Far be it from me to tell the nearest and dearest friends and survivors of David Foster Wallace, a great many of whom have said some pretty withering things about the beatifying biopic-in-miniature >The End of the Tour, that they’re wrong. There’s something squishy and off-putting about the film just in relationship to itself, and […]

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: the notorious insta-flop Pixels is an adventure about a group of competition-level video game players. It’s also pandering to […]

A review requested by John, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Almost Famous of the year 2000 is surely the Cameron Crowest of Cameron Crowe films. Not just because it’s also the most baldly autobiographical of Cameron Crowe films, though I suspect that fact informs everything else that […]

The Homesman is a film with an unimaginably specific and small ideal audience. It is, to begin with, a Western; a Western lover’s Western, drunk on the iconography of the genre and steeped in an awareness of the kind of myths told in Western cinema and more than that, the particular language and tenor of […]

There is one thing that I can say in praise of >Dumb and Dumber To, so I might as well lead off with it. It has a certain casual, easy comfort to its style. That is to say, it’s a film that picks up the baton of mid-to-late-’90s comedy filmmaking quite effortless and without strain: […]

I foreground pee-drinking not because it’s fun to take cheap shots (which it is), but because the film genuinely cares that much. Pee-drinking is the first thing that happens. We get the scene-setting as a portentous but oddly tinny-sounding narrator invokes “The future. The polar ice caps have melted, covering the Earth with water. Those […]

Everything about Ida sounds like it was copied verbatim from the Big Book of European Art Film Clichés: full-frame black and white cinematography with emphasis on the whole range of greys, frequently silent people staring mirthlessly and hopelessly at nothing, the Holocaust looms imposingly in the background, and the whole thing is a metaphor for […]

Winner of the Gold Hugo for Best Film Screens at CIFF: 10/15 & 10/16 World premiere: 30 August, 2014, Venice International Film Festival Satire doesn’t get much more on-the-nose, snottily sarcastic, or, in fairness, absolutely hilarious as the opening of The President, a most uncharacteristic but hugely welcome surprise from self-exiled Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. […]

The good news: Tammy isn’t entirely about making fun of fat people for being fat fatties who eat the fuck out of food when they’re not falling down on their fat asses for being so fat that they can’t even stand on their fat legs. And as such, whenever future cinephiles are attending Melissa McCarthy […]

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: Tammy is about being desperate, broke, screwed over by a man, and looking to solve it all by taking […]

There’s something especially annoying about a movie that veers between mostly good and very good for its entire running time, only to complete puke itself apart in the last few minutes. I present to you The Rover, writer-director David Michôd’s sophomore feature after his impressive but in many ways frustratingly commonplace crime thriller Animal Kingdom. […]

“How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?” screamed the breathless, wink-wink ad campaign in 1962. And this question was obviously meant to ask: how did they ever make a movie, under the moral auspices of the American film industry at that time, based on the 1952 novel about a middle-aged literary scholar and […]