It’s not very hard to imagine a different version of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children – only a slightly different version, even – that’s a wonderfully imaginative and full of no end of cinematic marvels. For a film that could be described, in fact very nearly demands to be described as “Harry Potter meets […]
In 2002, the great Russian director Aleksandr Sokurov exploded into international prominence with a movie filmed inside one of the world’s great art museums, using the collection and the physical space to mount an argument about the national identity and history of the country housing that museum. 13 years later, he did the same thing, […]
A review requested by Pat King, with thanks for donating to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Recommended musical accompaniment to this review. Obviously, if we’re talk about pure, rancid anti-cinematic imbecility, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is Michael Bay’s worst movie and will almost certainly remain that way, for it’s difficult to […]
A review requested by Marc Lummis, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. There are many indisputably great films that it’s clearly impossible for any normal audience member to complete unpack in all their nuances without the aid of some highly specialised arcane knowledge, but even then, writer-director Bernardo […]
A review requested by James P, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. If there exists a more pleasant, humane story of the constant horror of life during the London Blitz than John Boorman’s Hope and Glory, of 1987, I am thoroughly unfamiliar with it and frankly don’t know […]
As this final Summer of Blood arrives at the slasher boom of the 1980s, it feels like a homecoming. For this is where we belong, truly: in the gutter trash world of miserably formulaic thrillers, propped up only by their most exploitative element and frequently by nothing at all. And while it’s surprisingly willing to […]
A review requested by Jordyn Auvil, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. The big problem with The English Patient isn’t even its fault: the problem is that Elaine Benes fucking hated it, and nobody who saw that 1997 episode of the sitcom Seinfeld before they caught up with […]
With what I can only call the most admirable clarity, the monumental biopic Patton, Best Picture Oscar winner of 1970, opens with a kind of thesis statement that lays out everything the rest of the film is to contain. I don’t refer to the main body of its legendary opening scene, in which famed World […]
In the wide world of sequels that certainly don’t have any actual reason to exist, one could do a lot worse, conceptually speaking, than The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death – though that title! There’s absolutely nothing that mouthful achieves that wouldn’t be more accurately and clearly covered by just plain The Woman […]
The life story of Louis Zamperini is fascinating and wide-ranging, and it shouldn’t even be possible to condense it into a movie as all-around misguided as Unbroken. But that’s what happens when you throw an enormous non-fiction bestseller at talentless check-cashing hacks like Joel & Ethan Coen. Or something. I suspect that the story of […]
There are two ways, I think, that one could go about making a story of Alan Turing and his key role in inventing the computer as a means of cracking a Nazi code during the Second World War. One way would be to go all-in on the psychological aspect, and take it for granted that […]
Knowing that I’d eventually get to write about Saving Private Ryan – to grapple with my own wildly inconsistent feelings about it over the years, as well as to challenge all of you, my readers, to do the same – has been one of the things that I’ve been most excited about since the very […]
