Many years from now, when they are making the list of the great War on Terror thrillers, they will of course start with Zero Dark Thirty, and until recently, that’s where they could have ended, too. Now we have a second, sneaking into the world with virtually no fanfare other than a 2015 Toronto International […]
My instinct to say of Hail, Caesar! that you will love it if you fall into the enormously specific niche of people who adore Studio Era Hollywood but are still totally okay with making fun of it, and also consider themselves somewhere firmly entrenched in the Leftist-Socialist-Marxist end of the spectrum but are still totally […]
Joy is weird as all hell. The film makes many false steps, both in its screenplay and its direction (both by David O. Russell, though it is fairly well-attested that the back half – the much better half, as it happens – has been changed far less from Annie Mumolo’s original draft), with a terrifically […]
The Hateful Eight, sure enough, is about hate. I can’t recall the last movie so explicitly about how all of its characters, and by extension the society that they are a part of, are irredeemably evil, and I certainly can’t recall the last one that has such a jolly mood about it. This movie, if […]
There are more good things than bad about Spotlight – in fact, there are very few bad things about it at all – but I frankly think the best thing about it is the way it has redeemed the career of writer-director Tom McCarthy. You will maybe recall, how McCarthy started making movies with 2003’s […]
A review requested by John Taylor, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Reducing any film to the sum of its Oscar trivia is a filthy habit, but it’s also fun and I’m good at it, and Grand Hotel has a real whopper of a piece of trivia associated […]
During the press tour for Avengers: Age of Ultron – a press tour marked by an uncommon number of wrong turns by the participants – writer-director Joss Whedon admitted almost in so many words that making the film was exhausting and no fun and he wasn’t happy with the final product. It helps to know […]
Comparing Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice – the first Pynchon novel to be filmed, no less – with the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski is absolutely the laziest conceivable opening gambit the reviewer of the former film could engage in, but it has the merit of being inevitable. Both films are […]
Pride is, in the first place, an irresistibly nice movie. There’s a question to be asked whether that is, in and of itself, its big problem. For it is also a movie set against an extremely non-nice pair of events: the miners’ strike of 1984-’85 in Great Britain, and the expanding AIDS crisis. And while […]
The post title says it all, really. Ron Howard is an important Hollywood director, and I felt that I had to include him; but there was no reason I could come up with for any individual title in his filmography. 1989 had no other compelling contenders, plus I had never seen the director’s film Parenthood […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/18 & 10/19 World premiere: 28 August, 2013, general release in Iceland From its 2013 release in its native Iceland all the way to its present international festival run, the pitch for writer-director Benedikt Erlingsson’s terrific debut feature Of Horses and Men (the original Iclandic title, which is universes better in its […]
One of the grandest clichés in the critics toolkit is to refer to a classic work of satire or social commentary as being “ahead of its time”, with the passage of years not serving to blunt the impact of a film’s satiric insight but to make them seem less like satire at all, and more […]
