Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

I’m sure someone, somewhere, was devoting all their time and energy to hoping that the x-treme, edgy, snottily nihilistic strand of ’90s pop culture was going to come roaring back lo these twenty years later, and for that person, I am happy to say that the new Hellboy feature is waiting for them. How x-treme, edgy, and snotty? The first line – the very first line – heard in the […]

Carrie and Rob review Hellboy starring David Harbour, Milla Jovovich, Ian McShane and Daniel Dae Kim. Directed by Neil Marshall.

Every week 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: if we’re being classy about it, overt Twilight knock-off The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones could be more generously thought of as a new entry in that most modern of fantasy subgenres, in which […]

It is a truth undeniable that Hellboy II: The Golden Army does not enjoy a particularly robust and tight story; it might not be that much of a mistake, in fact, to claim that its story is a confusing mess. If that’s the sort of thing that’s going to bother you no matter what, then I respect your position, and I’ll do nothing to convince you that you should like […]

In celebration of the increasingly inaccurately named Indiana Jones trilogy coming to its ignominious conclusion, I have decided to look at some films people have actually heard of. This is also reparations for the admittedly punitive choices I have sometimes made in terms of Patreon requests. So, Carrie, this one’s for you. Astoundingly, I now have twelve requests for 2024, but if you are the patient type, keep ‘em coming! […]

With The Reckoning, we arrive at the saddest point in the life-cycle of any once-promising film director: the point where we need to abandon hope. Almost a whole generation ago, Neil Marshall blew his way into the world with an extraordinary one-two punch of Dog Soldiers in 2003 and The Descent in 2005, a pair of low-budget horror films good enough – and more importantly, creative enough – to make […]

You know Alistair Petrie as the consummate “bad guy” from General Draven in Rogue One to Lord Adam Glaren in Hellboy.  But I now know Alistair Petrie as the charming Englishman who was able to somehow navigate my awkward interview style, of not actually asking a question and somehow being able to articulate a lovely response. Alistair Petrie’s role in Eight For Silver  True to form, Petrie is playing kind […]

If I were to try to summarise the films of 2019 as a single, overarching narrative. I couldn’t do it. This was an especially fragmentary, inconsistent batch of films: it was an abnormally terrible year for big blockbusters and popcorn movies, a typically ho-hum year for nice Oscarbait and other adult dramas, and a world-class year for art cinema: the best year of the 2010s, even, just for the sheer […]

So we’ve finally hit the point we’ve been trending to for a decade or so: the summer movie season of 2019 is basically an uninterrupted line that started with Captain Marvel in early March, and now doesn’t end until mid-August. Having a big popcorn movie in March isn’t a new thing, of course; nor is having a big popcorn movie in April. The thing is that this April we have […]

If you’ve seen Stranger Things or the recently released zeitgeist-embracing adventure The Kid Who Would Be King, you know there’s no shortage of nostalgia for the decades in which most of the folks reading this grew up. The 1980s and ’90s are en vogue and ready to transport you back to your Topanga poster-covered walls of your bedroom. Or whomever you were into at the time. Maybe it was just […]

I like Guillermo del Toro quite a lot, and I like Jean-Pierre Jeunet a lot, and I like them for very similar reasons – they both make over-saturated movies dominated by production design and fanciful rather than realistic visual effects – and I still would never, ever pretend that I wanted to see a film that combined their two styles. But here we are, and here’s The Shape of Water, […]

This month’s Team Top 10 11 at The Film Experience, perfectly (if accidentally) timed for the recent Cannes win of Blue Is the Warmest Color, is a list of the best comic book/comic strip adaptations ever filmed. As distinct from the best superhero movies, which means something a little bit different. I was rather badly off-consensus with this one, though the final list is difficult to find fault with (outside […]