The basic plot of Seven Samurai has been re-worked so many times in so many wildly different contexts that it’s frivolous to complain about one specific remake. Of course, nobody had to make The Magnificent Seven in 2016, and it’s no shock that it’s not remotely as good as The Magnificent Seven of 1960, but […]
Gene Siskel had a famous test he supposedly applied to every movie he saw: is this more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch? I cannot recall the last movie to fail that test as emphatically as the new Ghostbusters, which scoops up a most enviable collection of quick-witted comic actors and […]
Christmas Day is late to make an end run for Worst Movie of the Year laurels, but the remake of Point Break holds nothing back in making sure it was the strongest possible candidate for that dishonor. It would be hard to run down a list of all the worst-case-scenarios the film manages to fulfill, […]
There us a great deal to admire around the largely French-made Turkish-language film Mustang. It scores two major coups even before you start watching it: it’s a study of adolescent female psychology and sexuality in a cloistered Turkish family, which is rare enough; and it was directed and co-written by a Turkish woman, Deniz Gamze […]
I don’t know when the statute of limitations for spoilers runs out on a movie that makes crazy-ass wackyland fantasy amount of money in its first weekend, but I do know that the internet is full of geeks, and there are are almost surely literally hundreds of reviews of Star Wars: The Force Awakens that […]
Two terrific versions of the highly melodramatic story A Star Is Born – three if you count the original 1932 What Price Hollywood? (as you absolutely should), the same material in all but name – was perhaps already pushing it, but least the 1976 incarnation of the story tries to freshen the material by changing […]
From among the Video Nasties Any honest accounting of the history of American horror filmmaking has to bow in the direction of the enormous influence of The Last House on the Left, the 1972 debut of writer-director Wes Craven and a solid contender for the title of most controversial movie of the last half-century. It […]
A review requested by Bryce Wilson, with thanks for his multiple contributions to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. So much for redemption. The third and so-far final part of the Rebuild of Evangelion series (the concluding fourth part is overdue with no release date in sight), Evangelion 3.0: You Can (Not) Redo, […]
At its best, the 2015 Poltergeist is a beat-for-beat (but only sometimes shot-for-shot) retread of the 1982 Poltergeist, with Jared Harris substituting for Zelda Rubinstein. And I love Jared Harris, and I’m never sad to see him in a movie, but Zelda Rubinstein was the best part of the original movie. So at its best, […]
To hear directors James Franco and Travis Matthews tell it – and oh, how much you get to hear Franco tell it, over and over, across the movie’s achingly long 60 minutes – the purpose of Interior. Leather Bar. is to interrogate the comfort level of the viewer and performer alike surrounding explicit gay sex […]
The moment when you start to voice the old “I can’t believe they left that part of of the book out of the movie! That was the best part!” complaint, and the movie about which you are complaining is Left Behind, that’s when you discover that you need to take a nice long break from […]
Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: with Maleficent, Disney updates a great cartoon from their Silver Age with a dubious live-action update that feels like […]
