Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters might very well represent the largest shift in the Godzilla formula since 1964’s Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, and not just because Planet of the Monsters is the first animated Godzilla feature (there have been multiple animated Godzilla TV series produced in both Japan and the United States).* Though it’s unlikely […]

Ana Lily Amirpour’s 2014 A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night was just about every last little thing I want out of a directorial debut: technically adept and hugely gorgeous, full of left-field concepts, and just limited enough in some really obvious ways that it was easy to hope that her next one would be […]

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: after many, many years, Stephen King’s most monumental work, The Dark Tower, is finally seeing the first fraction of […]

All good things must come to an end, and unfortunately for the Planet of the Apes franchise, that happened sometime in between 1972’s Conquest of the Planet of the Apes and 1973’s Battle for the Planet of the Apes. I wouldn’t say that Battle… is “all” bad, nor even predominately bad, not necessarily. But it’s […]

Two things first. One, War for the Planet of the Apes is an entirely excellent bit of popcorn drama, the first summer movie of 2017 (an important, subtly different thing than any old movie released in the summer) that I think has a fighting chance of still being passionately remembered 20 years hence, but having […]

It Comes at Night could be the title of a horror film, or of a pornographic parody of a horror film. In actuality, It Comes at Night is neither of these, though it’s not above pretending that horror might be in the offing. And if you’re willing to be flexible enough with definitions that a […]

My hat’s off to Resident Evil: The Final Chapter: it surely does seem to mean its title literally. When it’s over, the series mythology has been wrapped up nice and snug, and while it leaves the promise that there will be many more adventures to be had in this universe, it does so in exactly […]

Poor The Divergent Series. I mean it. You come into the world raring to be the new Hunger Games – made by the same studio no less, Lionsgate – with a new Hot Young “It” Actress to pin your hopes on, and then it’s all downhill after a kind of solid start. Eventually, you flare […]

It would be thoroughly disingenuous to claim that it’s obvious in hindsight that dividing Mockingjay, the third and most least-satisfying book in Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy, into two different movies was a bad idea. It was, of course, always obvious that it was a bad idea. But it’s still nice to have proof of […]

If we were to start off by directly comparing Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials to 2014’s The Maze Runner – and why shouldn’t we? For here we are, with Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials just dropped there right in front of us with all its petulant awfulness, like something the dog did on the carpet, […]

A review requested by Kent H, with thanks for donating to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Obviously, 1981’s Escape from New York is a transitional film in the career of director John Carpenter: his fifth feature (seventh if we include his television movies) is the one that finds him starting to really […]

A third review requested by Andrew Johnson, with thanks for contributing yet again to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Personal anecdotes aren’t criticism, of course, but in this case the anecdote shall lead us to criticism, I promise. The thing is, when I was a wee cinephile, I was quite addicted to […]