A review requested by Kin Wing Yan, with thanks for contributing to the ACS Fundraiser. The American viewer who knows of Hong Kong superstar Andy Lau at all is likely to associate him exclusively or nearly so with action movies, though this is not at all a fair summarise his career, as I understand it. […]
If we were to start off by directly comparing Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials to 2014’s The Maze Runner – and why shouldn’t we? For here we are, with Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials just dropped there right in front of us with all its petulant awfulness, like something the dog did on the carpet, […]
One of the acknowledged early masterpieces of the American documentary, 1938’s The River isn’t without its limitations on that front, among them being that it demonstrates that the heavy-handed advocacy essay quietly wandering by and pretending like it’s for real totally an unbiased work of non-fiction was with us long before Michael Moore or his […]
It would be disingenuous to call the film adaptation of A Chorus Line the worst possible version of the extraordinarily iconic stage musical. I mean, there’s probably some director out there just waiting and waiting for the copyright to expire so they can stage a version about cannibal lizard-men on the moon. But it’s really, […]
In any film genre, however disreputable and totally without merit, there’s still going to be the “best” of its kind. And so, here we are, and I find myself committing in print to the notion that 1995’s Mortal Kombat, the film that put Paul W.S. Anderson on the map (insofar as he ever actually was […]
Here’s a fun game I discovered by accident: describe the plot of The Perfect Guy to somebody. Better yet, see how much of the plot they can guess just from the title. It’s not hard to get most of it: the girl is dating this really swell guy, but he absolutely refuses to commit, so […]
A review requested by Andrew Testerman, with thanks for contributing to the ACS Fundraiser. There are many things to say about Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, nearly all of them very nice – for example, I might go around calling it the best film directed by the great, perpetually under-appreciated Peter […]
A second review requested by Julian D, with thanks for contributing twice to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. There’s nothing more personal and unique than what somebody finds funny – not even what they find scary, maybe not even what they find sexy. The things that make us laugh are as specific […]
The question that really deserves to be asked of Straight Outta Compton is whether the very real merit of presenting, in the backwards year of 2015, a story of downtrodden African-American men living under the constant threat of police brutality and suffocating poverty who use their intelligence and skill to rise to the very heights […]
There are as many reasons to bitch about 1995’s sputtering thriller Assassins as there are stars in the sky, and I was ready for all of them except one. As none of the reviewers of 20 years ago bothered to tell me, because 20 years ago this wasn’t something anybody would have been compelled to […]
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: as summer fades into oblivion, No Escape shows up just long enough for nobody to go watch its story […]
Far be it from me to tell the nearest and dearest friends and survivors of David Foster Wallace, a great many of whom have said some pretty withering things about the beatifying biopic-in-miniature >The End of the Tour, that they’re wrong. There’s something squishy and off-putting about the film just in relationship to itself, and […]
