Whether or not The Matrix Resurrections works very well – I am generally of the mind that it doesn’t really, though it is a better film than either The Matrix Reloaded or The Matrix Revolutions, and that’s sort of the only target it needed to hit – what cannot be taken away from it is […]
Thanks to Travis Neeley for his second contribution to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. This time around, Travis didn’t exactly make a request, so much as offer me a present: he wanted me to select a movie that I’d already reviewed but had changed my mind about in the intervening years, and […]
There are as many reasons to bitch about 1995’s sputtering thriller Assassins as there are stars in the sky, and I was ready for all of them except one. As none of the reviewers of 20 years ago bothered to tell me, because 20 years ago this wasn’t something anybody would have been compelled to […]
To begin with, Jupiter Ascending is pulp sci-fi of a very ancient stripe, and it is utterly proud of that fact. It tells the story of a secret space princess, set against the machinations of evil space corporations who hire burly lizardmen with bat wings as their guards; characters have names like “Titus Abrasax” and […]
If I may steal from Tolstoy: competently-made movies are all alike, ambitiously messy movies are all ambitiously messy in their own way. Which is as much to say, Cloud Atlas is basically a disaster, but it’s a disaster that held me in a complete rapture for the entirety of its beyond-bloated 172-minute running time, and […]
The conventional wisdom is that The Matrix Revolutions, the last of its trilogy, is weaker than its immediate forebear, The Matrix Reloaded, regardless of whether either of them is “good”; and I am proud to break with this convention. Not because I think that Revolutions is really good, or a successful return to the level […]
Many, many people love The Matrix. I am not one of them – I enjoy it well enough, but it doesn’t loom very large in my memory – nor was I in 2003, which is where our story begins. For it was in that year that two of the most heavily-anticipated movies of the 2000s […]
Every Sunday 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: though Christopher Nolan proves again with Inception that he’s one of the most honorable directors in the field of […]
It’s been a good long while since I’ve been the last one to see a film (especially one that’s been open for four days), and it’s kind of disheartening – what can I possibly add to the fray? Even though the answer is probably “nothing,” I’m absolutely not going to pass on the chance to […]
