The vibe one gets from the conversation around Kedi – not least because there are obvious economic advantages to the distributor in letting this vibe happen – is that it’s basically a feature-length version of a cute cat video on YouTube. To be entirely fair, if you’re the kind of person prone to spending 80 […]
Personal Shopper was booed at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival en route to winning the award for Best Director for Olivier Assayas, both of which are exactly right. I would be inclined to call it not merely a great film, but a very great film, and comfortably the best thing Assayas has directed since 2002’s […]
So, Kong: Skull Island isn’t “bad”, exactly. I don’t know, is it bad? It’s kind of bad. But the thing is, it wants to do one thing, and it does it, the thing promised right there in the title. Not “Kong” – this is closer to the dullest screen depiction of the giant ape Kong […]
I would ask you, if you please, to consider the 1991 Beauty and the Beast, the crown jewel of the Disney Renaissance. What, pray tell, do you find to be wrong with it? Or let me rather put it this way: is there even one single image in that whole movie that generates the response […]
An older review of this film can be found here When Peter Jackson, somewhat shockingly, used his brand-new Best Director Oscar and all the accumulated clout from having forced the three massive hit films of the Lord of the Rings trilogy into existence to get Universal to sign off on a new iteration of the […]
Popular history records the 1976 remake of King Kong as a terrible failure, but this is not in fact the case. The film cost a shocking amount of money, much of it wasted on a terrible-looking and dysfunctional live-sized robot Kong, but it also brought in a pretty healthy box office return, emerging as one […]
It is the sacred & holy right of genre films to be much, much better at addressing the social problems that plague the world than serious-minded sober dramas. Has been as long as there’s been movies, really. There are a couple of reasons for that, I think: one is that a movie which is content […]
The 1976 King Kong really is quite magnificent in its badness. It’s not that it’s a unjustified remake of an all-time classic film, those are are all over the damn place, that’s not worthy of attention. Even if this one is especially unjustified (after Psycho and Seven Samurai, I’d be inclined to call the 1933 […]
Between 7 March, 1933, and 22 December, 1933, there elapsed a total of 290 days. That is how long it took after the world premiere of the magnificent King Kong to commission, write, produce, edit, market, and release that film’s extraordinarily deflating sequel, Son of Kong. And really, that kind of says it all, doesn’t […]
I can think of not one single reason to hold back: the first King Kong, from 1933, is probably the most perfect movie ever made by a Hollywood studio in what we would call, I guess, the “popcorn movie tradition” – that is to say, big-budget adventure movies with rip-roaring special effects, or some other […]
A review requested by manwithpetgull, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. The Woman Chaser has a teeny-tiny cult following, and this confuses me. It should have an extremely large cult following. Which is a contradiction, of course, and I mean… surely you know what I mean. Just for […]
It is a little tempting to overvalue Logan for its novelty. And I do use “novelty” advisedly – it’s no less than the tenth movie in the broadly-construed X-Men movie franchise to come out in the last 17 years, and one of God knows how many superhero comic book adaptations during the same period. But […]
