I have mentioned, once or twice in the past, my theory that superhero franchises are uniquely likely to produce sequels that improve upon their predecessor. And I’ll stick by it, while noting with some annoyance that the 2010s most visible superhero franchise, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, seems largely resistant to this trend. For here we are with Deadpool 2, an improvement on 2016’s Deadpool in pretty much 100% of the […]
So, what do you think used to be the most boring comic book movie ever made? Superman Returns? Iron Man 2? Green Lantern? The Amazing Spider-Man? X-Men: Apocalypse? Anyway, it doesn’t actually matter, because now we have Justice League, and that settles it. For right now (and I’m not optimistic enough to suppose it will stay this way for more than a couple of years), this is it: the most impressively, […]
After three exemplary art house character studies (Reprise, Oslo, August 31, Louder Than Bombs), it’s fair that director Joachim Trier would finally put a foot wrong. And even there, I’m overstating things: if every time a filmmaker messed up, the results were still as amazing as Thelma (for that is the name of Trier’s fourth feature), cinema would be a great deal better than it is. This is my favorite kind of […]
The 2010s have produced only a scant number of horror movies more top-to-bottom objectionable than 2014’s Annabelle, the flagrantly unnecessary prequel about an absurdly overdesigned haunted doll first seen in 2013’s The Conjuring. And given the repeated threats in the last couple of years that production companies Atomic Monster and New Line Cinema want to spin-off goddamn near every last paranormal entity we’ve seen in this series into its own […]
It is a little tempting to overvalue Logan for its novelty. And I do use “novelty” advisedly – it’s no less than the tenth movie in the broadly-construed X-Men movie franchise to come out in the last 17 years, and one of God knows how many superhero comic book adaptations during the same period. But that’s exactly what makes it stand out: not one of its predecessors has felt so […]
There have already been two films released in the U.S. in 2017 that I’d suggest are dead certainties for my Top 20 of the year – Starless Dreams and John Wick: Chapter 2 – but let us anyway concede the idea that, in the current state of the film marketplace, the last two months have really just been about taking a deep breath before the year properly starts. (Speaking about […]
And here we are! The first Best of the Year post in my tenure as critic-in-residence at Alternate Ending, wrapping up the last year of Antagony & Ecstasy’s long and happy life. Good, not great. That’s how I’d sum up the movies of 2016 (as opposed to 2016 itself, for which the phrase “not great” would be kind of hilariously understated). I saw an almost uncountable number of very good […]
It’s not very hard to imagine a different version of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children – only a slightly different version, even – that’s a wonderfully imaginative and full of no end of cinematic marvels. For a film that could be described, in fact very nearly demands to be described as “Harry Potter meets the X-Men”, it doesn’t really rest on the laurels of copying those inspirations, but tries […]
First, the mea culpa: I’m as aware as anybody as to how many films behind I am from the summer-that-has-ended, and I am very eager to get to them as soon as possible. But “as soon as possible” isn’t that soon, because it turns out that one of the perks of being a graduate student at UW-Madison is that sometimes they select you to go on a trip to the […]
Summer movie season is upon us! And a summer movie that has all the appearance of peaking real damn early, though compared to 2015, I find it much easier to be excited about several of the tentpoles. There is, of course, no Mad Max: Fury Road in the wings, and the first blockbuster movie season in the wake of Fury Road was always going to seem a bit empty. 6.5.2016 […]
Many years from now, when they are making the list of the great War on Terror thrillers, they will of course start with Zero Dark Thirty, and until recently, that’s where they could have ended, too. Now we have a second, sneaking into the world with virtually no fanfare other than a 2015 Toronto International Film Festival debut that nobody talked about since it wasn’t getting an Oscar-qualifying run: Eye […]
The gap between what a film wants to be and what a film is doesn’t get much finer than it does with Deadpool, which I suppose makes it a success? It’s hard to imagine a film less prone to leaving audiences disappointed: the thing you walk into it expecting it to be is completely and in all ways the thing that it is. This can be taken as both a […]
