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: Warcraft is hardly a blockbuster, at least not in the U.S., in no small part because it’s a film […]
A review requested by David Lewellyng, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. I was born near the end of 1981, which means I was about a month shy of my 15th birthday on 15 November, 1996, which was the day that Space Jam opened. This means that I […]
There’s some real nice texturing, that’s what there is. I mean, real nice textures. In the extreme close-ups of the birds’ bodies (of which there aren’t all that many, but enough to make the point), you can see feathers that have been individually delineated, and even barbs that have been individually delineated, all of them […]
A review requested by Grace C, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Bad comedies, as I’ve had cause to mention before, are the very worst, because you can laugh at bad action or melodrama or horror. But the definition of a bad comedy is that it’s not funny, […]
This review is based on the most commonly-available copy recorded from the broadcast by the CBS affiliate in Baltimore, MD, with all commercial breaks intact. When we began our little retrospective of the Star Wars franchise, I asked you to do something unfathomably difficult, and pretend that it was 1977, and you just saw Star […]
A version of this review was published at the Film Experience There’s a good movie to be made out of Pixels, and it would be the easiest thing in the world to get there. First, keep all of the visual effects setpieces from the movie as it exists, for they are surprisingly beautiful and convincing […]
The late 1990s were a deeply insincere moment in American pop culture. Emboldened primarily, I suppose by the enormous success of Jerry Seinfeld’s famous stand-up and television comedy about nothing, every facet of music, movies, and television were infested by a great desire to indulge in something that was not, in fact, irony, but was […]
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 plot of Ted 2 touches on the sex life of a human woman and a talking animal brought […]
By no reasonable standard is Paul Blart: Mall Cop a good movie. It is perhaps even a very bad movie, and a largely unamusing comedy. That’s even adjusting for the already questionable comic standards of the “fatty fall down” genre, one of the loudest and most obnoxious of all possible subgenres. So it is bizarre […]
One cannot hear pans of a movie like those which greeted The Cobbler at its Toronto International Film Festival premiere in 2014 without becoming morbidly curious. Not pans. That’s not a strong enough word. These were the hushed, strangled whispers of people who had seen something too traumatising to ignore, but also too traumatising to […]
If, for whatever reason, you wanted to make the most ice-cold, vagina-drying, boner-killing movie about sex in all of cinema history, you would first have to confront the fact that Exit to Eden already exists, and it has set that bar inordinately high. It’s no surprise, really, that nothing good could should come of a […]
It’s kind of fascinating to know in advance that The Interview is going to be one of the most historically important movies of 2014. Who knows what happens in the future? Could be that everybody’s enthusiasm for The Grand Budapest Hotel evaporates the instant that it gets a Best Picture nomination at the Oscars. Five […]
