It is not uncommon, when people swan about, cooing with praise for the New Hollywood Cinema and the exciting American cinema of the 1970s, to act as if the whole of the film industry was engaged in thrilling experiments that met with broad favor from audiences, who for once in history were interested in being […]
The New Hollywood Cinema was largely a young man’s game, with most of its leading lights part of the first film school generation. Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, and Michael Cimino were both born in 1939; Brian De Palma in 1940; Martin Scorsese in 1942; Terrence Malick in 1943; George Lucas and John Milius in […]
Whatever natural goodwill one has towards the central gimmick of the central gimmick of the Expendables franchise – lookit all the ’80s action stars in one place! and these other guys like Terry Crews and Randy Couture, for no immediately apparent reason! – it has long since been expended worn out by the time arrive […]
2012’s Think Like a Man is, by and large, not a very good movie. But it does an absolutely fantastic impression of one, thanks to a game cast of very talented comic actors who don’t get very much work in major movies owing to their unbankable skin color, all of them working double-time to flesh […]
In all the history of cinema, there few subgenres that I find delightfully weird and random than one that existed for only a few years, between 1942 and 1945, made a staggering quantity of money, and ceased to have any function after World War II ended. I don’t even know if the style has a […]
Sometimes, one’s biases are simply so great that it’s impossible to do anything but acknowledge them and move on. Here, then, is mine: I saw Tracy Letts’s Pulitzer-winning play August: Osage County during its 2007 premiere run at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater, playing in the space it was written for and starring actors that, in some […]
There’s an insurmountable argument to be made that, most of a year later, there’s no merit to kicking Movie 43 anymore. On the other hand, writing shell-shocked, visceral pans of fucking dreadful movies is fun, and it’s Christmas Day. So here’s my present to myself, and hopefully to you as well, my readers. God bless […]
American Hustle is set in the 1970s, and tells a vigorously fictionalised account of the ABSCAM sting set up by the FBI to target corrupt politicians in 1978, but it’s a ’60s movie. For despite its grittastic cinematography and the word “American” there in the title, both of them promising a neo-New Hollywood exercise in […]
The thing about Inside Llewyn Davis is that it has a phenomenally interesting narrative structure. That sounds like a euphemism, but it really isn’t; among the many things the film is doing well, its structure is easily the most unmistakable and probably the most important. This is a story about a man in his late […]
The Best Man Holiday – which possesses a truly awful title, I hope we can all agree; even a simple apostrophe-s after “Man” would have helped – is the weirdest sequel of the year, greeted with some awfully hostile “why on earth are you bothering?” criticisms. I wish more films would do exactly the same […]
There is literally zero reason for This Is the End to work as well as it does, and I say this as someone who has entire run out of anything except for sullen tolerance for at least three members of its six-man lead ensemble. For anybody that can hear the name “James Franco” and not […]
The internet swears to me that I disliked Fast Five at the time; I don’t recall that, but far be it from me to call the internet a liar. So that being the case let us presume that Fast & Furious 6 really is the first totally satisfying film in the Franchise of a Thousand […]
