Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

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: Pixar’s grand return to artistic greatness, Inside Out, goes inside the human brain to take one look at how […]

A review requested by Gabe P, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Spoilers are going to be crawling up and down this post like ants. If you haven’t seen Mulholland Dr., know that I give it a perfect 5/5, and if I were making a list of the […]

Funny to say about a movie whose immensely cryptic plot can best be summed up as “humanity dances on the brink of cosmic destruction and lashes out violently in desperation”, whose characters are almost all nameless townsfolk except for the protagonist who becomes more unknowable the longer we spend time with him, and whose average […]

An earlier review of this film can be found here. A couple of years ago, I encountered the argument somewhere on the internet – I cannot find it again, alack, for it is a difficult thing to search for and not encounter porn – that long tracking shots are an inherently masculine act of cinematography. […]

It is not an unnoticed fact, but one still worth mentioning, because it is fun, that the career of Alfonso Cuarón repeated itself in a weirdly specific way. First, in 1991, he made Soló con tu pareja, a Mexican film with political overtones, that features a lot of sex. Then he went to America and […]

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: Pixar Animation Studios’ love affair with franchising continues with their first-ever prequel, Monsters University. In keeping with my quest […]

There is a very real possibility that out of the several thousand movies I’ve watched in my life, most of them in the twelve years since I was a wee film school freshman, Baz Luhrmann’s candy-colored, hyperactive post-modern musical Moulin Rouge! has had more of an impact on me than anything else. Partially this is […]

The filmmaking and storytelling in 2004’s Before Sunset are so simple as to be almost crude: two characters meet in the first scene, and in 76 almost flawless real-time minutes (I had remembered there being a couple cheats between locations, but if there’s more than a few seconds dropped here or there, I did not […]

This review is based upon the 135-minute cut of the film released to theaters in January, 2006. An earlier review of this film can be found here. After ending his 20-year sabbatical from motion pictures with 1998’s The Thin Red Line, Terrence Malick upped his game something fierce. It only took a scant seven years […]

After completing Princess Mononoke, Miyazaki Hayao issued one of those threats that directors sometimes do: having found the experience of making that film so grueling, he’d elected to abandon filmmaking altogether, dedicating his time instead to the planned Ghibli Museum, and to the studio itself, where he would stay on as an executive. It never […]

The biggest problem with recommending movies to other people – not as a critic, but as an ardent cinephile who loves to share the films I adore with friends and family and people I’ve just met at a bar – is that, after the title and maybe the director, the first thing anyone wants to […]

Some words on the criteria of judging movies: In praising a meritorious film, there are a lot of words that we can bandy about, and while ultimately all of them mean something similar, i.e. “Watching this movie was an experience that made me feel like I had spent time well and was better for for […]