October’s such a busy month: here I am, looking to pack away the Chicago International Film Festival and get to work on Kevin Olson’s Italian Horror Blogathon, and wouldn’t you know it, but I was given an absolutely perfect, gift-wrapped transition from one to the other in the form of Dracula 3D, the latest film […]
The long-in-development, long-delayed seventh film by director Alfonso Cuarón, Gravity, already had a massive amount of hype to live up to even before it opened to just silly good reviews out of the Venice film festival, and of course it doesn’t live up to it. It comes, however, about as close to living up to […]
They say that good things come to those who wait, and I am happy to report that after months of patient waiting, 2013 has finally produced a movie that’s so bad it’s good, in the form of 3-D sports/dance hybrid Battle of the Year, something of a b-boying themed remake of the 1989 taekwondo tournament […]
The problem with Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby – a problem with The Great Gatsby, I had better say – there are many problems, and some of them are more debilitating than others, and some really aren’t “problems”, but idiosyncrasies. Let me start again. See, there’s a lot of The Great Gatsby where it seems […]
There are good and bad things aplenty with Oz the Great and Powerful, but I am very pleased that the one which bothers me the most is a petty nitpick on a formal element. In an effort to recall the 1939 MGM film The Wizard of Oz – and goodness gracious, does Oz TGAP ever […]
1974’s revolutionary, genre-defining horror masterpiece The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has inspired a small army of follow-ups and remakes and prequels, but shockingly, it’s taken 39 years for it to finally kick off a film that takes place in what is demonstrably and purposefully the exact same continuity, the confusingly-titled Texas Chainsaw 3D, though of course, […]
I should not speak ill of Yann Martel’s humongously popular 2001 novel Life of Pi, because I couldn’t bring myself to finish it. Got a third of the way through, decided that one day, I was going to die, and on my deathbed, I didn’t want to find myself reflecting on the time I wasted […]
The second attempt at adapting the classic British comic book antihero Judge Dredd to film, titled just Dredd, is a vastly better movie than the last attempt, 1995’s Sylvester Stallone vehicle Judge Dredd; but this is true of nearly all movies, which makes it a some pointless observation. Anyway, except for the name of the […]
Author’s note, January 2017: I used to have you might call a bug up my butt about this franchise. Let’s say that although I stand by this review, I don’t actually agree with it. Typically, we do not want bad movies to have sequels; we want bad movies to go far away and stop ruining […]
Author’s note, January 2017: I used to have you might call a bug up my butt about this franchise. Let’s say that although I stand by this review, I don’t actually agree with it. I do not suppose that any of my habitual readers were anxious for me to watch and review Resident Evil: Afterlife, […]
Someone would have to be an abject moron to be “disappointed” by Step Up Revolution, which is after all the fourth film in the Step Up franchise, and which thus is pretty much exactly the movie it’s supposed to be. I think it’s awfully grown-up of me to openly confess in a public forum that […]
I know this is the most obvious possible way to start off, but: Ice Age: Continental Drift is no less than the third sequel to 2002’s blandly pleasant Ice Age, and I cannot figure out why. Okay, so why is thunderingly obvious: because the movies are ridiculously profitable (the third entry in the franchise, Dawn […]
