For his inevitable return to feature filmmaking after the busiest retirement in the history of the entertainment industry, Steven Soderbergh has looked backwards, kind of. He’s never made a film exactly like Logan Lucky (a failed attempt at creating a new commercial opening for creator-driven mid-budget films, but otherwise one of the most effortless triumphs […]
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: in The Hitman’s Bodyguard, a hitman has a bodyguard. Do you perceive the knee-slapping humor of this incongruity? Because […]
A quick tour of the internet has suggested to me that there are two kinds of viewers of The Belko Experiment: fans of screenwriter James Gunn who are outraged by how badly the film mangles his sense of humor and what an unpleasantly nasty slog the whole thing is, and fans of director Greg McLean, […]
Not that The Amityville Asylum set out to prove that you can make a bunch of clichés seem marginally less tired if you blend them with a bunch of other clichés, but that’s kind of the net effect. The second in the suffocating wave of direct-to-video Amityville films that was inaugurated by The Amityville Haunting […]
The career of director Ben Wheatley continues to be a softly deflating disappointment. I adore his second and third features, 2011’s Kill List and 2012’s Sightseers, enough that I’ll probably never stop handing out free passes to him, but his 2013 A Field in England was a bit of a disappointment, and 2015’s High-Rise was […]
The Ardennes is a very frustrating movie in a very limited sense: it seems absolutely no-two-ways-about-it certain that it’s going to be just great based on the first scene, and the whole rest of the movie is at best a significant step down in inspiration and execution. And what it turns out to be after […]
Alright, kiddies, it’s time for some box office numbers: 1. Star Wars: The Force Awakens: $936,662,22 (winter 2015-2016) 2. Avatar: $749,766,139 (winter 2009-2010) 3. Wolf Warrior II: $679,495,519 (as of 13 August, 2017) What we have there are the three largest single-territory grosses in the history of worldwide box office. The first two of those […]
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 history of horror stories about dolls, puppets, and other human-shaped objects that have been taken over by some […]
A review requested by Robert Hamer, with thanks for donating to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. It’s important to get it read into the record, right up front, that in a very real and very important sense, The Thief and the Cobbler doesn’t actually exist. Parts of it exist, and from these […]
Stephen King’s seven-volume fantasy series The Dark Tower was completed in 2004; the attempts to turn it into a film (or film + TV) franchise began nearly immediately thereafter. And now we come at the end of ten full years of development hell, and what do we find? A big old wet squib of a […]
The list of movies that owe a huge debt to Blade Runner is damn near inexhaustible, but even so, it’s been a real long time since the last film that drew upon that film’s iconic production design so blatantly and desperately as the 2017 version of Ghost in the Shell. More, indeed, than the film […]
I too donated to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser, and it would be unseemly to thank myself, but anyway, this is what I picked. Like all great satires, the 1998 film The Truman Show has started to look dated and quaint as a direct result of having been proven 100% correct (the […]
