From among the Video Nasties There will never come a time when the career of director Tobe Hooper isn’t sad: the fella makes one timeless all-American cinematic masterpiece in the form of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and then never comes within leagues of the same quality ever again. To be frank, most of his post-TCM […]

A quarter of the way through Knight of Cups, I was despondent with the thought that Terrence Malick will probably never make a great film again for the rest of his career. Halfway through Knight of Cups, I was convinced that I was watching the most important film of the 21st Century. By the end […]

A review requested by Deeper Understanding, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Countless awards and critical plaudits later, with the buzziest television show of the 2010s on its roster, HBO has been so respected for so long that’s almost come around on the other side, and now the […]

Swiss Army Man is pretty great right up until it very suddenly isn’t any good at all. I concede that is terrible film criticism, but I’m damned if there’s another way to talk about the movie. You hear “farting corpse that you can ride like a Jet Ski” out of the Sundance Film Festival coverage, […]

Here’s some praise that’s as likely to be a turn-off as not: Green Room is great because it presents the most comprehensively punishing and savage vision of humanity’s capacity for depravity since Wolf Creek, a decade prior (almost exactly a decade, in fact: Green Room premiered at Cannes on 17 May, 2015, while Wolf Creek […]

To start with, Our Kind of Traitor is based on perhaps the least-interesting of John le Carré’s novels that have so far been turned into a movie or TV miniseries or both, so it’s perfectly natural that it should be the least-interesting movie of the recent le Carré fad (which I’m only really using to […]

Let us be blunt: everybody knows who Tarzan is. You don’t have to have read a single one of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s books or seen any of the Christ knows how many movies released in the last eight decades and more to know who Tarzan is. Maybe you only know that he’s the white guy […]

Four unfathomably long years ago, so long ago that animation studio Illumination Entertainment didn’t much seem like they’d necessarily amount to anything, particularly given that one-third of its output up to that point was the incomprehensibly awful Hop, I remember being impressed by the production design of the studio’s Dr. Seuss adaptation The Lorax. Absolutely […]

In memory of Michael Cimino, 3 February 1939 – 2 July 2016 Compared to the glut of masterpiece-level films about World War II, American cinema has – perhaps surprisingly – never produced a wholly great and uncompromised movie about the United States’ war in Vietnam. Too many psychic scars, maybe; could be that the divisive, […]

A review requested by Mark Falconer, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. My sense is that the 1954 version of A Star Is Born is thought of first and above all, and maybe to the exclusion of all else, as a Judy Garland vehicle. That’s fair, because Garland’s […]

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 Secret Life of Pets posits that animals act very differently and have any number of adventures when humans […]

In 2002, the great Russian director Aleksandr Sokurov exploded into international prominence with a movie filmed inside one of the world’s great art museums, using the collection and the physical space to mount an argument about the national identity and history of the country housing that museum. 13 years later, he did the same thing, […]