Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

There’s always something fascinating and strange about when an established film property is given new life as a stage musical and that musical eventually wends its way back to the screen. We’re here to talk Matilda the Musical (with music and lyrics by Tim Minchin and book by Dennis Kelly, also on screenwriting duty) so obviously […]

Athena is representative of a trend in contemporary French cinema that I like to call banlieue porn, films taking place in Paris’ poorer, darker suburbs (les banlieues) and focusing on the lives of crime and violence that their predominantly young, immigrant, and Muslim population purportedly faces every day. Such films walk a fine line between […]

The 2019 anti-mystery Knives Out has a game cast and an interestingly annoying structural conceit, buried (but not very deeply!) below some very dumb social satire and “extremely online” cultural touchstones. It is very much a “fix this one thing, and you’ve really got something here” proposition, but unfortunately, it was written and directed by […]

Diversity.  It makes us great.  It makes us strong.  Quality representation of our many diverse cultures in our many diverse films is so important.  And that’s why it’s so wonderful that, thanks to Netflix and a plucky creative team, the broader Latin American community finally has Christmas with You, a sickly-sweet, forgettably mediocre Christmas movie […]

There are those filmmakers whose artistic focus is so much on the creation of deeply over-designed worlds and heightened visual style, and so little on anything resembling tight storytelling and naturalistic emotions (I am, to be clear, not saying that this is a bad thing), that learning they are about to make their very first […]

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 […]

The Netflix Christmas season is back, and as much as I would like to rejoice, 2022 is an astonishingly anemic year for the streaming service. In the past we have been treated with various entries in the Princess Switch and A Christmas Prince franchises along with variably high-concept one-offs like The Knight Before Christmas and A Castle […]

Categories: netflix originals, romcoms

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 […]

The history of cinematic adaptions of Dangerous Liaisons is a strange one. The earliest, to my knowledge, is a French film from 1959 that took place in what was then the present day. This was apparently so misleading that it needed to be rechristened Les Liaisons dangereuses 1960. The next two adaptations were a pair […]

The Gray Man may very well be the end of an era. Over the last half a decade, Netflix has attempted to move into the blockbuster space, making hyper-expensive streaming projects to rival Hollywood’s theatrical output, initially staking their claim with the putrid, runny dribble of offal known as 2017’s Bright. They have continued to […]

A note about the critic. While I am a devoted Austen-ite, her final, posthumously published novel Persuasion is not one of her works that particularly captures my imagination, good as it may be. Thus, I am somewhat inoculated against people fucking with it, which probably explains why I’m not illegally downloading a copy of Netflix’s […]

Like many comedic actors, Rebel Wilson has fallen into a schtick and can’t get up. This is not her fault. 2011’s Bridesmaids and 2012’s Pitch Perfect, both of which featured her in incandescent side roles, were a hell of a one-two punch to get a career going. Her deadpan, brutally honest characterizations are and were genuinely funny, […]

Categories: netflix originals