The second-most irritating thing about The Big Short is how utterly facile it is. This adaptation of Michael Lewis’s 2010 post-mortem of the 2007 collapse of the housing mortgage bubble that crashed the U.S. (and thence the world) economy, written by Adam McKay and Charles Randolph, and directed by McKay, functions first and above all […]
A review requested by Trevor Downs, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. This one’s been bumped up the queue quite a few slots, but it needed doing. This review is dedicated with profoundest gratitude to the memory and legacy of David Bowie (1947-2016), one of the most fearless […]
There is no way to make a film in which most of the words spoken come from the velvety-acidic tongues of National Review founder William F. Buckley and novelist Gore Vidal (or actors Kelsey Grammar and John Lithgow reading from Buckley’s and Vidal’s writing, respectively – inspired casting) and have it be any less than […]
Not every documentary has to be a great work of aesthetics, I suppose, but the career of the remarkably prolific Alex Gibney has been uniquely frustrating in that regard. He’s great at pop journalism: gathering information, sorting it into an argument, and finding all the ways to undercut and poke holes in the counter-arguments of […]
There comes a point when one has to throw up one’s hands and declare, “I just don’t get it”. And here’s me, and here’s director Asif Kapadia, and I just don’t get it. His widely-celebrated 2010 documentary Senna was on a subject that I hold personally dear – Formula 1 racing – and I could […]
The admittedly ungenerous first response I had to Kent Jones’s lovingly fussed-over Hitchcock/Truffaut is that it’s extraordinarily inessential. The famous, one-of-a-kind book length interview, conducted in 1962 and published in 1966, between film directors Alfred Hitchcock and François Truffaut is, to begin with, much too long and full of far too many musings to be […]
May the Film Internet forgive me, but I honestly, reliably enjoy the visuals in director Tom Hooper’s movies. I like the way he and his regular cinematographer, Danny Cohen, kept shunting the actors into weird corners of the frame in The King’s Speech to suggest the main character’s sense of discomfort in the world; I […]
You know who we take for granted? Tom Hanks. And I include myself in this – at the time I write this review, I’m also sorting through my various Best of 2015 year-end musings, and I have not once thought of mentioning him as one of the year’s best actors, despite how utterly arid Best […]
It would be thoroughly disingenuous to claim that it’s obvious in hindsight that dividing Mockingjay, the third and most least-satisfying book in Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy, into two different movies was a bad idea. It was, of course, always obvious that it was a bad idea. But it’s still nice to have proof of […]
A review requested by Thor Rudebeck, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is not going to be anybody’s first answer to the question “name a country that makes animated films” – probably not even the people who live there. […]
A version of this review was published at the Film Experience The big problem I have with Anomalisa is extravagantly petty, but also fundamental: see, there’s a character named Lisa. And she is, as a matter of fact, anomalous within the film’s world. That’s the kind of trite, gimmicky pun that one might patronisingly smile […]
Magic Mike was one of the great surprises in 2010s cinema: a shaggy tale of male strippers starring an army of beefcake with limited (at best) acting skills that turned out to be a piercing, hurtfully insightful examination of personal financial stability in the wake of the 2008 economic collapse. It is a party movie […]
