TIM: I’d like to thank Zev Valancy for his contribution to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser & Review Auction, which in his case wasn’t simply a run-of-the-mill review; for his money, he wanted to have to do some work. So his request was that he and I join forces for one of […]
First things first: the sheer weirdness of watching a director whose work up till now has all been characterised by a glacial sheen of emotional remove from her characters and their behavior retelling a story of hothouse Southern Gothic sexuality during the U.S. Civil War – and maintaining that glacial quality! – is all it […]
A review requested by Mat Daniel, with thanks for donating to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. I would have thought we were past this, but I’ve recently come to find that no, there’s still a seemingly insurmountable gulf in people’s attitudes towards Orson Welles. On one side, there are people who regard […]
A second review requested by Patton with thanks for contributing twice to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. How in the name of the good Lord does one even go about starting to discuss Apocalypse Now? It’s among the small population of films about which I think it’s more or less impossible to […]
“It’s stagey” say so many of the critics, in regard to the long-awaited film adaptation of Fences, August Wilson’s magnificent 1985 play about a former Negro Leagues player emotionally terrorising everyone around him. “It feels like you’re just watching Denzel Washington and Viola Davis doing the play, just as they for 114 performances back in […]
A review requested by Mark M, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. It can no longer be argued, as was once stated with some casual authority, that The Maltese Falcon was “the first” film noir (it was released in October, 1941, more than fours years after You Only […]
It is the end of a long, baffling journey to American audiences for The Little Prince, an English-language French-made animated feature that has been waiting since the 2015 Cannes Film Festival for this moment. A substantial hit in most of the markets where it opened across 2015, the film was scheduled for release in the […]
Roald Dahl’s 1982 children’s book The BFG is possibly the gentlest thing he ever wrote, with his characteristic dark humor and fantastic violence flickering on the margins but mostly left away from the plot. Even so, director Steven Spielberg and production company Walt Disney Pictures have endeavored to make it gentler still in their new […]
A review requested by Geoffrey Moses, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. I have mentioned before, and I shall mention in the future, that one of my most vulnerable weaknesses as a moviegoer is for anything that foregrounds hyper-literate insulting dialogue delivered with sufficient vigor and acidity by […]
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: because we were apparently all very bad, Disney has seen fit to punish us with Alice Through the Looking […]
A review requested by theizz, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Upon revisiting the great musical character dramedy Hedwig and the Angry Inch for the first time in many years, I was pleased and more than a little bit surprised to find that I treasured it more now […]
There’s nothing in and of itself excessively shocking about The Silence of the Lambs. It’s a gory, grotty thriller that just enough of a literary sheen to it – it was based on a best-selling crime novel that could at least pretend to be somewhere in the wheelhouse of classy fiction, thanks to author Thomas […]
