As of the year of our Lord 2024, there have been three complete film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel Dune, which is a decent number for a book widely regarded as “unfilmable”. One of these, the 1984 Dune directed by David Lynch, is almost completely ineffective as a narrative film, but it sort of works as fever dream that captures some (only some!) of the mystic weirdness of the […]

Dune: Part Two is as much the payment of a debt as it is a movie. In 2021, director Denis Villeneuve and his co-writers Eric Roth and Jon Spaihts presented us with an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s genre-defining 1965 science fiction novel Dune – which I guess we now ought to formally start calling Dune: Part One, which is after all what it said onscreen – that very recklessly told […]

You know her movies, now get to know director Martha Coolidge Whoever came up with the notion that you shouldn’t meet your heroes never had a chance to meet director Martha Coolidge. Martha was busy breaking glass ceilings for women in the film industry before most of us were born with her feature film debut Valley Girl in 1983 and didn’t stop there making some of my favorite movies over […]

Author’s note, March 2024: I’m leaving my original rating intact, but in retrospect, I was hedging against the fear that Dune: Part Two, if and when it was made, would let this film down. As such a thing did not end up happening, consider this to be a 4-star review in all but name. When presented with a largely successful attempt at filming a book that has defeated as many […]

You are Ingmar Bergman, one of the most famous motion picture directors in the history of the medium, and you have just completed Fanny and Alexander, a monumental declaration of your intention to be done with the art form, having said all you will ever say with it. And critics have agreed, anointing the film on the spot as an all-time masterpiece But you’re not dead, and you’re not the […]

As I type these words, it is so cold as to be literally dangerous to go outside, which makes the question of “what shall I see in theaters these next four weeks?” seem slightly ridiculous. But life goes on, even in the winter, and at any rate, we have in front of us a February in which there’s a film almost every single weekend that I’m somewhat or even very […]

The 2008 film Mamma Mia!, based on the 1999 stage musical of the same name is fucking dreadful: a bunch of famous people mugging stupidly while belting out songs in what we might charitably say is almost always nearly the right key, as the camera is plonked down in stunning indifference to the preceding 95 years of development of the art form of cinema, as the cast is put through […]

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. Last week: director Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword reminds us of the wide range of approaches that filmmakers have taken towards staging the Matter of Britain across the decades. It gives me great […]

A review requested by Patton, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Pop culture knows Deep Blue Sea, from 1999, as the movie in which Samuel L. Jackson delivers a big, operatic summer action movie monologue, and then right when he gets the soaring inspirational part, a giant super-intelligent mako shark jumps out of the water behind him and eats him. This is a […]

To start with, Our Kind of Traitor is based on perhaps the least-interesting of John le Carré’s novels that have so far been turned into a movie or TV miniseries or both, so it’s perfectly natural that it should be the least-interesting movie of the recent le Carré fad (which I’m only really using to mean 2011’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, 2014’s A Most Wanted Man, and the 2016 miniseries […]

The unbridled imaginations at Disney have managed to do it again, creating a fantasy beyond belief. With its new live-action Cinderella, the studio has managed to do the impossible, and portray a version of the classic fairy tale heroine who’s even more of an insipid doormat that the one in its 1950 animated classic. For all that the animated Cinderella is probably the blandest and most inactive of Disney’s princesses, […]

And so, Nymphomaniac; or is it Nymph()maniac? There are more than just cosmetic reasons for the latter to count as the actual title, since the dividing line between nymph and maniac is even more important to the film’s project than the fact that an open parenthesis followed directly by a close parenthesis looks in the vaguest possible way like a vagina. But Nymp()maniac is cumbersome to type out and a […]