A review requested by Tristan F, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. If ever a film fully earned the descriptor “cult movie”, the 1982 Rankin/Bass production The Last Unicorn is it. Good for the film, and good for its deeply passionate fans, who tend to describe it as […]
Warcraft is not a disastrously bad movie. Would that it were. Then there might be some chance that enough people would gravitate towards it over the years as a camp spectacle to redeem it as gloriously awful, the fate that has rescued so many other movies based on video games, from Street Fighter to the […]
A review requested by Kaitlyn B, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. There are two great cinema masterpieces of American folklore.* Kind of. One of them is The Devil and Daniel Webster AKA All That Money Can Buy, which is based on a 1936 short story that draws […]
The Conjuring 2 is a proper old-school sequel. It doesn’t retroactively turn The Conjuring into the first movement of a long-form narrative; it doesn’t really mention the events of The Conjuring at all, outside of a couple quick visual allusions. It just takes the same heroes, married paranormal investigators Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine Warren […]
A review requested by KayMartha12, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. I like the idea of liking Titan A.E. It’s the kind of movie that, I hold, there should be more of: space operas that really dig into the possibilities of a galaxy full of things that aren’t […]
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: Warcraft is hardly a blockbuster, at least not in the U.S., in no small part because it’s a film […]
A review requested by Will T, with thanks for contributing to the ACS Fundraiser. In celebration of the late Irwin Allen on the occasion of his centennial There are very few movies that you can point to that single-handedly killed off a thriving career. The Swarm is one of these. Prior to making this film, […]
A fourth review requested by K. Rice, with thanks for so many contributions to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. I quite clearly recall making time to watch The Life and Death of Peter Sellers on the night of its U.S. premiere in the late autumn of 2004, as an HBO telefilm, and […]
Let there be no mistake: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows is not a good movie. It’s damn near even a bad movie. And yet it might go down as the 2016 release that most soundly passed my expectations, on account of being a nigh-miraculous improvement in every respect I can think of […]
A review requested by M.C., with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. There once was a time when political commentator Ben Stein was… not cool. He was always a bit of a droning blowhard. But he was the droning blowhard you rooted for. He was that square, smug relative […]
Director Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2009 international breakthrough Dogtooth is a bar set so high that you’d not even mind if it he never managed to leap over it again, and yet here we are: just two films later – and the director’s first film in a language other than his native Greek (it’s English and a […]
A review requested by David Lewellyng, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. I was born near the end of 1981, which means I was about a month shy of my 15th birthday on 15 November, 1996, which was the day that Space Jam opened. This means that I […]
