I am about to make a patently unfair comparison, but the job of the reviewer is to be honest, and this has been my overriding feeling for the past couple of days: there’s ultimately nothing that The Martian does that 1995’s Apollo 13 and 2013’s Gravity didn’t already do. And they both did it better. None of which isn’t to say that The Martian isn’t a perfectly charming, entertaining brainy-adjacent […]

There’s a pronounced difference between the knowledge “I shall be very busy at grad school” and the lived experience of holy shit, I’m busy all the damn time, and I’ll spare you the whole story, but that’s how September managed to be the first month in Antagony & Ecstasy history (I believe) without a movie preview. Let us not permit that to ever happen again, and even though this post […]

The story of Moses and the exodus of the Hebrews from Pharaonic Egypt is, when you get right down to it, one of the key works of literary narrative in the entire history of the world, so there’s no reason a filmmaker shouldn’t poke at it. That’s what shared foundational texts are there for. So if e.g. Ridley Scott wants to make a movie based on Exodus that puts a […]

There was, to begin with, Braveheart. That film’s depiction of violent, manly battles in an undifferentiated Olden Days setting begat Gladiator, and between the two of them, the five Oscars each of them won (overlapping only on Best Picture – they didn’t even win the same Sound award), and the huge amount of money Gladiator made along the way, the pair managed to resurrect the old-fashioned historical action epic for […]

And here we are at the end of a year that began well, middled terrifically, and now… well, it’s the most crowedest time of the year, with films being pitched out in the mad hope that they’ll have awards glory, or make huge sums of cash over the holidays, or both. And as has been the case from just about the beginning, I’ve found very little to look forward to […]

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: Tammy is about being desperate, broke, screwed over by a man, and looking to solve it all by taking to the road with Susan Sarandon as your wingman. Or perhaps it’s about being comically […]

The primary characteristic of Cormac McCarthy’s novels, it has seemed to me, is terseness. His plots and scenes come along bluntly and quickly, like a swift punch to the windpipe, his characters speak barely at all, and frequently only state absolutely essential facts when they do. So why, oh why, is The Counselor, McCarthy’s first original screenplay at the pixieish age of 80, so bogged down with scenes packed with […]

After a year that has been, film for film and month by month, the most tepid in my living memory, we’re finally hitting the good stuff: not that I am typically fond of the sort of movies that tend to get released in Oscar season, because it is a matter of record that the stuff I just love and the stuff that AMPAS just loves are not, for the most […]

For the first beat of his first theatrical feature, Tony Scott made no little choices. When the little brother of Blade Runner and Alien mastermind Ridley Scott made the leap from television commercials to cinema with 1983’s The Hunger, he opened that film with one of the most in-your-face gestures of uncut style to be found anywhere in English-language cinema in the 1980s. As the sounds of bleak Goth rock […]

Every Sunday 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: I like to try to be more imaginative than to great a new remake by reviewing the original in this series, but the arrival of the 2012 edition of Total Recall reminded me that […]

Prometheus is a film abnormally resistant to definitive statements, and movie reviewing is a form that lives and breathes definitive statements, and this brings us to a pretty pass. I will, anyway, begin with what might well be the only absolute judgment on the film that I’m willing to pass, and it is this: the last 25 minutes of the movie, perhaps just the last 20, are an unmitigated car-wreck […]

Longtime readers know that I am far more concerned than anyone should be with typography and punctuation in movie titles, and will thus not be surprised that I’m obsessed with whether or not there’s supposed to be a colon in the title of the 1997 feature Alien Resurrection – the credit block on the poster tells me no, but convention tells me yes – and we can agree, I suppose, […]