Basically, Splice is one of the most confounding horror movies I’ve seen in quite a long time. Parts of it work magnificently well, parts of it work magnificently well while being incredibly hateful, and parts of it are just plain stupid. There are going to be a lot of people who see it, and hate […]
The biggest problem with recommending movies to other people – not as a critic, but as an ardent cinephile who loves to share the films I adore with friends and family and people I’ve just met at a bar – is that, after the title and maybe the director, the first thing anyone wants to […]
Once upon a time, Frank Miller was among the finest writers in the comics medium; that would be right around 1986, when The Dark Knight Returns was published for the first time, revolutionising the world of superhero literature. In the years that follow, Miller started to slide a bit into weaker and weaker stories, then […]
First, the disclaimer. Part of going to a film festival is recognising that sometimes things get messed up: prints don’t show, screening times are pushed at the last minute, et cetera. Thus it happens that there was something wrong with the projection when I saw Juhn Jaihong’s Beautiful. First, there was a stretch of about […]
From Scary Movie to, well, Scary Movie 4, you’d have to look long and hard to find a talented comedienne with a spottier resume than Anna Faris’s. This is a truly horrible shame, since even in the trashiest trash, the actress herself is never less than completely charming and endearing, and in those few cases […]
In 1979, Woody Allen directed a film called Manhattan: half a love story about neurotic, self-obsessed intellectuals, half a gauzy Valentine to all the nooks and crannies of a city the filmmaker adored, filmed in unmentionably gorgeous black-and-white 70mm by the legendary Gordon Willis. And much as Annie Hall has been echoed consciously or subconsciously […]
Forgetting Sarah Marshall has become instantly famous for one of the most dubious reasons I can imagine: the lead actor Jason Segel, who is un-coincidentally also the screenwriter, goes full-frontal in one of the film’s first scenes. Setting aside that fact that there have in fact been penises in movies before – why, just last […]
Sometime in the first third of 27 Dresses, the lead character Jane, played by Katherine Heigl, is flipping out over her cute but oblivious boss (as she does fairly constantly for 97 of the film’s 102 minutes, less credits), when the sassy friend character, played by Judy Greer, slaps her hard on the face. “I […]
Joking is all well and good, but the surprisingly virulent controversy around Hostel, Part II perhaps deserves some consideration. So check this bit of nastiness out: If we follow the official narrative, you had one of two reactions to that poster: you thought it was depraved, immoral, sickening trash; or you thought it was compelling […]
With two major feature films under his belt, I think it’s possible to start making some generalizations about indie writer-director Craig Brewer: he has an uncanny ability to capture community and place on film; he is gifted at using music for its narrative implications as much as for its sound; he is taken with stories […]
Generally, I try to defend Neil LaBute from charges of misogyny, using the admittedly dubious argument that he dislikes everybody irrespective of gender. And while I will continue to insist that In the Company of Men is an example of equal-opportunity misanthropy, it’s pretty hard to look at the LaBute-scripted and -directed remake of The […]
