A review requested by a contributor who wishes to remain anonymous, with thanks for donating to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. The second-most interesting thing about the 2012 film Wadjda is that it the first movie shot, in its entirety, in Saudi Arabia. The most interesting thing is that it was the […]
For six long years, the Amityville film series rested. And why shouldn’t it? Amityville 3-D was a big fat fucking flop in 1983, and the horror film marketplace started to soften right around the same time. But truly evil things, as we’ve learned from the movies, have a way of forcing themselves back into the […]
A review requested by Tyler Thibodeaux, with thanks for donating to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. The critical line of dialogue in Goodfellas isn’t, I don’t think, the pitch-perfect “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.” It sure as hell isn’t “I’m funny how, I […]
Headshot is not The Raid. There is, of course, no reason that Headshot should have been The Raid, but it still comes across as just a little bit disappointing. The five films preceding this in the career of martial artist Iko Uwais have come in two categories: starring roles for director Gareth Evans (2009’s Merantau, […]
A review requested by James Miller, with thanks for donating to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. There’s nothing at all weird about a 1990s animated fairy tale/Disney knock-off with weak musical numbers and hardly any budget. In fact, this is one of the least-weird things imaginable: attempting to copy what works, cutting […]
It Comes at Night could be the title of a horror film, or of a pornographic parody of a horror film. In actuality, It Comes at Night is neither of these, though it’s not above pretending that horror might be in the offing. And if you’re willing to be flexible enough with definitions that a […]
I don’t know if I’m confident that The Mummy would be a good film if it lacked any and all references to the “Dark Universe” that Universal badly wants to kick-start, in which all of the studio’s classic monsters (Dracula, the Frankenstein creations, the wolf man, the creature from the Black Lagoon, and yes, the […]
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: The Mummy is Universal’s third film of that title, each one of them a surprisingly different affair. The first […]
A review requested by Lisa W, with thanks for donating to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. I’ll get to the review in a minute, but allow me a chance for a brief reflection as I draw near the conclusion of this January 2015 fundraiser, here in June 2017. One of the best […]
In November of the year of our Lord 1983, the holy trinity was completed. That was when the third of the “Part 3-D” movies was released, an increasingly degraded attempt to cash in on the short-lived 3-D fad of the early 1980s before it reached its inevitable end, by slopping some cheap 3-D effects onto […]
If we weren’t through the rabbit hole before, we sure as hell are now: DreamWorks Animation has made a film that is literally about potty humor, sixteen years after their Shrek normalised fart jokes in animated features, and about how people who don’t like potty humor are joyless assholes, and it is the sweetest, nicest, […]
A review requested by Allison Tooey, with thanks for donating to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. The thing we should first know about the 2011 animated feature film Tales of the Night is that it’s not really a feature film. Or from 2011. Instead, it’s a package film made up of six […]
