The Accountant has a pretty bad screenplay, and no mistake. If it wasn’t already dragging its feet rather terribly as it headed into the second hour, two sequences would be more than enough to finish the job: one is an exposition dump that… well, after all it’s an exposition dump in the second hour. It’s […]

Starless Dreams is an exercise in pure heartbreak. The documentary has more on its mind than simply making the viewer feel terrible (it is, in fact, a social problem film, though one that offers nothing resembling a solution for the seemingly endless nightmare of human suffering it depicts), but feeling terrible is an unavoidable side […]

Early on in In the Last Days of the City, a filmmaker on a panel can be heard to grumble that he and his colleagues were there to discuss cinema, but that everything they’ve talked about has concerned politics. This is as close as this magnificently sloppy film comes to a direct thesis statement, for […]

Over the 62 years of its existence, Godzilla has been anything and everything: metaphor for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, dangerous animal, force of nature, warrior for the environment, psychic hangover from of WWII, friend to all children, giant hermaphroditic iguana. There’s no such thing, really as a “normal” Godzilla or a normal Godzilla picture, and that’s […]

There’s potentially a great thriller to be found in the content of The Girl on the Train. In fact, there already have been. A witness to a potential crime who isn’t sure exactly what she saw, men using domestic authority to trick the women they love into doubting their own handle on the truth, someone […]

Dheepan is terrific right up until a point near the end where it becomes kind of actively terrible in a really bold, gaudy way; not the first time this sort of thing has cropped up, and not likely to be the last. At least Jacques Audiard, the director and one-third of the writing team (with […]

A review requested by Andrew Yankes, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. There is no film quite like the 1979 animated short Tale of Tales. I mean that in the most literal way. Just about every film is like some other film, but not this one – it […]

Let us not mince words: when the director of Drive makes his version of a Dario Argento movie that abruptly turns into his version of a Lucio Fulci movie, the question was never if I was going to like it, but if I’d be able to choke down my enthusiasm enough to admit that, objectively, […]

The good part first: watching Deepwater Horizon gave me a feeling I haven’t had in a very, very long time. That is, the experience of watching a special effects sequence so impressive in conception and execution that it genuinely seems like something we’ve never seen before. 23 years after Jurassic Park, CGI has evolved from […]

The basic plot of Seven Samurai has been re-worked so many times in so many wildly different contexts that it’s frivolous to complain about one specific remake. Of course, nobody had to make The Magnificent Seven in 2016, and it’s no shock that it’s not remotely as good as The Magnificent Seven of 1960, but […]

Hunt for the Wilderpeople is a movie full of what they used to call “heart”. They still do, I guess, but in general I don’t know that “heart” is in terribly high regard these days. Generally speaking, movies that are long on heart tend to also be mildly awful, is the thing, and this is […]