A review requested by Robert J, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. A person with the slightest knowledge of contemporary American film style and genre could accurately date Roger Dodger to the first three years of the 2000s based solely on onscreen evidence, and I’m not even counting […]
Any movie that openly courts direct comparison to the 1984 rock mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap is all but begging us to find fault with it. So it’s all the more impressive that Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping should be such an exceptionally rewarding comedy, given the giant breathing down its neck. I’m not sure […]
No movie has ever had such an easy bar to clear as director Adam Wingard and and screenwriter Simon Barrett’s Blair Witch: be better than 2000’s stupefyingly awful Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, unrelentingly terrible and trashy even by the standards of horror sequels. At the same time, Blair Witch had another bar to […]
A review requested by a contributor who wishes to remain anonymous, with thanks for donating to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Ugetsu is everything. I don’t think it’s the best movie ever made – I don’t, in fact, think it’s even the best Japanese movie of 1953, what with Tokyo Story sitting […]
If we want to be brutally honest about it, Sully never really does quite get around to making the case that the story it’s telling needed to be told. It tells the story, to be fair, very well; in an era when highly proficient movie storytelling for middle-class adult audiences was more common, this would […]
In its own way, Keanu is a miraculous little picture. It is a comedy – an American studio comedy – that is driven by its plot and not by the material the stars produced while riffing on set. Possibly as a result of exactly that thing, it has a running time, with end credits and […]
Fundamentally, the only thing that Don’t Breathe gets wrong is that is has the wrong protagonists. Or maybe it’s even that it has the right protagonists, but doesn’t know what to properly do with them. So much of the film feels like it should be a perfectly engaging bit of end-of-summer tosh, a shabby little […]
I want you to ignore the modestly impressive 3/5 rating attached to this review. Ip Man 3i is a fascinating film even in its mistakes, and a great film in its triumphs: anyone with the most glancing interest in action movies, especially martial arts movies, has really no choice but to see it. This is […]
A review requested by Maciej, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Director Vittorio De Sica released the bitter and grim Bicycle Thieves in 1948 and the utterly crushing Umberto D. in 1952, and in between them made only one film, about the dirt-poor inhabitants of a shantytown. With […]
He doesn’t get as much press or awards attention as Cristian Mungiu, but I dunno: Corneliu Porumboiu will always be “my” Romanian film director, somehow. His feature debut, 12:08 East of Bucharest is one of my favorite comedies of the 2000s and one of my favorite satires ever; and now, ten years later and with […]
A review requested by Mark M, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. It can no longer be argued, as was once stated with some casual authority, that The Maltese Falcon was “the first” film noir (it was released in October, 1941, more than fours years after You Only […]
A second review requested by Sara L, with thanks for contributing twice to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Spend any time at all perusing the responses of both critics and anime fans to Princess Arete, a semi-obscure 2001 feature made by the semi-obscure Studio 4°C, and one word will keep cropping up. […]
