Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

30 November, 1993, represents the dividing point in the career of director Steven Spielberg. Prior to this, he was primarily a director of ebullient, exhilarating popcorn movies; since then, he has primarily been a director of largely serious dramas, with even his genre films tending to be more about investigating society than providing easy thrills. […]

At one point, I suggested on this very site that 1997’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park was “readily the worst thing [Steven Spielberg] has ever made”. I will now freely admit that I was speaking those words from a position of fearless intellectual dishonesty: until re-watching it for this review, I had not actually seen […]

Jurassic Park is a beloved classic of popcorn cinema, still a cultural touchstone two decades on, and as keen a demonstration of Steven Spielberg’s peerless skills at directing clean, effective populist entertainment as anything you could ask for, so I imagine it will be able to survive just fine if a schmuck blogger like myself […]

It’s not exactly the case that Empire of the Sun is Steven Spielberg’s most “divisive” movie, in any useful sense of that word (that’s almost certainly A.I. Artificial Intelligence). It’s something a little bit weirder than that: a movie that nobody really pointedly dislikes, unless they’re already suspicious of the director’s tendency towards sentimental manipulation, […]

First surprise: that Lincoln is not a touch-feely biopic of the much-loved historical icon, and it does not gawk at him with starry-eyed hero-worship, but instead is a rather hard, clear-eyed study of mid-19th Century Realpolitik that has the audacity to depict the most romanticised of all U.S. presidents as – shock and gasp – […]

E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial premiered in North America on 11 June, 1982, and was initially meant to be a smallish personal project (for a big-budget sci-fi picture) that would give director Steven Spielberg a chance to recuperate from the hectic production of the previous year’s Raiders of the Last Ark. It ended up devouring the Zeitgeist […]

For some time now, I’ve had people raising the question, “When are you going to review Jaws?” because as we are all aware, there are not nearly enough reviews of Jaws in this world. That said, I am not immune to begging, and when the slowest week for new releases in several months stumbled into […]

Some directors, following a long break between films, come back refreshed, recharged, and ready to do bold new things – the Stanley Kubrick Effect, we can call it – and some seem to have forgotten how the hell to make a movie. It causes me nothing but pain to say this, but Steven Spielberg has, […]

It’s not at all reasonable to say of something that’s as blissfully enjoyable for as much of its running time as The Adventures of Tintin is, “I was completely disappointed’; but that film’s director, Steven Spielberg, has set the bar about as high as anyone could for adventure films that marry the narrative innocence of […]

The year of my birth, 1981, was among the worst in cinema history, something I’ve only become strongly aware of in the last few weeks; yet it’s also the year that produced my second-favorite movie of all time.* And while it is undeniably the case that the world does not need another review of Raiders […]

Some words on the criteria of judging movies: In praising a meritorious film, there are a lot of words that we can bandy about, and while ultimately all of them mean something similar, i.e. “Watching this movie was an experience that made me feel like I had spent time well and was better for for […]

The question everyone has been trying to answer in regards to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull – does it live up to the classic Indiana Jones films? – is inapt. Viewed with our objective caps on, neither Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom nor Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade […]