The big surprise of the new action-comedy Spy is how much of an action-comedy it actually is, as opposed to a comedy that’s got some dog-ends of action in it. For a film directed by Paul Feig and starring Melissa McCarthy – a partnership that has resulted in Bridesmaids and the much more overtly comic […]
A review requested by Jenny B, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. I have been guilty of this sin as recently as in the middle of re-watching the film for this review, but I think I can still say without hesitation: it’s much, much too easy to overlook […]
There’s a level on which Kingsman: The Secret Service is the movie director Matthew Vaughn has always been destined to make. In fact, that is perhaps true of all of its levels, both the good ones and the bad. On the good side of the ledger, Kingsman is one of the most smartly-crafted action films […]
It’s kind of fascinating to know in advance that The Interview is going to be one of the most historically important movies of 2014. Who knows what happens in the future? Could be that everybody’s enthusiasm for The Grand Budapest Hotel evaporates the instant that it gets a Best Picture nomination at the Oscars. Five […]
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: The November Man is the latest in a long line of spy thrillers that owe their exist and most […]
For reasons owing mostly to a capricious, unfair universe, A Most Wanted Man will probably always be first remembered as the movie with Philip Seymour Hoffman’s last starring role. That’s a cruel fate for any film to have to live up to, but at least in this case it’s helped out by Hoffman being absurdly […]
Above all else, what Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit teaches us – if we really needed to be taught it, though we do not – is that Kenneth Branagh the director has an unstoppable infatuation with Kenneth Branagh the actor. Kevin Costner gets introduced coming up behind the camera and in profile. Keira Knightley just meanders […]
Sheer chronological accident made 2002’s The Sum of All Fears the unwilling First Jack Ryan Picture of a Post-9/11 World, but in all particulars it feels far more like the decade-late First Jack Ryan Picture of a Post-Cold War World. Notwithstanding the fact that all of the Jack Ryan movies came out after the end […]
Having figured out how to make a Jack Ryan action thriller with 1992’s Patriot Games, the same cluster of filmmakers (with a couple of swaps here and there) got to do it again two years later with Clear and Present Danger, in the process managing to improve virtually across the board. And I say “virtually” […]
I would doubt that the makers of 1992’s Patriot Games were trying to be ironic – actually, that’s not the half of it: a film more free of pesky things like nuance and cleverness than Patriot Games is damn hard to imagine – and yet the title ends up playing that way regardless. The two […]
Year in, year out, from hot war to cold, you can always count on a good submarine thriller. Something about the combination of cramped spaces, hollow reverberating sounds,* and being stuck in a metal tube beneath thousands of cubic meters of water just lends itself to high-stakes tension and pressure-cooker drama. That’s even true for […]
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: a twofer! With Paranoia, we have a thriller about a man whose job has unexpectedly thrust him into the […]
