Depending on what you’re watching for, on a scene-by-scene basis The Villainess might be anything from a contender for 2017’s most powerfully image-driven film to a frustrating, confusing an alienating affair of watching non-characters maneuver through a non-plot while gushing jets of blood. And why I say “scene-by-scene basis”, I really almost mean a “shot-by-shot […]
I cannot in honesty say that Forever My Girl is a bad movie that’s only one tweak in the script away from being good. The filmmaking itself is too defective for that. Especially the camerawork, which is full of irritating little shimmies that oughtn’t be there; most egregiously, during a major emotional beat near the […]
Taraji P. Henson as a gang assassin with a conscience who ends up fighting both sides of a turf war? Fucking-a yes. A neo-blaxploitation film with a classic soul soundtrack and posters like these? Not as much of an enthusiastic yes, but sure, why not. Both of those films in the same package? Obviously yes, […]
It is easy, and usually ignorant as hell, for the Western critic to declare of any fantasy-tinged anime feature from Japan, “why, that reminds me of Studio Ghibli!”, but in the case of Mary and the Witch’s Flower, that resemblance is less a matter of cultural bias than of distinct, definite intent. This is, in […]
Paddington 2 is the safest, most satisfying kind of sequel. If you liked 2014’s Paddington – and if you didn’t, you should know that I am instantly a little bit suspicious of you – you will almost certainly like Paddington 2, because it is almost entirely the same movie. The biggest single difference is that […]
Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters might very well represent the largest shift in the Godzilla formula since 1964’s Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, and not just because Planet of the Monsters is the first animated Godzilla feature (there have been multiple animated Godzilla TV series produced in both Japan and the United States).* Though it’s unlikely […]
It’s not like it’s a surprise that Tom and Jerry: Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory is dumbfoundingly bad. Hell, it’s actually gratifying: it’s always pleasant when a movie is exactly as good as you hope it will be, and that’s just as true when said hope is for something truly repulsive that you can […]
It had seemed, for a little while there, that Liam Neeson had tired of the “AARP action hero” phase of his career: Run All Night, his third thriller with director Jaume Collet-Serra, came out early in 2015, and since then it’s been nothing but respectable roles in respectable movies: a small but hugely critical part […]
It’s not the only admirable thing about Phantom Thread, but it’s the one that I think is most immediately available, how it does not whatsoever feel like a film that was released in 2017. This story of sexualised psychological cruelty in the high fashion world of 1950s London puts everything it can into feeling like […]
The Death of Louis XIV certainly does live up to its title. The newest entry in cinema’s third-oldest genre*, the “watch a monarch die” biopic (born with 1895’s The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots), starts at close to the exact moment that Louis XIV, King of France (Jean-Pierre Léaud) begins to suffer from the […]
Marjorie Prime is a wonderful example of a stage-to-screen adaptation. Director Michael Almereyda’s screenplay mostly leaves intact the material of Jordan Harrison’s 2014 play, a Pulitzer finalist. It largely takes place in a single location, and it leaves alone the distinctively stagey cadences of the dialogue. But it’s such a movie. Almereyda’s visual treatment of […]
A little context before we start: Before I Wake was shot in the fall of 2013 (under the name Somnia, but that’s nor here nor there), and was finished by the beginning of 2015, and only a series of corporate bankruptcies have kept it from us till now. That means that when wee little Jacob […]
