Joy is weird as all hell. The film makes many false steps, both in its screenplay and its direction (both by David O. Russell, though it is fairly well-attested that the back half – the much better half, as it happens – has been changed far less from Annie Mumolo’s original draft), with a terrifically impressive-on-paper cast marching fearlessly into some very indefensible decisions. Decisions motivated by the utter screwiness […]

Two months into summer, two great films, and one awe-inspiring record-setting mediocrity. The season’s second, generally small half begins now, and on paper at least, it looks promising. At least, for myself, there are more films I’m looking forward to in July than there were at the start of either May or June. There’s always room for a surprise – or a disappointment, of course – but I confess myself […]

There was always going to be a mash-up of the nuclear monster movie and the beach movie sometime in the mid-’60s. B-movie producers, as a breed, are too good at mimicry and chasing the latest fad with Terminator-like focus for the two biggest subgenres of cheap drive-in programmer to go unwed for too very long. It just happened to be Del Tenney, a moderately successful stage actor who reinvented himself […]

A second review requested by Andrew Johnson, with thanks for contributing twice to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Once upon a time there was a 24-year-old named Steven Spielberg, who wanted to make movies. Not to grow up into one of the most marketable brand-name producers in the history of the medium; not to be personally responsible, along with his friend George, for murdering the concept of […]

You would not, to watch the 1982 thriller First Blood, expect it to birth the franchise it birthed. Though it’s too much of an action movie to qualify in any other genre, it’s a very brainy, sociologically alert action movie, in which the cultural stratification of the Vietnam War years is found to have echoes, and not always ones you’d anticipate, in the dawning years of the 1980s, right about […]

Three films in, I think it’s safe to say that Laika has hit the point where it can do anything it wants. The studio, founded by the CEO of Nike essentially so that his son Travis Knight could finance Coraline for director Henry Selick in 2009, had already proven with its second film, 2012’s ParaNorman, that it had a distinctive personality and aesthetic system that was independent of any one […]

Even by the standards of a movie franchise whose immediate prior entry featured an 80-meter dinosaur spitting beams of nuclear energy at a giant carnivorous rose that was cloned from the dinosaur’s own DNA, the 1991 film Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah is really peculiar. Not, entirely, peculiar and bad. And I do not regard as a problem the single thing most often cited as a damned flaw in writer-director Ohmori […]

I will tell you what I like about Homefront: nothing. I will also, however, tell you what I like about REVIEWING Homefront, which is that the film offers a perfectly gift-wrapped opportunity to offer up thought pieces on the career and star persona of its leading man, Jason Statham. This is not a subject that automatically recommends itself as a rich topic for conversation, given that by no imaginably useful […]

We live in a profoundly weird world right now, with franchises that have never been very good suddenly coming out with a genuinely worthwhile entry attached to a number that you would never, ever have expected to result in anything but the most vacant sort of cash-in: it started in 2011 with Fast Five, continued with Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol a year ago, and if three times is a […]

There is a gentleman named Roger Corman – perhaps you have heard of him? And if not, how is it that you care enough about movies to find yourself reading a film blog? For Roger Corman is one of the essential producers in the annals of American cinema, the very David O. Selznick of the B-movie set. He has been the driving force behind some of the most beloved crappy […]

Jay Marks wanted to see a horror sequel get its due appreciation for its unusual expansion upon the original when he contributed to the Carry On Campaign – and for his pains, he ended up unexpectedly sponsoring the only horror movies I ended up watching on Halloween night! So thanks, Jay. Did I find it in me to give that sequel the props he’d hoped for? Maaaaybe. Considering the low […]

The blog has been on a bit of an ’80s kick lately, and Adam Bertocci did his part to keep things going when he donated to the Carry On Campaign and requested today’s review. Three cheers for the decade of Reagan, leg warmers,and hair metal! Even for a decade in which the high-concept comedy reached its apex, there’s something exceptionally high-concept about Ghostbusters: a horror and science-fiction hybrid whose state-of-the-art […]