Best case scenario, I figured, was that John Wick: Chapter 2, would be in pretty much every way just as good as 2014’s John Wick – the best American action movie of the last decade and a half or more* – only without the jolt of novelty & thus not as enjoyable. Fairy tale, cloud […]

A review dedicated to T. Rice, as part of the to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. In 1966, stand-up comic and television comedy writer Woody Allen wrote a new dub script for the 1965 Japanese spy comedy Key of Keys, at the behest of U.S. distributor American International Pictures. The result (somewhat […]

The Lego Batman Movie is not at all perfect, and in some particular respects its not-perfection strongly suggests that the returns on theatrical Lego movies are going to start diminishing pretty damn quickly (coming in less than eight months: The Lego Ninjago Movie). But it’s got this going for it: for the first time since […]

The problem with being the director responsible for A Separation is that you’ll almost certainly never make something as good as A Separation ever again. Would I have fallen head over heels for The Salesman if it was just some movie, and not the seventh feature made by Asghar Farhadi? In truth, reader, I do […]

Mike Mills made his first feature as a writer-director, Thumbsucker, in 2005. By some curious coincidence, that appears to have been the exact same year that his third feature, 20th Century Women, was packed in foam peanuts and left to age until it could be sprung on an unsuspecting world as a surprising, not completely […]

A third review requested by Brian Malbon, with thanks for his multiple contributions to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. The 2005 motion picture version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is, as they say, neither fish nor fowl. It skips over enough of the details of the plot with little or […]