Some folks love the Oscars, and obsessively follow them every year, nomination announcements to award campaigning to treating the grand ceremony like their Super Bowl. On the other hand, some folks hate the Oscars, and think it’s simply Hollywood patting themselves on the back, while largely ignoring both quality big-budget populism and great arthouse cinema in favor of vanilla, middle-of-the-road “crowd-pleasing” formula (AKA Oscarbait). And then there are folks who […]
A movie as bad as House of Gucci shouldn’t be as bad as House of Gucci. If you follow me. Basically, if you were to select the right moments – the ones in the film’s shockingly weird trailers, for example – you would be 100% convinced that you had before you a remarkable piece of overpriced prestige-picture camp, a true-crime Oscarbait epic made by an A-list director with extremely talented […]
If I may risk dipping my toes into The Discourse, I would like to offer a thought. It is possible for two things to be simultaneously true: first, that smartphones and social media have absolutely turned the brains of everyone under the age of 45 into mashed bananas, and left us a society unable to actually produce or engage with cultural objects of any artistic value, which is why commercially […]
I mean, it’s still a preview to me, even if we’re already into the month’s first weekend. Anyway, the release calendar is starting to get fully back on track, to go along with the steady improvement in the box office, and while surely not all of these will be equally good, there is at least a nice wide mixture of things coming out, big and small 5.11.2021 As we bear […]
October has already started and with it the first day of new releases, so “preview” is at least a slightly insufficient word. But whatever, I haven’t seen any of these yet, and it’s likelier than not you haven’t see any of these yet, so it counts. Anyway, I’ve been looking forward to this fall season for a while: two years worth of prestige movies all crammed into one! So those […]
10 years ago, YouTube teamed with producer Ridley Scott to produce the documentary Life in a Day, which compiled clips sent in by people all around the globe, recording what was occurring in their lives on July 24, 2010. Producing a sequel ten years later only makes sense, even without the global pandemic that rocked the world on the selected date, July 25, 2020. I doubt anybody involved would have […]
It is perhaps ironic for a film titled News of the World to have nothing actually new within it. Fortunately, it’s doing very familiar things very well, so even if the exact people most likely to enjoy what it’s doing (diehard Western fans) are exactly the people most likely to have seen it all before, I think it’s fair to assume they’ll find it gratifying to watch, anyway. At least, […]
I do not like to start reviews with the most obvious possible statement that hundreds of people before me have already pointed out, but sometimes it doesn’t pay to be clever. And so: the 2000 ancient world epic Gladiator is quite clearly what you get when 1995’s Braveheart and 1998’s Saving Private Ryan have a baby. I would add to that standard version of the story, it’s not a very […]
To help fill the void in your weekly listening, Carrie and Rob are bringing you Weeklies – a review of the last 7-days of movie new…with a twist! Rob has gathered all the 10 best pieces of movie news and Carrie will only be able to pick 5 ‘Aeronauts’ Trailer Sees Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne Fighting for Their Lives in Hot Air Balloon New ‘Purge’ Thriller Finds Lead in […]
Hey! Don’t forget to check out our 2017 year-in-review podcast! You know, sometimes you’re just way the hell off-consensus, and that’s all there is to say about that. And that’s all I particularly want to say as a preamble to this summary of the 2017 movie year: it’s not much fun when everybody around you is oohing and ahhing over movies that you found deeply adequate and not much more, […]
Whatever else can be said about the whole sordid situation, it’s great for All the Money in the World that Kevin Spacey had to be dumped and replaced by Christopher Plummer, because Plummer’s performance is absolutely the best thing about the movie and possibly the solitary factor that nudges it across the thin, bright line separating “yeah, might as well see it” from “eh, don’t bother”. Add in the very […]
I suspect, with absolutely nothing to back it up besides anecdotal data and hunches, that Murder on the Orient Express, from 1934, is Agatha Christie’s best-known mystery novel; or at least the best-known title to one of her mystery novels, which is the same thing as far as film producers go. And yet here we are, in the year of our Lord 2017, to find only the second English-language feature […]
