The Boss is not actually good. Melissa McCarthy is actually great in it, however, and that provides enough cover for the film as a whole to achieve some kind of simulation of goodness. Or to put it another way, I laughed, and I laughed often enough to conclude that it was a worthwhile comedy, however […]
Princess musicals. That’s the ticket: Walt Disney Animation Studios just needs to keep on making princess musicals. You can set the starting point of Disney’s second renaissance under the guidance of John Lasseter wherever you want – with 2008’s Bolt, which was the first film for which Lasseter was chiefly responsible for overseeing its production; […]
What a strange, strange trend 2016 has brought us: deadly serious movies about race and slavery in America that are nearly undone by terrible editing and ugly color correction that drenches night scenes in azure. By all means, The Birth of a Nation is better than Free State of Jones, but it’s a hell of […]
Of all the things people said against Free State of Jones when it came out – which wasn’t much, because it sank like a stone from the moment it opened as one of the most self-evidently un-commercial wide releases of summer 2016 – I’m rather angry that nobody bothered to tell me how shit-ass ugly […]
A review requested by Nik Evans, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Laura is a fucked-up movie about sex. There’s much else to say about it, virtually all of it good, but I think that’s the core of it. Movies released in America in 1944 didn’t have the […]
I shall simply cut to the chase: The Wailing is all that I could possibly ask of a horror movie. The Korean import isn’t perfect, of course, particularly with an ending that goes through at least one too many switchbacks (though the concluding pair of scenes are exquisite), and a distinct over-reliance on “scary dream […]
A review requested by David Q, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. The Exterminating Angel, from 1962, was the first film directed by Luis Buñuel after his splashy return to his native Spain to make the magnificently poisonous satire Viridiana (whose official condemnation by the Franco government sent […]
We have, in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, a first for the Harry Potter Cinematic Universe: a film with a running time of about two-and-a-quarter hours, telling a story that was designed to take about two-and-a-quarter hours to tell. This was a problem for just about every one of the eight Potter films […]
A review requested by a contributor who wishes to remain anonymous, with thanks for donating to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. There is a sense in which Diva is a victim of its own success. We know from the evidence of contemporaneous reviews that the 1981 release was greeted with “liking nothing […]
In the most unyielding, prescriptivist sense, Hacksaw Ridge is not a film about a pacifist. The real-life character at its center, Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield), firmly believes that it would be sinful to kill other human beings even in combat, but he has no particular complaint if the men surrounding him see fit to kill […]
It’s not very hard to imagine a different version of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children – only a slightly different version, even – that’s a wonderfully imaginative and full of no end of cinematic marvels. For a film that could be described, in fact very nearly demands to be described as “Harry Potter meets […]
Arrival is one of the most entirely ideas-based sci-fi films that I have ever seen; even its late turn from linguistics to moral philosophy is squarely in the realm of the intellect, and while it is in its own way heart-rending, that way is all mixed up in an impressively dense matrix of theories of […]
