Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

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Dune: Part Two is as much the payment of a debt as it is a movie. In 2021, director Denis Villeneuve and his co-writers Eric Roth and Jon Spaihts presented us with an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s genre-defining 1965 science fiction novel Dune – which I guess we now ought to formally start calling Dune: […]

Presuming that Trolls Band Together represents the conclusion of DreamWorks Animation’s Trolls Trilogy – and given DreamWorks’s historical and ongoing shamelessness about resurrecting any franchise whose brand name seems to have a few dollars left to squeeze out of it, this is a terrible presumption – the least we can say is that leaves us […]

I would like to start by making it clear that The Nun II is not a good movie. I am giving it a good review anyway, because I am very easy mark for a certain kind of dipshit haunted-house atmosphere, so take that as you will. I would also like to point out that this […]

Over the course of its 27-years-and-counting lifespan – a geological epoch, by summertime movie standards – the Mission: Impossible movies have tried on many different guises and been many different things. But one of the things they have been the most consistently, going back at least to the free-climbing and knife-against-the-eyeball scenes in 2000’s Mission: […]

The defining fact about 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is that it isn’t Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. On its own, this fact is hardly distinctive. Many, if not indeed most, movies are not Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The key difference is that Indiana Jones and the Last […]

The biggest problem that was always going to face Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is that it was never going to have the staggering shock of the truly new and revolutionary. Even if the first sequel to 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse were to have a story more expansive and elaborate than that film (and it […]

In 2017, John Wick: Chapter 2 opened by showing footage from the 1924 Buster Keaton comedy Sherlock Jr., one of the greatest stunt-driven movies of all time, and the gesture was an obvious, swaggering brag: “what we’re up to here is just as good as Keaton”. And for the next two hours, director Chad Stahelski […]

There are three entirely different ways we can look at Creed III, and the film is more or less of a success or a failure based on which one we pick. Starting from the most failed and going up: as the trilogy-capper to a story begun in 2015’s exceptionally great boxing movie Creed and 2018’s […]

DreamWorks Animation, once the unlovely home of such crimes against animation as Shark Tale and Bee Movie, has been quietly handing Disney and Pixar their asses on a platter for so long now that it should no longer come as a surprise when it happens, but it still feels like Puss in Boots: The Last […]

In the thirteen years since James Cameron’s last new feature, Avatar, I have increasingly come to treasure his particular mode of popcorn filmmaking, which I feel didn’t used to be rare, but basically has been dead as dead can be for all of those thirteen years. It is a mode of complete, unyielding sincerity, mixed […]

There probably aren’t more than a half-dozen movies in the history of American cinema more sacrosanct than Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho from 1960, a film standing proudly alone as such a defining achievement in cinema that the mere notion of ever trying to cash in on it in any way is genuinely immoral. Which hasn’t stood […]