House of 1000 Corpses is an energetic, lively movie, but it is also a substantially dysfunctional one, better-suited for demonstrating writer-director Rob Zombie’s all-encompassing love for the horror genre than for working as an audio-visual narrative object. It’s the kind of first feature that a filmmaker needs to get out of their system so they […]

The Sun Is Also a Star has no reason to be good at all: the teen YA romance adaptation, as a genre, is not one that has ever demonstrated a particularly robust correlation between quality and financial success, just so long as the book has a big enough fanbase and the filmmakers avoid doing too […]

Sequels that are really more like unrelated entries in an anthology series are nothing new at all, especially in the horror & thriller genres, so the fact that 47 Meters Down: Uncaged has absolutely not one blessed thing to do with 47 Meters Down, the banal shark film from 2017, is not surprising. That it […]

The Angry Birds Movie 2 is a misnomer twice over. First, the onscreen title treatment and all of the advertising material state, clear as day, The Angry 2 Birds Movie. Second, the birds in this one are not angry. But I imagine that The Birds with Depression Movie would sell fewer tickets. As you undoubtedly […]

When one of the greatest working directors of actors and one of the greatest working actors collaborate on their first film together, it is extremely easy to get one’s expectations all riled up. And this much at least can’t be denied about Where’d You Go, Bernadette: Cate Blanchett (for she is the actor) is splendid, […]

I have no intention of ranking the …Has Fallen films. They haven’t earned that. You rank things because it is fun to think about their relative merits, not their relative flaws; one could as well rank one’s sinus infections as rank the …Has Fallen films. But I will, albeit sullenly, hazard the quasi-praise that Angel […]

One of the similes I keep handy in my back pocket is the formula “[film] overuses [word] like a 12-year-old boy who’s just learned to swear, and can’t think of anything funnier” (presented with modifications, of course, but if you keep an eye out for it, you’ll see that 12-year-old boys come in for a […]

The conventional wisdom around Ready or Not is that it’s a lacerating satire of vicious, hapless rich people, a smart commentary on the depravities of the 1%, a Film For Right Now. And okay, sure. It can do that if you want it to. I don’t think it does it particularly well, or with anything […]

The IMDb synopsis for The Art of Racing in the Rain reads as follows: “Through his bond with his owner, aspiring Formula One race car driver Denny, golden retriever Enzo learns that the techniques needed on the racetrack can also be used to successfully navigate the journey of life.” What this fails to clarify is […]

There is simply no reason for a live-action adaptation of the interactive children’s cartoon Dora the Explorer to be good. And when we add in the ugly wrinkled that the beaming seven-year-old of the show has been aged up to an improbably innocent teenager forced to go to public school for the first time, I […]

Ask a horror fan what draws them to the genre, and you’ll get any number of possible answers. Ask that question of, say, a twelve-year-old horror fan, and I suspect that the range of answers will be at least somewhat narrowed down: and high on that list would be gross corpses with lots of gore […]

Furious 7, the last altogether good movie in the Fast & Furious series, came out in April 2015. This is very recent according to any human-scale accounting of time; but it has been an entire generation in American action cinema. The intervening four years have borne witness to a veritable golden age: while Furious 7 […]