“Style over substance” is generally meant as a criticism, though not ’round these parts, not if I have anything to say about it. And I think, anyway, that if I call Baby Driver a particularly clear-cut example of style over substance, I am agreeing that the film turned out exactly the way writer-director Edgar Wright […]
Whatever else is true of Bong Joon-ho’s filmography as late, I’m glad that we have one filmmaker in the business of treating global capitalism as cartoonishly evil in madcap genre films that have the approximate rationality of 1960s European comic books. Okja, Bong’s latest film isn’t as visually brazen & thus not as successful as […]
A review requested by Brian F, with thanks for donating to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. The first question: how is one to even go about the task of watching The Night of a Thousand Cats? The film was first released in its native Mexico in 1972 (the Spanish title is La […]
So, I think we might have it: the Michael Bay-est movie that Michael Bay has ever made. Which is ironic, because it is tremendously obvious as you’re watching Transformers: The Last Knight that Bay didn’t want to be involved. That’s nothing new, of course; I think that Bay has pledged that every new Transformers film […]
Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: it appears that part of Transformers: The Last Knight – the part that isn’t about King Goddamn Arthur, anyway […]
The Amityville Curse wasn’t the worst Amityville film at the time it came out (no haunted lamp, no sale). But it was undoubtedly the most boring, and isn’t that really just as bad? At least Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes lets you gape at it with unreasoning bafflement that numerous intelligent people decided to make […]
A review requested by Andy P, with thanks for donating to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. “It’s like a dream turned into imagery” is a sentiment that I confess to relying on much too lazily and much too often, but after seeing Horrors of Malformed Men, I might have to retire it. […]
47 Meters Down was completed last year and readied for an August 2016 VOD release (under the title In the Deep), and its stay of execution came about for one reason and one reason only: because about five weeks before its street date, The Shallows came out and got shockingly good reviews and made a […]
I’ll tell you what, Collateral Beauty only wishes it could Collateral Beauty as well as The Book of Henry does. This summer’s entry in the “uplifting sentimental treacle made by people who learned about humanity by studying our robots” genre has, like that film, a plot swerve so unbelievably apeshit that I cannot imagine how […]
Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: Pixar has, for reasons best not examined too closely, returned to the world of talking race cars with Cars […]
Cars 3 could be a hell of a lot worse. We know that. We already had Cars 2. To avoid the fate of joining that film at the bottom pit of Pixar hell, the filmmakers made the very reasonable distinction of simply going back over the plot of the first Cars, a movie that was […]
A review requested by a contributor who wishes to remain anonymous, with thanks for donating to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. And now we come to a question of some real urgency: what the living hell happened to Don Bluth at the start of the 1990s? There’s a simple answer to that, […]
