Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

Kingsman: The Secret Service is the quintessence of the kind of movie that I haven’t thought about from basically the moment I hit “publish” on my review back in 2014, but I remember thinking it was sufficient enough as junk food. It had the right amount of saltiness, it was greasy but not, like slick […]

I’ll say right out that if you’re the kind of person for whom “style over substance” is a bad thing, you’ll certainly have less of a good time with Atomic Blonde than I had (and I had a very good time indeed – it’s my favorite movie of summer 2017 to date). The film is […]

The consensus around Jason Bourne has quickly emerged that it’s disappointing because it’s just more of the same: that director Paul Greengrass has retrenched to simply copying his own The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum from 12 and 9 years ago, respectively, and is doing nothing new. In fact, it is even worse. If […]

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: Jason Bourne is back! Let us take this opportunity to remind ourselves of where he has been. There’s so […]

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: Jason Bourne is back! Let us take this opportunity to remind ourselves of where he has been. There’s no […]

To start with, Our Kind of Traitor is based on perhaps the least-interesting of John le CarrĂ©’s novels that have so far been turned into a movie or TV miniseries or both, so it’s perfectly natural that it should be the least-interesting movie of the recent le CarrĂ© fad (which I’m only really using to […]

You know who we take for granted? Tom Hanks. And I include myself in this – at the time I write this review, I’m also sorting through my various Best of 2015 year-end musings, and I have not once thought of mentioning him as one of the year’s best actors, despite how utterly arid Best […]

A guide to all things Bond at Alternate Ending. Directed by Sam Mendes Written by John Logan and Neal Purvis & Robert Wade and Jez Butterworth Premiered 26 October, 2015 PRE-TITLE SEQUENCE The time has come to acknowledge that, notwithstanding the hellish editing in the car chase that opens Quantum of Solace, the Daniel Craig […]

There is a place that Universal could have sent its library of iconic monsters to in the 1940s that’s so unbelievably obvious and offers so many opportunities for wonderful weirdness that, in retrospect, it’s astonishing that it only happened once: the European theater of World War II. Imagine a 20th Century wolf man retaining just […]

After Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol came out in 2011, it seemed that the series had finally figured out how to become the best version of itself and could go on forever doing the same thing. It was with that film that the movies stopped being somewhat dimwitted star vehicles for producer Tom Cruise and […]

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: Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation continues the unexpected late flowering of a TV-derived spy franchise into its best self. […]

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: Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation continues the unexpected late flowering of a TV-derived spy franchise into its best self. […]