I have nothing but scorn for the full title Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn), which I will only henceforth refer to as Birds of Prey in the interest of bringing this review in under 3000 words,* but credit where credit’s due, it’s unquestionably right for the movie it’s attached […]
The most interesting thing about 6 Underground The only thing that is interesting about 6 Underground whatsoever is how it was financed and distributed. The 14th film directed by Michael Bay comes after a bizarre dozen years in his career, during which time he focused on only two kinds of production: five Transformers pictures, each […]
Depending on how you count the intermissions that are baked right into the print – there are five of them, all about 15 minutes in length – La Flor is anywhere from about 13.5 hours long to a bit less than 15 hours long. This is, of course The Big Fact about the film that […]
When a film comes into the world with the kind of uncommonly bad reputation as The Grudge, 2020 edition – simultaneously a remake of and sequel to the 2004 film of the same name, and the 13th feature film in a multi-national horror franchise with at least three different continuities – the obvious first question […]
In space, maybe, nobody can hear you scream, but in High Life, space is marked out primarily by the thick omnipresence of sounds. The lucky 13th feature film by director Claire Denis – and her first in English, a leap she navigates with a force and confidence that equals any other great director’s forays into […]
The title of Life Itself comes from one of its most particularly florid, sophomoric lines, “The most unreliable narrator is life itself.” This sentence, or a close variation, is spoken enough times during the length of the film that, if you were to take a shot every single time, you would likely die. Given that […]
Want another opinion? Check out Conrado’s thoughts on the film! I have not read James Baldwin’s 1974 novel If Beale Street Could Talk, so I cannot say if the new film adaptation written and directed by Barry Jenkins is especially respectful (it’s the first English-language feature film taken from Baldwin’s works). I can certainly say […]
You really do have to salute Bad Times at the El Royale for its bravery: not every film would run the risk of just up and putting “bad times” right there in the title. So impressed am I, in fact, that I’m going to dignify the film by not making any of the obvious jokes, […]
The first time, to my incomplete knowledge, that the gimmick of showing a horror movie entirely through the form of what happens on a computer screen was in the 2012 found footage anthology V/H/S, in the segment “The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger”, and it has been a few times […]
The 2014 film Unfriended (released in 2015) was a pretty banal ghost story in which a bunch of generic teenagers are taken to task for their past sins in the matter of a bullied girl who committed suicide. It would be almost insufferably generic and forgettable, except for one very important thing: the entire film […]
Adrift is a curious, inexplicable little beast. It starts out looking like one film and it ends up looking like a slightly but very importantly, different film, and neither of these look exactly like the film it was marketed as being. It’s kind of too bad, because the film it ends up being is pretty […]
Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool was maybe the most Oscarbaity Oscarbait of 2017,* and to a large extent it lives down to that expectation. It’s the story of how 57-year-old Gloria Grahame (Annette Bening), Oscar-winning actress and star of at least two rock-solid film noir masterpieces (1950’s In a Lonely Place, directed by her […]
