It’s just really, really special to be a cinephile alive in the days of Joachim Trier. Three features in, all three of them genuinely great (the others being Reprise and Oslo, 31 August, one of the very best films of the 2010s), and none of them are especially like the other two, on top of […]
A review requested by a contributor who wishes to remain anonymous, dedicated to the memory of his father, with my thanks for donating to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. It is 1972, and you have a Western with Robert Redford in it. With that in mind, what’s most surprising about Jeremiah Johnson […]
It is the end of a long, baffling journey to American audiences for The Little Prince, an English-language French-made animated feature that has been waiting since the 2015 Cannes Film Festival for this moment. A substantial hit in most of the markets where it opened across 2015, the film was scheduled for release in the […]
As even the quickest look at a box office report shows, 2016 has been a great year for the popularity of animated films. But outside of the heavyweight American studio tentpoles, there have been genuine treasures that have still managed to slip through the cracks. Thus it’s my pleasure to introduce to you the crackling […]
At some point, I’d really like to see John Carney make a different movie, since he’s clearly got talent to spare as a director of actors, and his writing is an irresistible combination of aching sincerity and clear-eyed, raw naturalism. But as long as the one film he keeps making over and over again – […]
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: with Suicide Squad, Warner Bros. has embraced the harder side of comic books, asking us to root for monsters […]
A review requested by Ben Gruchow, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. The bar for movies based on video games is low enough so that my judgment of 1995’s Mortal Kombat – it’s not just the best one, but is the best one by a whole lot – […]
A review requested by Monica Reida, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. This article is doing no less than quadruple-duty, so get ready. First, it’s of course fulfilling Monica’s request to go along with her donation to the ACS. Second, it’s plugging another hole in the list of […]
For the second time in 2016, Warner Bros. has released a film in the nascent DC Extended Universe that is simply not that bad, and yet people are running around acting like it beat their dog. That being said, Suicide Squad isn’t really very good, when all is said and done. There is good in […]
There’s an extremely strong chance that Midnight Special ends up as the best science-fiction film of 2016. It is thus awkward for me to suggest that it would maybe be better if it was less of a science-fiction film. The film’s strengths – and they are glorious strengths – are entirely grounded in the smallest […]
A review dedicated to Nick Davis (who made no request with his donation, and it is my pleasure to offer this review of one of his favorite films), with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. We’re all familiar, I am sure, with the spectacle of a truly amazing, bravura […]
To call High-Rise a genre film satirising class divisions and the tyranny of the elite is to make the least-brave possible claim about it. This is so unbelievably obviously a movie about the (very literal, in this case) class war that I think you’d have to be a space alien just arrived on Earth right […]
