My hat’s off to Resident Evil: The Final Chapter: it surely does seem to mean its title literally. When it’s over, the series mythology has been wrapped up nice and snug, and while it leaves the promise that there will be many more adventures to be had in this universe, it does so in exactly […]
A review requested by Rob Graham, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. I’m tempted to say that Messiah of Evil is good, but only by accident. Or good, but not on purpose. These are silly thoughts, of course: other than a very few heavily ironic examples, nobody starts […]
It’s not that Monster Trucks is “bad”, which would be comprehensible. It’s that it is enormously dispiriting. The kind of dispiriting that causes a film shot in the spring and early summer of 2014 to receive four different release dates before it’s finally quietly dumped into the hostile snows of January, almost two years after […]
Disney’s current wave of live-action remakes of its old animated films (or “live-action” in the case of 2016’s The Jungle Book) will have reached its fifth title by the end of the first quarter of 2017. And of those five films, Pete’s Dragon is the clear outlier in all sorts of ways. It is, for […]
The Red Turtle is a miracle of transnational cinema: a great Dutch animation director hand-picked by Japanese filmmaking legends to make his feature debut with a Franco-Belgian co-production supported by a Japanese studio. The Japanese legends being Takahata Isao (who serves as this film’s producer) and Miyazaki Hayao, and the studio being Studio Ghibli. Which […]
A review requested by Matt U, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Sideways, from 2004, is one of the more peculiar Zeitgeist hits of the 21st Century. It’s a film about two rather dismal human beings acting generally horrible, and it puts all of its chips on metaphors […]
The fact that Elle isn’t punishingly unpleasant is maybe the most unpleasant thing about it. One longs for the film to tip fully over into brutal viciousness, so we could be sure that it’s got the proper outrage about its sordid subject matter; or for it to go all-in on sleazy exploitation, so we could […]
Martin Scorsese has been attempting to make a film version of Endo Shusaku’s 1966 novel Silence since the early 1990s (an earlier Japanese-language adaptation, directed by Shinoda Masahiro), was released in 1971). After a quarter of a century, he has finally succeeded, and the emergent Silence very much feels like a movie that was the […]
A review requested by Salim “STinG” Garami, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. I’ll freely admit that I can’t tell if Class of 1984 is a good movie or not. On the one hand, it’s unmixed, trashy exploitation, portraying a most overheated melodrama that plays on the audience’s […]
We can talk about how bad it is in a minute (spoiler alert: very bad), but first, I think we should pay full respect to the title of The Bye Bye Man. It is just spectacularly the worst thing ever. I would prefer, as a dignified adult filmgoer, to loudly ask the ticket seller for […]
A second review requested by Patton with thanks for contributing twice to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. How in the name of the good Lord does one even go about starting to discuss Apocalypse Now? It’s among the small population of films about which I think it’s more or less impossible to […]
There has historically been a one-to-one relationship in the Underworld films between Kate Beckinsale being onscreen and the films being even a little bit palatable to watch. In the fifth and very probably final entry in the series, Underworld: Blood Wars, we see less of Beckinsale than in any of the others besides the 2009 […]
