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: Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation continues the unexpected late flowering of a TV-derived spy franchise into its best self. And now, may I present its worst self. There’s nothing new in the observation that […]

About the project BEYOND RANGOON (John Boorman, UK/USA) Screened in the main competition Hypnotically clumsy editing and a lead performance that finds Patricia Arquette looking as glazed as a porcelain cat are the most overt problems with this message movie about the 1988 democratic uprisings in Burma. Its particularly galling embrace of the “this story about third-world suffering matters because it affected a white American” trope is another. The most […]

My prediction record: 20/24 – a very pleasing number for a very hard year. The Oscars are here! I’ll be updating this post throughout the ceremony with the winners and my brief thoughts as they come along. Is it really already that time of year? Golly Moses. Well then, let’s dive into the fray and make some predictions for what’s going to walk away with shiny statues at the show […]

Most years, this is the part where I grouse a little bit about how, to quote one of the year’s best performances, I just thought there’d be more. That the movies would be a bit more inspiring, more fun, more challenging. But I will not be doing that here. The films released in the United States in 2014 made it, as a body, one of the strongest years of film […]

To begin with, let’s not even talk about my predictions, and I apologise deeply if you were using me for the office pool. Second, a very surprising morning, and not always for the best (Selma is the obvious talking point of the morning, and I have some scattered thoughts about that throughout). But if we don’t worry about having the Oscars matter – it’s hard to say that, collectively, the […]

There are two ways to primarily think about Erin Brockovich, I believe: one is that it is among the most conventional films in the career of director Steven Soderbergh, which isn’t to say that it’s really so conventional as all that, but coming sandwiched in his career smack-dab in between The Limey and Traffic, it feels distinctly low in its ambitions, if not its execution. The other way is that […]

By the end of the first weekend in June, it felt like we’d stumbled, quite by accident, onto one of the strongest summer movie seasons in years. Everyone’s report card will be different, of course, but from where I’m standing, Edge of Tomorrow, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Maleficent, and Neighbors were all considerably better than I’d expected them to be going in (though they are not, of course, all […]

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: seven films into a 14-year-old franchise, X-Men: Days of Future Past trots out everybody’s favorite hackneyed genre trick, time travel, to add some spice and get the widest possible array of desirable actors assembled […]

It seems disingenuous to talk about the start of traditional blockbuster season when what’s likely to end up the year’s biggest superhero movie is already going strong, but that’s the giddy world we live in today. So anyway, here’s the kick-off to one of the more peculiarly quiet-looking summers we’ve had in a long while. 2.5.2014 Having already showed up in most of the world, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 hits […]

It’s nothing less than shocking that Ender’s Game any is good at all. Stuck in development hell for something like three generations of fans of the Orson Scott Card novel from 1985 to grow out of its target audience, and finally given the breath of life by a writer-director as dubious as Gavin Hood (of the admirable and sluggish Tsotsi, and the outright foul X-Men Origins: Wolverine), the film comes […]

The Wolverine is the best X-Men movie since X2, a long decade ago; but what the hell kind of bar is that to clear? It’s one of the most successful and aesthetically coherent tentpole movies of summer, 2013, but that’s a lower bar, if anything. It’s a solid movie, that is to say, one that’s perfectly entertaining and diverting for as long as it goes, but I can’t help like […]

Louis Feuillade’s Fantômas quintet of 1913-’14 predicted many of the aspects of future escapist entertainment, but I’m afraid that the last thing it managed to establish is one that we’d have all hoped would have been avoided. The False Magistrate, premiering 364 days after Fantômas – In the Shadow of the Guillotine (that is to say, on the same weekend, one year later), represents perhaps the first time in cinema […]