With 2011’s Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked, we arrive at my favorite point in the life of a franchise: when everybody stopped caring and lost their goddamned minds. The chief failure of Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, made two years prior – and oh, how many different ways that film fails! it is an […]

There’s no dignity in spending all of one’s time complaining about how contemporary art isn’t as good as old art, which is why I do it a lot less than I’d like to. And while we are not, by any stretch of the imagination, living through a golden age of cinema right now (those of […]

There is blackness, to begin with. Impenetrable black, with unfocused electric guitar chords slicing through the nothing. And then comes the giggling, shrill and mad, the voice of some otherworldly hellspawn that has seen things that any living thing would pray to never see, to never imagine. And then the voice speaks, and its words […]

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: […]

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: keeping alive the traditions of a franchise best known for assembling all of the best and most manly action […]

You know how in slasher movies, sexually active teenagers are killed? Congratulations, you have all the information you need in order to have written Student Bodies, a slasher movie parody from 1981, the earliest year in which “slasher parody” is something we could even conceivably talk about (added bonus points for being released by Paramount, […]

Camp is one of the hardest things in pop cultural discourse: hard to quite grasp which of a dozen almost identical, but in some crucial way contradictory definitions, cuts to the heart of what it is; hard to explain it once you’ve seen it, and demonstrate how and why it works the way it does; […]

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: since the Italian genre film began revving up after the Second World War, filmmakers have been putting Greek hero […]

Those of you who’ve been around for a while have undoubtedly picked up on my certain disdain for movies that play the “we know we’re making a bad movie, so it’s actually funny that our movie is bad” card. And oh my Lord, does the 1997 direct-to-video Jack Frost lean on that conceit as unrelentingly […]

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 […]

2012’s Think Like a Man is, by and large, not a very good movie. But it does an absolutely fantastic impression of one, thanks to a game cast of very talented comic actors who don’t get very much work in major movies owing to their unbankable skin color, all of them working double-time to flesh […]

There’s a terrific and deeply necessary movie that could have been made out of the basic DNA of The Other Woman. It is, for starters, basically a platonic rom-com about how a pair of mismatched women come to rely on each other as friends, and cinematic depictions of female friendships are achingly rare (contra the […]