Pondering what makes for the nadir of the showbiz biopic screenplay is a yawning chasm that we had best not peer into, lest we fall in and plunge into a rich madness that can barely be described in words. I mean, it’s only been fifteen years since Beyond the Sea, and I’m still not sure […]

Nothing about Abominable is even mildly surprising (unless it’s that an English-language movie made by American creators and mostly at an American animation studio should be set in China and have a female protagonist, and neither of these facts are even briefly commented upon), which is kind of a great thing. It doesn’t feel like […]

For a decades-later fifth entry in a franchise that really wasn’t very good to start with, Rambo: Last Blood is surprisingly non-terrible. To be sure, Rambo III, way the hell back in 1988, set the bar extremely low for “not the worst Rambo film”, and I’m not willing to make any stronger claim for Last […]

Tigers Are Not Afraid* is an especially miraculous kind of movie, the sort whose influences are so obvious it’s almost boring to talk about them (Vittoria De Sica’s 1946 Shoeshine and Guillermo del Toro’s 2001 The Devil’s Backbone are the most conspicuous ones that come to my mind), and yet the end result doesn’t feel […]

I have said before and will, I am entirely sure, have reason to say it again: nothing in the whole world of filmmaking in the 2010s interests me as much as the Chinese film industry’s concerted efforts to establish itself as an internationally competitive alternative to Hollywood, concurrent with the swift rise of that country’s […]