There are so, so many things wrong with Independence Day: Resurgence. It’s hard to decide where to start, but I think this is the one that pointlessly annoyed me the most: it is a massive waste of potential. Not, of course, the potential of being the 20-years-later sequel to Independence Day, one of the biggest, […]
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: after twenty years, Independence Day: Resurgence is upon us. Because why wouldn’t it be. To begin with, it really […]
A review requested by David N, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. In the general fashion of such things, when Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark erupted into the world at the 2002 Cannes International Film Festival, it was greeted by the majority of English-language critics as though it was […]
Star vehicles aren’t nearly as common as they used to be but you’ll still see them come out at least several times a year. But Central Intelligence is another thing altogether than just a star vehicle – it’s not a project that has been designed to take best advantage of the established skills and personae […]
Whit Stillman has, kind of, always been making Jane Austen adaptations: his 1990 debut, Metropolitan, is a loose reworking of Mansfield Park, in addition to mentioning Austen in the dialogue, and his entire career to this point (five movies and an Amazon pilot that didn’t get picked up, in 26 years – also a 1996 […]
A review requested by Hunter Allen, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. No less an expert on the films of Alfred Hitchcock than Alfred Hitchcock himself once described his 1948 feature Rope as “an experiment that didn’t work out”, and who am I to disagree with Alfred Hitchcock? […]
A review requested by CJ, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Released perfectly in the middle of the 1980s, during a period when British filmmaking was undergoing some dramatic growing pains, My Beautiful Laundrette is something like the focal point for all of that growth. It is the […]
A review requested by Dave F, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. The 2010 film Four Lions could only ever have been made in Britain, for two reasons. One of these reasons is that Britain’s Pakistani population occupies a relatively uncommon sweet spot between assimilation and xenophobia, and […]
Finding Dory is definitely the best sequel made by Pixar Animation Studios without the word “toy” in the title. This is a relief, but not all that much of an achievement: Cars 2 is a visually ravishing trash fire, while Monsters University is an easy-going, wildly lazy hang-out movie that only turns on its brain […]
Here’s my pitch: Pixar Animation Studios needs to make more films with birds. Because here we are, with the company’s newest short film Piper, which is exquisite: the studio has not released such a beguiling, immediately engaging little miniature in the sixteen years since For the Birds (which remains my favorite Pixar short – not […]
A review requested by Carter Smith, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. There’s going to be a lot of wholly subjective, first-person claims in this review, I am sorry to say. But comedy is notoriously subjective and this is a specifically notoriously subjective comedy we have in front […]
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: thirteen years later, Finding Nemo finally gets a sequel in Finding Dory. In contrast, it took less than sixteen […]
