Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

Once Within a Time is on the one hand, a film that I feel compelled to praise for being unsafe and experimental, especially since it had every reason not to be: director Godfrey Reggio is an octogenarian these days, after all, and in the year of our Lord 2023, when the primary mode of so […]

It’s surely easy to overstate how groundbreaking the film Koyaanisqatsi was at the time of its enthusiastically-received 1982 premiere and its massive-hit-by-cult-film-standards commercial release in 1983, but I would be much more wary of diminishing it than puffing it up. Ever since it was young, an honest reckoning with the techniques and aesthetics of this […]

The phrase “generous to a fault” irresistibly suggests itself in connection with the feature film Barbie, a combination of toy commercial, exercise in feminist critical theory, anti-capitalist satire, and celebration of the ennobling power of consumerism directed and co-written by Greta Gerwig, who certainly deserves some credit for having been assigned an almost impossible unfair […]

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We are living in a golden age of movies for children that present metaphorical parables about racism, in which the metaphor is horrendously bad and probably makes the pro-racism argument more effectively than the anti-racism argument. Not a good thing to have a golden age of. But anyway, here were are with the 27th feature […]

There are both a good idea for a movie and a great idea for a movie tangled up right next to each other inside of Saint Omer, and it is one of the more disappointing developments of the young 2023 movie year (the film is technically a 2022 release in the U.S., but only in […]

It’s a cheap shot to start a review of a movie with such a sturdy, meat-and-potatoes title as Women Talking with some joke about “they sure do!” or “well, you can’t say the movie didn’t tell you what to expect”, or whatnot. But it is, in fact, a movie that is to an extraordinary degree […]

In all my movie-going years, I have only very rarely encountered a film whose entire conceit screamed “come here and eat this huge plate of raw lima beans, because this is extremely serious and important” the way that She Said does. It’s a ripped-from-the-headlines story with the uncommon twist that we can point directly to […]

Erich Maria Remarque’s undying 1928 anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front has the uncommon fortune for a major literary classic to have been adapted into a major cinematic classic, and this happened almost immediately: the U.S.-produced adaptation that would go on to win the Academy Award for Outstanding Production (i.e., Best Picture) at […]

I don’t think it’s a good habit to get into to take account of the advertising campaign materials – part of what we call “paratexts” in the thinking-too-hard business – as part of a film review, but in the special case of Armageddon Time, I will make an exception. The film’s poster, which you can […]

I’m not exactly sure how it is that directing a critically-acclaimed Oscar-nominated film that helped create an animation studio and remains the highest-grossing film in that studio’s history sends a fella to Director Jail, but that’s where Henry Selick has been for the thirteen years since making Coraline, still one of the best animated features […]

Hollywood has been battling nightmarish politics with goofy antics for just about as long as cinema has existed. Hell, even the Third Reich inspired its share of comedy classics—not merely decades later (as in, say, The Producers’ deliberately ludicrous “Springtime for Hitler” production number), but while World War II was still very much in progress. […]