When one of the greatest working directors of actors and one of the greatest working actors collaborate on their first film together, it is extremely easy to get one’s expectations all riled up. And this much at least can’t be denied about Where’d You Go, Bernadette: Cate Blanchett (for she is the actor) is splendid, […]

Every Saturday in August, Brennan Klein will be subbing in for Summer of Blood by exploring a German krimi film from the 1960’s. Well, here we are. It’s the final week of our Summer of Krimi and we’ve reached the end of the line. The subgenre that started that fateful day in 1959 when the Germans first […]

I have no intention of ranking the …Has Fallen films. They haven’t earned that. You rank things because it is fun to think about their relative merits, not their relative flaws; one could as well rank one’s sinus infections as rank the …Has Fallen films. But I will, albeit sullenly, hazard the quasi-praise that Angel […]

“I like movies. Old ones. Back when they knew what they were doing,” says Ed Hemsler (John Lithgow), star of The Tomorrow Man, and you know what? I totally agree with that. Also, if you want a really clear-cut example of the kind of movie that gets made now, when they don’t know what they’re […]

Intermittently 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: I regret to say, Angel Has Fallen exists now, bringing back Gerard Butler’s meaty Secret Service agent Mike Banning for […]

One of the similes I keep handy in my back pocket is the formula “[film] overuses [word] like a 12-year-old boy who’s just learned to swear, and can’t think of anything funnier” (presented with modifications, of course, but if you keep an eye out for it, you’ll see that 12-year-old boys come in for a […]

The conventional wisdom around Ready or Not is that it’s a lacerating satire of vicious, hapless rich people, a smart commentary on the depravities of the 1%, a Film For Right Now. And okay, sure. It can do that if you want it to. I don’t think it does it particularly well, or with anything […]

Every Saturday in August, Brennan Klein will be subbing in for Summer of Blood by exploring a German krimi film from the 1960’s. We’re approaching the end of our overview of the German krimi cycle, and as anyone who reads Summer of Blood surely knows by now, the tail end of a subgenre’s boom is when […]

The IMDb synopsis for The Art of Racing in the Rain reads as follows: “Through his bond with his owner, aspiring Formula One race car driver Denny, golden retriever Enzo learns that the techniques needed on the racetrack can also be used to successfully navigate the journey of life.” What this fails to clarify is […]

Intermittently 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: there is a grand total of one hook that they’re using to sell Good Boys: it is funny when kids […]

Every Saturday in August, Brennan Klein will be subbing in for Summer of Blood by exploring a German krimi film from the 1960’s. Now that we’ve skipped straight from the krimi subgenre’s inception to the middle of the boom, let’s stop and smell the roses for a while in 1964. This weekend we’re taking a look at […]

There is simply no reason for a live-action adaptation of the interactive children’s cartoon Dora the Explorer to be good. And when we add in the ugly wrinkled that the beaming seven-year-old of the show has been aged up to an improbably innocent teenager forced to go to public school for the first time, I […]