Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

One of the goofier box-office sensations of the ’70s saw Airport, Universal Pictures’ soapy adaptation of Arthur Hailey’s best-selling novel, unexpectedly kick off a decade-long franchise (and usher in a general vogue for big-budget disaster movies featuring all-star casts; The Towering Inferno, like Airport, was even Oscar-nominated for Best Picture). As often happens with sequels, […]

There is dumb, and then there is Roland Emmerich dumb. To wit: -Dumb: “William Shakespeare’s” plays were written by a nobleman, possibly Edward De Vere. Roland Emmerich Dumb: Also King James I was a gay dwarf. -Dumb: The Mayans predicted the end of the world in the year 2012. Roland Emmerich Dumb: This will happen […]

The for Gerard Butler vehicles is about as low as low gets, so if I first say that Greenland is, like, obviously the best Gerard Butler movie I’ve ever seen, I have given you very little information. It could still be a bad movie, and indeed, if we were to talk strictly in terms of […]

It is simply impossible to think that 1999’s The Legend of the Titanic, one of the worst animated films I have ever seen  or could imagine seeing, was such a big deal that it could inspire a quick, cheap knock-off, but here we are with 2000’s Titanic: The Legend Goes On… or Titanic: The Legend […]

I guess it’s not really “surprising” that there weren’t really any knock-offs of James Cameron’s 1997 box-office behemoth Titanic to speak of; pragmatically, what could you do? There’s kind of only the one story to tell, and nobody was going to have the budget to tell it better. So outside of a flood of non-fiction […]

The stink of having been shot almost three years before it finally saw the light of a commercial release hangs over Underwater like a fart in church. It’s not exactly the film’s fault – part of the delay is because the 20th Century Fox release got tangled up in that company’s acquisition by the Walt […]

The killer alligator picture Crawl is maybe the least Alexandre Aja-esque film that Alexandre Aja has directed thus far, which I imagine is even a good thing for some people. The filmmaker’s body of work, to date, has been one of extreme violence and gore, with highlights including the 2003 New French Extremity barnburner High […]

It is well to avoid making absolute statements, especially absolute statements about weirdly idiosyncratic and fundamentally unquantifiable things, but I’m feeling feisty. So here goes: I think it’s entirely likely that the most interesting and important thing happening to cinema anywhere in the world right now is the Chinese film industry’s attempts – largely successful […]

Credit where credit’s due: Skyscraper delivers what it promises. Admittedly, this is because the only thing it promises is green-screened shots of Dwayne Johnson precariously hanging off the edge of things as CGI fire dances in the background. But it is damn good CGI fire, the best incarnation of this sort of VFX work since […]

Three cheers for conceptual integrity: the animated feature My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea is a nigh-perfect marriage of style and narrative content, bringing to life the bored apocalyptic fantasies of a bookish, smart, socially inept high school boy of 16, who takes pleasure in casting himself as the hero and his social […]

The good part first: watching Deepwater Horizon gave me a feeling I haven’t had in a very, very long time. That is, the experience of watching a special effects sequence so impressive in conception and execution that it genuinely seems like something we’ve never seen before. 23 years after Jurassic Park, CGI has evolved from […]

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: because nobody stopped them when the dragged god-damned dinosaurs into the ice age two movies ago, the makers of […]