It would be accurate to describe Beast as “the movie where Idris Elba kicks a CGI lion in the face”. But it would be even more accurate to describe Beast as “the movie where Idris Elba kicks a CGI lion in the face twice“, which of course means it is twice as good. And as […]
Originally, superhero comic books were aimed primarily at children, and so were the movies based upon those comic books. That’s not to say that plenty of adults didn’t enjoy 1978’s Superman and 1989’s Batman and 2002’s Spider-Man (2002), all of which were massive four-quadrant blockbusters. Still, there was a time, not so very long ago, […]
Many people (including Tim, which is why I’m the one covering this movie), have been turned off by the trailer of Bodies Bodies Bodies because of its artless display of the characters misappropriating Gen Z “woke” language. That’s not not part of it, to be fair. But, like pretty much any A24 genre film, the publicity […]
In a world of endless sequels and remakes, it’s easy to lose sight of a less common but more valuable phenomenon—what one might call the spiritual successor. These are films that take their inspiration from, and hence owe their very existence to, a single ancestor, but are not pointless carbon copies; characters get substantially reimagined, […]
One of the goofier box-office sensations of the ’70s saw Airport, Universal Pictures’ soapy adaptation of Arthur Hailey’s best-selling novel, unexpectedly kick off a decade-long franchise (and usher in a general vogue for big-budget disaster movies featuring all-star casts; The Towering Inferno, like Airport, was even Oscar-nominated for Best Picture). As often happens with sequels, […]
The history of cinematic adaptions of Dangerous Liaisons is a strange one. The earliest, to my knowledge, is a French film from 1959 that took place in what was then the present day. This was apparently so misleading that it needed to be rechristened Les Liaisons dangereuses 1960. The next two adaptations were a pair […]
To have come so close to losing the rights to the Hellraiser brand that one must quickly rush out a sequel for contractual reasons is sloppiness. To have done this twice begins to feel like deliberate sabotage. And yet, seven years after Hellraiser: Revelations was (barely) released in 2011, Dimension Films once again had to […]
Not Okay, the Hulu-based sophomore effort from actress-writer-director Quinn Shephard, opens with a much-discussed “content warning” that the film we are about to experience contains “flashing lights, themes of trauma, and an unlikable female protagonist.” It’s a tweak of the viewer’s nose intended to set a cheeky tone and make some kind of statement about […]
In a long career as Hollywood royalty that has generally swung between the none-too-distant poles of “affably, watchably mediocre” and “tediously mediocre”, Ron Howard’s best film as a director has long been 1995’s Apollo 13, and I would be inclined to say that it’s not really a close race. I’m not quite going to say […]
It was perhaps inevitable that a summer camp slasher was going to be set at a conversion camp eventually. It was probably less inevitable that it would be the directorial debut of John Logan, the screenwriter of The Last Samurai and The Aviator, but that’s what we get with They/Them (pronounced They Slash Them, get it?), a project […]
In the three-and-a-half decades since the release of the exquisitely focused and gnarly Predator, a high point in the careers of both director John McTiernan and star Arnold Schwarzenegger, that film’s sequels and spin-offs have all been built around complicated, cumbersome variations on the misguided quest, “you wanted more world-building, right? Just tons and tons […]
“Hello, my friends. I want to put on record that the flic out there using the word Hellraiser IS NO FUCKIN’ CHILD OF MINE! I have NOTHING to do with the fuckin’ thing. If they claim its from the mind of Clive Barker, it’s a lie. It’s not even from my butt-hole.” -Clive Barker, who […]
