle of anti-drug films in the […]
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: once again, it has proven impossible to make a remotely decent movie out of the seminal comic book Fantastic […]
A review requested by Jonathan Storey, with thanks for donating to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. The title of the magnificent 1975 Warner Bros. release Dog Day Afternoon gives the game away: whatever else it’s about, and there’s a lot of things we could say it’s specifically about, it’s about how fucking […]
I will likely never get over the grisly syntax of its title, but in all other ways, Shaun the Sheep Movie is a miraculous film. It is gripped by a gentleness in both tone and worldview that has been almost totally invisible in children’s cinema in the English speaking world for years upon years – […]
