There’s something undeniably medicinal about the notion of yet another film in which the psychic scars of the Holocaust play out in a post-war European domestic drama. Even when they are very, very good, the questions loom: what’s actually left to say about this topic? And dear God, is it at least being said in […]
Fair is fair: Crimson Peak has a screenplay that feels like it was written by a 12-year-old, for 8-year-olds. It is a screenplay (credited to director Guillermo del Toro and Matthew Robbins) in which the main character is writing a Gothic novel that apparently has a similar story to the one she’s living through – […]
The bar for movies starring TV genius Tina Fey is so low that really, I only needed to not actively hate Sisters to declare it a success. Mission accomplished, but not by a nearly secure enough margin. Perhaps the easiest way to point out the great gaping hole in the movie is to mention that […]
Natalie Dormer has an interesting face. I don’t necessarily mean to say that she’s enormously attractive, though of course she is, in an unconventional way. That “unconventional” makes the difference – the shape of her head is flatter than you’d expect from a Hollywood-type star, and that pushes her features together in an unusual way, […]
Christmas Day is late to make an end run for Worst Movie of the Year laurels, but the remake of Point Break holds nothing back in making sure it was the strongest possible candidate for that dishonor. It would be hard to run down a list of all the worst-case-scenarios the film manages to fulfill, […]
There us a great deal to admire around the largely French-made Turkish-language film Mustang. It scores two major coups even before you start watching it: it’s a study of adolescent female psychology and sexuality in a cloistered Turkish family, which is rare enough; and it was directed and co-written by a Turkish woman, Deniz Gamze […]
If a body wanted to be unnecessarily reductive in every possible way, one could say something like: Sicario is the Mexican drug cartel version of Zero Dark Thirty, with Emily Blunt replacing Jessica Chastain as the woman driven to the breaking point in competing with violent male nihilism. I say, let’s not be that reductive. […]
Creed is the best Rocky film since Rocky” has very obviously become the conventional wisdom, but I don’t think it goes far enough. Creed is, I would much rather say, the best Rocky film, period. And that includes having the best depiction of Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) himself, as a tired, sorry old man who […]
Director Michael Dougherty’s first film, Trick ‘r Treat, is both a great Halloween movie and a great horror film, which sounds like a trivially easy task to accomplish. If any holiday is well-suited to a genre, it’s Halloween and horror; and yet what else has ever done it? Even the mighty Halloween isn’t quite as […]
I know the internet has decided that we’re supposed to hate Birdman, but I persist in admiring its razor-sharp presentation of a smudgy POV through sardonic, jazzy comedy. I had even allowed myself to hold out hope that was to be the salvation of Alejandro González Iñárritu, a director whose filmography started out with the […]
If you’re going to make a new version of a ’70s Italian cannibal movie, to be set in the American Old West, the first thing to do is ask yourself why the actual fuck you want to do that. But okay, let’s assume you come up with a satisfying answer, so you go ahead and […]
The Hateful Eight, sure enough, is about hate. I can’t recall the last movie so explicitly about how all of its characters, and by extension the society that they are a part of, are irredeemably evil, and I certainly can’t recall the last one that has such a jolly mood about it. This movie, if […]
