Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

The paradox of Drive My Car is that nearly every individual moment within it feels like the most delicate kind of minimalism, while the film that is the sum total of all those individual moments has the grandeur of a big, sweeping epic. This is, not least, because there are almost three hours worth of […]

There’s a strong possibility that A Hero is the most that Asghar Farhadi has ever “done an Asghar Farhadi”. This would typically be a problem, but since “doing an Asghar Farhadi” basically means to craft a blend of social commentary and white-knuckle moral thriller done in a deceptively loose realist aesthetic, telling a story that […]

In all honesty, just the title of The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin) is enough to clue us in that this is going to be a fairly presumptuous motion picture, even without knowing one single other thing about it. Is there a more pretentious punctuation mark, in this context, than […]

It is a strange thing to say of a director’s unmistakably intimate, personal, and passionate film that it also feels like he’s working in an unusually minor mode. But I’d be hard-pressed to come up with a better way of quickly describing the very curious ambivalence at the heart of The Hand of God, which […]

The idea of Kenneth Branagh writing and directing a semi-autobiographical story of his childhood in Belfast, right around the time that tensions between the nationalists and loyalists in Northern Ireland broke out into open violence in 1969, is not one that fills me with any great amount of automatic optimism. Branagh is quite a sufficiently […]

The text “A fable from a true tragedy” is the very first message that Spencer has for us, and this tells us the most important thing we need to know about it. Namely, this is not a biopic of Diana, Princess of Wales, but an impressionistic psychodrama based on the material of her largely unhappy […]

The phrase “elevated horror” gets bandied about pretty freely for something that has no concrete definition beyond “the kind of horror movies distributed by A24”. But there’s certainly something going on that deserves a word to describe it, a strain of unconnected movies that mix in horror with serious character drama. It is a very […]

Of all the rides or other attractions in any of the theme parks operated by the Walt Disney Company, if you were going to make a motion picture based on any of them – in this case, “you” are presumably either Chairman & CEO Michael Eisner or President & COO Bob Iger, and in either […]

A paradox about Titane, and not the only one, is that it almost certainly didn’t deserve to win the 2021 Palme d’Or, and also it’s extremely cool and exciting that it did so. The Palme is probably the major film award with the best batting average, quality-wise, so I don’t mean to impugn it in […]

There is very little inherently interesting about Things Heard & Seen, a movie about which the strongest emotional response I have had is frustration at the almost gravitational pull that I have towards typing out the title as Things Seen & Heard, having to bodily force myself on the right track every time.  Or that […]

Three stars gets absolutely nowhere close to my actual feelings about The Mitchells vs. the Machines, the new film by Sony Pictures Animation that has, after pandemic-related delays, settled into a home on Netflix. There are, in fact, three entirely different films happening here, and I would give three stars to none of them; but […]

At this point, in the third decade of the 21st Century, “terrible late-career comedies starring the formerly great actor Robert De Niro” has become its own genre, and I don’t think there’s a person among us who would claim that it’s a good one. Even so, The War with Grandpa is impressively terrible. The warning […]