When Stanley Kubrick died on 7 March, 1999, it was some twelve years since the release of his last film, Full Metal Jacket; but all was not lost. He’d been working for some time on a new movie, and just days before his passing, he had screened a cut of it to some executives and the lead actors. “The final cut!” assured Warner Bros. to all of us nervous cinephiles […]

Days of Thunder shouldn’t be as good as it is, I want to say; but that would imply that it is good, and I’m not entirely sure if that’s the case. It oughtn’t be good, at least. Not with that script. And yet it’s so much better than the combined quality of its elements that I simply don’t know what to do with it. Whatever else is the case, we […]

There’s no doubt that Stoker goes for it, for every given value of “it” you can come up with. And this is absolutely the saving grace of a movie that is all over the place, totally unconcerned with whether it’s making good or bad decisions, and generally flaunting its own grotesqueness in a way that works only because that grotesqueness is so freely presented, with good energy and high spirits. […]

What a fast February that was. Here we are, with pre-summer blockbuster season just about to kick off, and I feel like I’ve still got a pile *this high* of new releases I missed. But anyway, yes: March, the new home of popcorn season movies that couldn’t be fit into summer like decent people do. I always harbor this little hope that it will go back to the way things […]

Let’s get the housekeeping out of the way: my prediction record was 16/24 (I am taking full credit for the Best Sound Editing tie – easily the biggest surprise and delight of the evening – because who the hell predicts ties?), which is not a number I feel terribly good or bad about (it’s my best record in three years, but at least one shy of a truly decent performance). […]

Ordinarily, one tries to beat the Oscar nominations when one is putting together one’s own, “Oh, I’m so much cleverer than the Academy” list of personal nominees, but they happened early this year, and I wasn’t nearly ready yet. Add in my rather shockingly bad time management skills all of a sudden, and we get to the back half of January before I get the darn thing up. But I […]

On Thursday, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announces it nominees for the best achievements in the 2012 film year, and for the first time in an age, it’s genuinely unclear what they’re going to pick in many of the categories. Which makes the guessing game part of the season more fun than usual. For the record: last year I went a reasonable but not legendary 83/118 overall, […]

There is a very real possibility that out of the several thousand movies I’ve watched in my life, most of them in the twelve years since I was a wee film school freshman, Baz Luhrmann’s candy-colored, hyperactive post-modern musical Moulin Rouge! has had more of an impact on me than anything else. Partially this is because it came out at the exact perfect time for a movie to make that […]

The Paperboy is now the third film of Lee Daniels’s career that can be readily described as “bugfuck insane”; and it is the third film of his career that has, apparently, turned out exactly the way he wanted it to – and if something as balls-out batshit as this movie represents an artistic compromise, than I don’t even know what to do with myself. It’s also, maybe, his best, although […]

Let us first deal with a misconception: there are nipples on the batsuit in Batman Forever, though this innovation is frequently held to have started with Batman & Robin, two years later. My suspicion is that this has happened because, and there’s not really a delicate way of putting this, Batman & Robin is “gayer”. Both films were directed by Joel Schumacher, an out gay man, and both run headlong […]

Year in and year out, one of the subjects that always comes up during awards season is category fraud – those times when an actor is placed in a supporting category despite being a lead, to increase their chances of winning or (much more rarely), when an actor is put in the lead category despite having a supporting role, for reasons that have never made much sense (it certainly doesn’t […]

In my head, people regard me as a bitter contrarian who can’t like the things that everybody else does; maybe this is not so, but every time I spit out a disgusted 5/10 for the like of The Descendants or Young Adult (both of which, incidentally, I truly did expect to like), I can’t help but feel like I’m being mean just for the sake of it. Which makes this […]