Wouldja look at that, hire some filmmakers who actually give a shit about Star Trek, and poof! you have yourself a perfectly solid Star Trek movie. It only took three tries – and getting J.J. Abrams hired away to direct a film in that other space franchise – but the neo-Trek prequel/reboot series that started […]
A review requested by Andy Stout, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. A film like Martyrs has to exist, and I’m glad it does. That is not the same thing as being glad I’ve personally seen it, and it sure as bloody hell isn’t the same thing as […]
The absolutely worst thing about 10 Cloverfield Lane is that it’s titled 10 Cloverfield Lane. For the title means that we’re going to have some expectation that it will in some capacity tie into the 2008 giant monster from space movie Cloverfield, no matter how much we want not to. Thus, no matter how carefully […]
Scary is subjective, what makes one person quiver down to the base of their spine makes the person sitting next to them yawn with boredom, all that good stuff, and I wasn’t thinking about any of that “let us be sensibly objective” bullshit while I was quivering in pleasurable agony in the mostly dark theater […]
There aren’t too many slasher films as scattered as Curtains. When I put it that way, it sounds like it’s not even a compliment. And I suppose it probably isn’t a compliment, at that, given how much the movie at the end feels like a collection of scene ideas tacked to a board over the […]
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: because nobody stopped them when the dragged god-damned dinosaurs into the ice age two movies ago, the makers of […]
Poor The Divergent Series. I mean it. You come into the world raring to be the new Hunger Games – made by the same studio no less, Lionsgate – with a new Hot Young “It” Actress to pin your hopes on, and then it’s all downhill after a kind of solid start. Eventually, you flare […]
A third review requested by Zev Burrows, with thanks for his multiple contributions to the ACS Fundraiser. To date, the 1974 film Stavisky… is the only straight filmed treatment of one of the key events in interwar French history (the 1937 Hollywood film Stolen Holiday is a fanciful and mostly fictionalised interpretation), but that’s not […]
Here’s an object lesson in what cultural hegemony looks like, from the perspective of the hegemon. So at this point in history, China is the second-largest market for American films after the United States itself, and several of the highest-grossing films in the history of the Chinese box office are American studio blockbusters: Furious 7, […]
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: if you have been paying very close attention you might have stumbled across the obscure little tidbit that the […]
Gene Siskel had a famous test he supposedly applied to every movie he saw: is this more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch? I cannot recall the last movie to fail that test as emphatically as the new Ghostbusters, which scoops up a most enviable collection of quick-witted comic actors and […]
A review requested by Mia S, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. The second narrative feature directed by Peter Greenaway (and it would probably be okay to put “narrative feature” in scare quotes), A Zed & Two Noughts from 1985, is kind of fucking ludicrous, the monumentally ambitious […]
