A review requested by Ryan R, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. The line attributed to Jean-Luc Godard goes something like, “To critique a movie, you have to make another movie”, which puts the modern reviewer of the 1967 potboiler Valley of the Dolls at a clear disadvantage. […]
A review requested by Pat King, with thanks for donating to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Recommended musical accompaniment to this review. Obviously, if we’re talk about pure, rancid anti-cinematic imbecility, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is Michael Bay’s worst movie and will almost certainly remain that way, for it’s difficult to […]
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: Magic Mike XXL continues its predecessor’s look at the lives of men who dance dirty for a living. Not […]
A review requested by John Taylor, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Reducing any film to the sum of its Oscar trivia is a filthy habit, but it’s also fun and I’m good at it, and Grand Hotel has a real whopper of a piece of trivia associated […]
A review requested by Shoumik H, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Johnnie To is a name that you might know, and you definitely should. He is nothing less than the finest director of action movies and crime thrillers in Hong Kong since that country’s action cinema wave […]
Joseph L. Mankiewicz is not a bad director. But he’s not a truly great one, either; he’s not worthy, anyway, of being the second of only two men to have won a pair of back-to-back Best Director Oscars (John Ford was the first). He didn’t, in general, do anything unexpected with his camera; he rarely […]
Take my hand – or whatever other body part you prefer – and walk with my back to the 1970s, and the Golden Age of Eurosmut. It was a time when the boundary between the glaciated art films developed from the mid-’50s onward and the new world of pornography was as thin and porous as […]
The Costnerssaince just isn’t going well, is it? For the latest from our boy Kevin Costner, we turn to Black or White, a drama about race relations in America whose suffocating earnestness is almost enough of a liability to distract one from the film’s clear-eyed assessment of the tenuous state of racial harmony in a […]
There’s very little doubt that The Boy Next Door is a terrible movie. But it is so cheerfully overt about it that it offers the very real possibility that everybody involved in making not only knew just how terrible it was, but in fact that they might actually have signed specifically because of that fact. […]
Marion Cotillard can do anything, anyway. Whatever else one walks away from The Immigrant certain of, one can be certain of that. As the recipient of the first-ever leading female character (co-)written and directed by James Gray, specialist in portraits of New York masculinity in moments of self-doubt, Cotillard has been handed a role with […]
There is much to be argued for simple things done well. I present for your approval Beyond the Lights, a backstage melodrama and love story that invents nothing, does not surprise, and is still one of the most rewarding films to come out (and then almost immediately vanish) in the waning months of 2014. Blame […]
Hype is a brutal fucker. Coming to Whiplash cold, it might be entirely possible to find it a fun, nervy little sudser about Type-A personalities clashing with lacerating verbal violence, done up in an appropriately hyper if not terribly innovative style. Coming to it, instead, with the knowledge that it’s pretty much a done deal […]
