Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

I think it goes without saying that the best answer to the question, “what do you would the right way to remake Kurosawa Akira’s gorgeous 1952 melodrama Ikiru?” would be “I hope you die in a fire”, but setting that aside, Living is actually pretty good. The biggest problem with it, by far, is that […]

There are both a good idea for a movie and a great idea for a movie tangled up right next to each other inside of Saint Omer, and it is one of the more disappointing developments of the young 2023 movie year (the film is technically a 2022 release in the U.S., but only in […]

In all my movie-going years, I have only very rarely encountered a film whose entire conceit screamed “come here and eat this huge plate of raw lima beans, because this is extremely serious and important” the way that She Said does. It’s a ripped-from-the-headlines story with the uncommon twist that we can point directly to […]

To be fair to the makers of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, from Marvel Studios capo Kevin Feige to director/co-writer Ryan Coogler and all the way on, they were facing a no-win situation. Chadwick Boseman, the charismatic star of the 2018 Zeitgeist-dominating smash hit Black Panther, died tragically young of cancer at the age of 43 […]

Erich Maria Remarque’s undying 1928 anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front has the uncommon fortune for a major literary classic to have been adapted into a major cinematic classic, and this happened almost immediately: the U.S.-produced adaptation that would go on to win the Academy Award for Outstanding Production (i.e., Best Picture) at […]

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. […]

When telling a story about truly horrible people, you’ve got two basic choices. Option one: They remain horrible, and either experience a moralistic comeuppance (for several decades, Hollywood’s old Production Code expressly forbade evil to triumph) or, more cynically, thrive as a result. Option two: They eventually achieve some degree of self-awareness, even if that […]

Categories: very serious movies

Setting aside the question the question of whether the end results are actually worth it – my answer would be “mostly, yes” – one must give After Yang the unhesitating credit that it is a complete work of narrative cinema, in which every element of the image and sound has been carefully positioned to work […]

There’s no argument I can imagine that director Matt Reeves’s The Batman, the first in what’s undoubtedly meant to be a new ongoing series built around DC Comics’ second-most iconic superhero, is “the best” Batman film to date. But I think no argument is necessary that it is “the most” Batman film, and I’m including […]

The phrase “elevated horror” gets bandied about pretty freely for something that has no concrete definition beyond “the kind of horror movies distributed by A24”. But there’s certainly something going on that deserves a word to describe it, a strain of unconnected movies that mix in horror with serious character drama. It is a very […]

The original Brodaway production of the musical Dear Evan Hansen won six Tonys off of nine nominations, making it the single most-awarded production of the 2016-’17 season. In some years this would mean very little, but that season was an atypically competitive one for critically-acclaimed new musicals, meaning that there had to be some actual […]

Nicolas Cage is in fact a very good actor. That might sound like it goes without saying, or it might not, but it does help to have the reminder: after something like a quarter of a century building an ever- grander persona as a goofy, kitschy weirdo, prone to glowering and bellowing and twitchy, almost […]