A review requested by Ryan R, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. The line attributed to Jean-Luc Godard goes something like, “To critique a movie, you have to make another movie”, which puts the modern reviewer of the 1967 potboiler Valley of the Dolls at a clear disadvantage. […]
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 generation-defining mobile video game Angry Birds was released late in 2009, with its international popularity peaking in 2010 […]
There’s some real nice texturing, that’s what there is. I mean, real nice textures. In the extreme close-ups of the birds’ bodies (of which there aren’t all that many, but enough to make the point), you can see feathers that have been individually delineated, and even barbs that have been individually delineated, all of them […]
A review requested by theizz, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Upon revisiting the great musical character dramedy Hedwig and the Angry Inch for the first time in many years, I was pleased and more than a little bit surprised to find that I treasured it more now […]
The Nice Guys feels more like a movie directed by the writer of Lethal Weapon than it feels like a movie directed by the director of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Who in both cases is Shane Black, here making just about the Shane Blackest movie of his career. And there anyway comes a point where […]
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: Money Monster is a very sober crime thriller about fiscal malfeasance starring George Clooney and Julia Roberts. I would […]
A great work by a magnificent director, Cemetery of Splendor is, nonetheless, the movie that makes me wonder if Apichatpong Weerasethakul is becoming “shticky”. That probably means nothing at all other than that of all his features, it’s the one whose cryptic insolubility feels to me the most soluble, and in the most straightforward way. […]
A review requested by Alex, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. The line on 2010’s Attenberg, established during its 2012 U.S. release in my hearing, but possibly older, is that it is a warped and weird and delectably perverse entry into the 21st Century’s tradition of demented Greek […]
In retrospect, “the worst of the Captain Americas” and “the best of the Avengerses” is exactly what somebody with my tastes in Marvel movies should have expected from Captain America: Civil War, and lo and behold, that’s exactly what it is. The first film in the much-ballyhooed Phase 3 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is […]
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: I swear, the worst thing about doing this feature every year is coming up with something, anything to riff […]
Chantal Akerman premiered her final film, No Home Movie, on 10 August, 2015, at the Locarno Film Festival, and on 5 October, 2015, she died. It has been reported that she committed suicide. Ordinarily, I’d say it would be right to dismiss that kind of detail as prurient, salacious gossip-mongering, but as a heavily-modulated autobiographical […]
The third and newest film produced by the Walt Disney Company to bear the title The Jungle Book significantly lacks the greatest strength of Maleficent and Cinderella, Disney’s other recent attempts to remake its animated features as realistic popcorn movies: it does not feature a world-class actress playing one of the studio’s greatest villains (which […]
