Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

In the 2001 masterpiece of big-budget studio fluff Ocean’s Eleven, George Clooney and Julia Roberts co-starred as bickering ex-spouses, whose sharp-tongued acrimony was so clever and adorable and spiked with gorgeous movie star energy that one can barely stand the crashing force of all the chemistry between them. So we know they can do better […]

Hollywood has been battling nightmarish politics with goofy antics for just about as long as cinema has existed. Hell, even the Third Reich inspired its share of comedy classics—not merely decades later (as in, say, The Producers’ deliberately ludicrous “Springtime for Hitler” production number), but while World War II was still very much in progress. […]

Not Okay, the Hulu-based sophomore effort from actress-writer-director Quinn Shephard, opens with a much-discussed “content warning” that the film we are about to experience contains “flashing lights, themes of trauma, and an unlikable female protagonist.” It’s a tweak of the viewer’s nose intended to set a cheeky tone and make some kind of statement about […]

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: in addition to having the most soullessly branded title of any superhero movie this year, DC League of Super-Pets […]

To begin with, I find the very title of DC League of Super-Pets unpleasantly provocative. Not the League of Super-Pets part; that’s mostly just describing the content, though I might wonder why the film bothered to so subtly rename the comic book Legion of Super-Pets. Probably because Warner Bros. assumed (and with reason) that movie […]

Lightyear, the 26th feature film produced by Pixar Animation studios and easily the worst one that has no talking cars in it, opens with two title cards relaying the following information: “In 1995, a boy named Andy got a Buzz Lightyear toy for his birthday. It was from his favorite movie. This is that movie.” […]

It was, I believe, my father who introduced me to the phrase “he thinks his shit don’t stink” as a pithy way of denigrating the kind of person who is arrogantly convinced of their righteous infallibility. I will not say of writer-director Adam McKay, and his newest film, Don’t Look Up, that he thinks his […]

TIM: Welcome all to a very special Alternate Ending review. Our subject for today is the latest adaptation of the fairy tale Cinderella, this one prepared by Sony for a planned theatrical release that got squashed like so many others by the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead, it has entered the world as an Amazon Studios original, […]

Free Guy is a film that lives and dies on one consideration: how much do you like Ryan Reynolds’s “thing”? I have grown to dislike it very much. But by all available evidence the movie has turned out to be one of 2021’s most successful crowdpleasers, as one of the few releases in the post- […]

We’ve got to start somewhere, so why not with the question that I’ve been kicking around in my head since I finished Space Jam: A New Legacy: how can anyone worship a God vindictive and hateful enough to allow this movie to exist? No wait, that’s the other question I’ve been kicking around. The one […]

In the early parts of Mainstream, it appears that producer, director, and co-writer (with Tom Stuart) Gia Coppola was really anxious to make her own version of Aunt Sofia’s The Bling Ring. It is not very good at this, and also, by the time the film’s glacially-paced 94 minutes are over, this will seem like the […]

Three stars gets absolutely nowhere close to my actual feelings about The Mitchells vs. the Machines, the new film by Sony Pictures Animation that has, after pandemic-related delays, settled into a home on Netflix. There are, in fact, three entirely different films happening here, and I would give three stars to none of them; but […]