Ask a horror fan what draws them to the genre, and you’ll get any number of possible answers. Ask that question of, say, a twelve-year-old horror fan, and I suspect that the range of answers will be at least somewhat narrowed down: and high on that list would be gross corpses with lots of gore […]
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: Dora and the Lost City of Gold makes a tiny form of history as the first live-action feature based on […]
Every Saturday in August, Brennan Klein will be subbing in for Summer of Blood by exploring a German krimi film from the 1960’s. When last we left the German krimi, it was just being birthed upon an unsuspecting world in 1959’s Fellowship of the Frog. Now we shall alight in 1964, smack dab in the height of […]
I had supposed (and was even prepared not to be annoyed by it) that The Farewell was going to turn out to be overhyped, if only because the hype has been so damn loud. And this is only a tiny bit true. It has, however, been incorrectly hyped. To judge from many of the reviews, […]
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: in Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, Dwayne Johnson plays a character who was introduced as a villain in […]
Furious 7, the last altogether good movie in the Fast & Furious series, came out in April 2015. This is very recent according to any human-scale accounting of time; but it has been an entire generation in American action cinema. The intervening four years have borne witness to a veritable golden age: while Furious 7 […]
[Editor’s Note: Although I’m taking the summer off from looking at violent thrillers & horror movies, Brennan Klein has very kindly offered to take up the slack. Every Saturday this month, he’ll be taking us on a tour of the German crime genre that led into the Italian crime genre that led into the American […]
So, his name is Stu, and he drives an Uber. This really is the sum total of what what qualifies for wit in Stuber, a deeply unsatisfying movie that typifies almost everything wrong with comedies in modern American cinema, save one: it appears to have a proper screenplay, by Tripper Clancy, and not just a […]
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: the finest scene in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time …in Hollywood finds Sharon Tate raptly watching herself in the […]
