Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

Part of me, and it is a very large part, feels extremely uncomfortable giving Yesterday a star rating implying that it’s a good film, because in point of fact it is not. It is an adorable film, almost entirely on the backs of stars Himesh Patel and Lily James; it is one of the most […]

Obviously the world didn’t “need” a sequel to 1996’s Trainspotting, but the world has nevertheless received a sequel to Trainspotting, with the acutely & I am sure deliberately terrible title T2 Trainspotting. And you know what? It’s actually pretty doggone good, visibly rejuvenating director Danny Boyle and star Ewan McGregor, neither of whom has done […]

A review requested by Aaron Loehrlein, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. I first saw the 1996 film Trainspotting in 2001, as a 19-year-old film school undergraduate, which is exactly the right place, stage of life, and point in history to have first seen it, and I will […]

If we absolutely must have Biopics of Great Men™, the least we can hope for is that they all try as hard as Steve Jobs. It is a film that is not-great in many ways and actively broken in at least a couple, but as whipped together by screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (and oh my word, […]

The emergent conventional wisdom is that Trance has a really dreadful script, and this is something I cannot manage to disagree with, though I think the degree to which it’s been slammed is a bit exaggerated. Undoubtedly, it’s silly as hell, and relies on twists that are plainly there more in the spirit of “did […]

The title 127 Hours refers to the time 27-year-old extreme outdoorsman Aron Ralston (James Franco) spent pinned by a large boulder to the wall of a narrow, isolated canyon deep inside Canyonlands National Park in Utah in April, 2003, escaping only after he amputated his right hand several inches above the wrist. If that true […]

Author’s note: I have strong suspicions that I no longer agree with much of any of this review, but I haven’t seen the film since it was new in theaters – one of these days I really must revisit it and find out. The career of Danny Boyle has gone more places than just about […]

Science fiction in the movies has always had a rough time of it, compared to literature. Not that there aren’t plenty of sci-fi films, of course; but they tend to be much more of the “ray guns and space battles” variety, and not the “speculative musing on the way that our race will function in […]