Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

Every single review of The Zone of Interest, the fourth feature film directed by Jonathan Glazer, at some point will reference the subtitle of Hannah Arendt’s 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil. Some reviews will mention it in the context of this being a very powerful illustration of Arendt’s most famous idea. […]

The new “guess we have to call it a biopic, what other word fits?” Priscilla, directed by Sofia Coppola from a screenplay she adapted from Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoirs, is exactly what you suspect it is, though exactly what you suspect it is depends on your tastes and history with the director. Do you find […]

My hope for The Pope’s Exorcist before I watched it was that Russell Crowe’s instantly-legendary spicy meat-a-ball of an “Italian” accent would remain amusing throughout the film’s 103-minute length. This was akin to hoping, upon starting a trip to Yosemite, that you’d see some large trees: you’d get what you wanted even more than you […]

I wouldn’t precisely say that Oppenheimer is a Christopher Nolan movie for people who don’t like Christopher Nolan movies. I have people in my life who don’t like Christopher Nolan movies, and they’re still pretty cool towards this one. Maybe the way to put it is that Oppenheimer is the Christopher Nolan movie for people […]

The Fabelmans is full of striking images. It is, in a sense, a film about striking images. Perhaps the most striking of all, to me, comes somewhat far into the movie – it is maybe even a spoiler to talk about it. But I’m not sure how much you can “spoil” The Fabelmans: the story […]

The route that Weird: The Al Yankovic Story took to the screen is, well, weird. The feature is based on a short film that was originally released on the comedy website Funny or Die back in 2010, which presented a faux trailer for a Walk the Line style movie about Weird Al, as played by Breaking Bad‘s […]

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: Baz Luhrmann directs his first feature in nine years, Elvis. Elvis being Elvis, this isn’t even the first film […]

The grand-scale spectacular biopic Elvis (the fourth narrative treatment of the life of Elvis Presley in any filmed medium to go by that precise title, and at 159 minutes, somehow, also the shortest*) is the first feature directed by Baz Luhrmann in the nine years since The Great Gatsby. It’s been considerably longer since his […]

In a career spanning 45 years and nine feature-length films, the great Terence Davies, one of Great Britain’s finest living directors, has made only three kinds of films: autobiographies, wordy literary adaptations, and biopics of poets. His newest feature, Benediction, is sort of all three of these things in one body. Officially speaking, it’s only […]

Even by the highly dubious standards of Oscarbait biopics whose commercial and awards campaign both hang insistently on one single performance and literally nothing else whatsoever about the film, The Eyes of Tammy Faye is a pretty cruddy movie. Adapted from a 2000 documentary of the same title by screenwriter Abe Sylvia and director Michael […]

Benedetta, a film about lesbian nuns directed by Paul Verhoven, is a very different thing than “a film about lesbian nuns directed by Paul Verhoeven” can even start to suggest. One of the most shocking, provocative things about it is that it puts almost no effort into being provocative or shocking. It satirically targets the […]

A movie as bad as House of Gucci shouldn’t be as bad as House of Gucci. If you follow me. Basically, if you were to select the right moments – the ones in the film’s shockingly weird trailers, for example – you would be 100% convinced that you had before you a remarkable piece of […]