Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

Wish, the 62nd animated feature produced by Walt Disney Animation studios, was very consciously, one might even say laboriously conceived to be the big capstone to the Disney 100 celebrations, in which the Walt Disney Company celebrates the anniversary of its incorporation, as Disney Brothers Studio, on 16 October 1923. Given that 2023 turned out […]

Regardless of whether or not I should, in the year of our Lord 2023, want to extend any benefit of the doubt to director David Gordon Green, I cannot help but wish to, and in the case of his 16th feature, The Exorcist: Believer, the extension I would make is this: early in the film, […]

I will say this about Five Nights at Freddy’s, an extremely unlikable piece of shit movie whose enormous, instantaneous box-office success has filled me with the gloomy suspicion that we’re staring down the gun barrel of a new epoch where the only movies that become hits are the ones that can  be turned into memes: […]

Parting is such sweet sorrow. The After franchise has been in our lives for four years, and while these movies certainly haven’t been the worst thing that has happened to the world in the period between 2019 and 2023, they’re at least in the Bottom 10. But I can’t quite pretend that I’m happy this […]

If anything makes me happy about the existence of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, a bloated and dour attempt at nostalgia-scraping that primarily demonstrates that there really probably wasn’t any artistically valid reason to give the swashbuckling archaeologist his third consecutive “grand farewell tour” in a series that only runs to five films, […]

One of the very first lines of dialogue spoken in the 1989 animated feature The Little Mermaid is “A fine strong wind and a following sea. King Triton must be in a friendly-type mood.” The approximately equivalent line of dialogue in the 2023 remake of that same film is “This is a dangerous time. Tonight’s […]

Prey for the Devil, then operating under The Devil’s Light (it is, I think, an open question which of these is worse – I refuse to frame the question as which of them is “better”) was filmed in the summer of 2020, more than two years before it ultimately came out. And it feels like […]

Unlike the other major horror franchises, the Halloween series has made room for so many mutually-incompatible narratives – there are five different branches of continuity distributed between thirteen films – that there’s a sense in which “this isn’t ‘really’ a Halloween film” is sort of an empty thing to say. Heck, the 1982 release Halloween […]

Hang around long enough as a cinephile and you’ll eventually watch significant filmmakers fade into irrelevance. If you’ve only gotten the bug sometime in the past 15 years, you may be largely unfamiliar with Neil LaBute, who’d once briefly appeared to be a major new filmmaker; after grabbing attention with 1997’s In the Company of […]

The 1940 feature-length animated adaptation of Pinocchio is one of the crown jewels of American cinema. It is perhaps the most lustrous, richly-colored and -textured of all hand-drawn and hand-painted animated films, as much an example of fine art given the illusion of life through 24 frames-per-second movement as it is just another cartoon – […]

For those of you just joining us, the story of the After franchise is a long and winding road, getting longer and windier by the minute. This project started its life as an AU (alternate universe) fan fiction by Anna Todd asking the penetrating question of “What if Harry Styles was a sexy, dangerous college student who […]

The history of cinematic adaptions of Dangerous Liaisons is a strange one. The earliest, to my knowledge, is a French film from 1959 that took place in what was then the present day. This was apparently so misleading that it needed to be rechristened Les Liaisons dangereuses 1960. The next two adaptations were a pair […]