I shall start with the grubby & ungenerous part, which is that the documentary 13th isn’t all that great as a movie per se. It’s distractingly over-directed by Ava DuVernay, who shot all of her interviews from multiple angles and with editor Spencer Averick (credited alongside DuVernay as co-writer) cuts them together in a dizzying […]
Not one blessed thing connects the film other than being road films through the western part of the United States directed by Europeans, but all during Andrea Arnold’s fourth feature, American Honey, I found myself thinking that it was great that we’ve finally gotten a worthy successor to Paris, Texas. For even as they’ve got […]
Historically, Marvel Studios films have suffered from subpar visual effects. Not bad visual effects; it’s just that their CGI has a tendency to stumble at inopportune moments. So here is the first nice thing to say about Doctor Strange: the effects are absolutely stunning. Certainly the best in Marvel’s history, maybe the best in any […]
The worst thing about almost all of polemicist-documentarian Michael Moore’s movies is when Michael Moore appears in them. Which bodes poorly for Michael Moore in TrumpLand, a film that includes virtually nothing else but Michael Moore. In TrumpLand. Specifically, it follows Moore to Wilmington, Ohio, the county seat of Clinton County. Here, over two nights […]
I teach 18-year-old college freshmen how to write research papers and persuasive speeches. Every one of them is better at these things than convicted felon Dinesh D’Souza, a grown-ass man whose job is political analysis. His third film, Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party, is founded on the most specious line of […]
The notorious dance party ending is a plague upon all animated films, but it is perhaps a particularly important element in the films of DreamWorks Animation; it was that studio’s 2001 Shrek that did more than probably any other individual title to cement the trope into place, and they’ve relied on it extensively in the […]
Jack Reacher, back in 2012, was no masterpiece, but it’s a damn solid action thriller with an admirably unfussy star turn from Tom Cruise, a phenomenally colorful villain played by Werner Herzog, and it is blessed with a plot that splits the difference between “twisty” and “generic as all hell” exactly where you’d like to […]
The problem with with The Handmaiden is that it starts out perfect. Just perfect, I mean, everything I want a movie to be is in there: utterly lush, can’t-stand-it-how-pretty costumes and production design that bring pre-WWII Korea to life with elegance and great vividness while also locking the film into a visual schema based on […]
Like many another film lucky enough to share a series with a real piece of crap, the 1956 sci-fi/horror film The Creature Walks Among Us had a nice, easy, eminently surmountable bar to clear. That being, in this case, to be better than 1955’s Revenge of the Creature, an endlessly tedious film about which I […]
Maybe I’m feeling generous because it’s been so many years since we’ve last seen Tyler Perry’s drag horrorshow in the movies, but I sort of wonder if Boo! A Madea Halloween isn’t the best of all the Madea films (I admit that the character’s last appearance, in 2013’s A Madea Christmas, remains unseen by me). […]
