The story goes that after the success of Death Race 2000, Roger Corman asked Paul Bartel to make another car picture, but this time more ‘real’. Bartel had no interest but he needed the money, hence this rehash that strips out the dystopian setting and vicious satire — as well as the gore and mean spirit — for a lighter action jape across America, loaded with cameos and familiar faces and one especially witty scene (Bartel’s favourite, as it happens) where the director plays a Cole Porter pastiche on the piano while Dick Miller gets the shit kicked out of him. More…
###
Far too much being made here about the whole ‘they never mention climate change lol’ thing, as if no one knows the climate in which movies like this are made. The producers picked their battles and went with the unscrupulous developers angle, which in itself is fairly radical for a summer popcorn flick that’s meant to convince the denizens of flyover country to hand over their dollars. More…
###
A near-perfect blockbuster: high concept, relentless pacing, thrilling effects where the practical stuff grounds the digital in reality, a game cast that really sells the mission, and the kind of orchestral score that makes you wish you had a bucket of popcorn in you lap. Points deducted only for the very dated ’90s radio tuneage. More…
###
Let’s be honest, this one drags a lot when the fire takes hold and it puts much of the drama on pause to document the procedural aspects of fighting such a deadly blaze (and Newman and McQueen roll up their sleeves as the men in charge). That adds a lot of valuable verisimilitude, such that beyond the fashions and decor that are decidedly of the time, this hasn’t dated very much at all. But obviously what’s sacrificed there is spectacle: everything you see on the screen is technically impressive, but not all of it is particularly exciting. They wouldn’t make it like this today, that’s for sure. I’m not certain they’d make it any better, either. More…
###
RoboCop is absolutely a film that’s greater than the sum of its parts. But its parts are pretty great too, and this four-part, five-hour docu does a pretty entertaining job of breaking it all down to discover how the magic was made. It also really benefits from having so many of those involved in the production giving their piece, warts and all. More…
###
Jessica Rothe got in absolutely rock-hard shape for… this? More…
###
Somehow never saw this one back in the day. I would have been just as annoyed then as I am now by the whole thing where Jean-Claude Van Timecop comes back from a timecopping mission clearly agitated by differences between what he left and what he returned to, but there’s no debrief or any inkling that anyone is bothered by it, despite everyone’s job ostensibly being, y’know, timecopping. More…
###
A curiously, distractingly anachronistic paranoia thriller, with a muddied message about mass surveillance, social conditioning via television, simulacra and simulation, etc but one that’s mostly undone by telegraphing its ‘shocking’ twist practically from the get-go. More…
###
Wasn’t feeling this one. Andrew McCarthy centres himself in a conversation about the consequences of the ‘Brat Pack’ label placed on that group of young ’80s Hollywood actors. Not unreasonably, he has his own bitterness and neuroses about the branding, some of which are shared by fellow brats but notably those who didn’t quite parlay their potential and notoriety into a high-profile career. More…
###
Has the distinct air of a short blown up to a feature — but making up for the absence of any additional plot or character development with stylish atmosphere, which only goes so far before it diffuses into nothing. The metaphors and more direct allusions (it’s far more text than subtext) are laid on too thick for my liking. But the overall sentiments are worth exploring. More…
###
Alex Garland trolls us with a deliberate provocation that has nothing new or profound to say, and it’s proud of it. Is ‘war journalists are an odd bunch?’ a fascinating or unique observation? Not on this surface level, which leans into all the ‘adrenaline junkie one minute, dead-eyed and emotionless the next’ clichés. More…
###
I had this occult/nunsploitation/body horror pegged as being wildly unhinged from the way people were talking about it. So imagine my disappointment… Don’t get me wrong, it’s fine for what it is, but if only it had leaned into its pulpier urges. More…
###
It’s only taken, what, 25 years until they started making professionally produced documentaries about the weirdo music I got into at the turn of the century. And honestly the music and aesthetic of The Locust (and this is mostly about The Locust, despite all the other things Justin Pearson has done) is still so impactful to my brain today; so anti-orthodox in terms of conception, and intimidatingly so. Thirty-second songs with herky-jerky rhythms and blast beats and screaming and synths? Still very much my shit. More…
###
Less a documentary than an extended music video, an aesthetic exercise as meditative as Earth’s latter-day music. I’d love to know if it would convert anyone unfamiliar with Dylan Carlson and his musical exploits over the decades, because as much as I enjoyed it (especially when Adrienne Davies carefully considers her approach to drumming), overall it feels like a hibernaculum, opaque and impenetrable — but rewarding if you have managed to crack it open. More…
###
Here’s a strange one, mostly played straight — talking heads, clips from films and interviews, you know the score — but partly staged, like an attempt to underline the kayfabe of the documentary form but done as ham-fistedly as the director’s latter filmography. More…
###
I have a lot of time for Jason Statham, as you’d know if you know me well, but this… I’m not convinced it wasn’t ‘written’ by a large language model. More…
###
Watching this really hammered home for me how much the story of Cork’s Microdisney mirrors that of Brisbane’s Go-Betweens. So of course it turns out they befriended each other in the 1980s London squat scene and remained somewhat close in the decades since. You wouldn’t know any of that from watching this documentary, mind, which feels like a glaring omission of context. But maybe you don’t need all the dots connected to see the picture for what it is. More…
###
Albert Brooks deserves better than this tribute to be sullied by so many unnecessary talking heads, a disconcerting number of whom have been cancelled (or as we used to say, rightfully ostracised for doing really shitty things). More…
###
There’s a brief but stupendous sequence roughly halfway through this where a traditional Argentine dance is intercut with Sho Kosugi bashing henchmen’s faces in. I don’t expect high art from these things but that was remarkable (as is the main villain who looks like if René Aubergonois and Andrew Robinson got merged in a transporter accident) and I was disappointed it never returned to those heights, and indeed reached some dispiriting lows (at one point Sho massacres a bunch of Amazonian tribespeople who don’t appear to be baddies, just people defending their land?). More…
###
After a thrilling start, this one gets really bogged down in all that ‘story’ business when all we’re really here for is to see Sho Kosugi kick some ass. I guess he needs some motivation or whatever for the third-act revenge against the sociopathic mob killer Limehouse, and that’s a grisly, weapon-filled one definitely worth waiting for. Even Sho’s son Kane has a go at being a ninja James Bond with a gadget-rigged bicycle. More…
###
John Cena the Movie Star is pretty decent in small doses. Unfortunately he’s all over this piece of military-industrial complex propaganda in excelsis. Five stars if it were a satire, but I’m pretty sure they mean every bit of it. More…
###
Hard to watch this in November 2023 and not see parallels between its blatant orientalism and the othering that’s driven the Palestinian genocide. Though I admit I smirked at the bit when the evil empire rolls in with super-tanks replete with US Army logo in lowercase, because they’re nice and friendly guys, really, honest, just ignore the communities being crushed under the tank treads and the AI suicide bombers they use a few minutes later, nothing to see here, nosiree. More…
###
Jack Sholder’s follow-up to Freddy’s Revenge is another possession story but one that’s mis-sold as a horror movie when it’s really 90% squib-heavy shoot-’em-up action thriller, with some breathtaking stunt work to boot. Kyle MacLachlan’s also great as the oddball sidekick to Michael Nouri’s gruff detective in an alien-human buddy-cop pairing that beat Alien Nation to cinemas by about a year. More…
###
The second one of these I’ve really enjoyed. See? Horror can be good without being mean-spirited! Mike P Nelson’s two-parter is especially effective, and is probably about as long as it needs to be. More…
###
It’s nice to get a glimpse of the man beyond his most iconic role, of course, but the best part is in the opening minutes where we get to see old photos of a young Robbie Englund hamming it up with his family and in early school theatre larks. Other than that it’s a fairly rote, superficial biography for a talent who really does deserve more. More…
###
SFX guy Stephen Norrington gets in early on the ’90s cyberpunk trend with this dubious, tonally inconsistent mashup of Snow Crash, RoboCop, Aliens and Hardware but perhaps the worst of it is it’s two whole hours long and the thing that everybody’s here to see is in it for, what, five minutes tops? You’ve gotta give the people what they want, man. More…
###
The Final Cut again, this time at home in 4K. I probably should have noticed before now that Leon echoes Roy Batty’s famous “Time to die” line much earlier in the film. Anyway. Still love it. Its ambiguity remains its greatest strength. I’m increasingly convinced Ridley Scott didn’t understand what he was working with. More…
###
I feel this is being mis-sold as a psychological drama as it’s not nearly as harrowing as the phrase implies. Anna Kendrick’s Alice, severely stressed by her manipulative partner, is whisked away to a lakeside house for a friend’s birthday weekend that turns into an intervention of sorts to rescue Alice from her abusive relationship. Theres’s certainly verisimilitude in the choice not to make the bad guy’s behaviour cartoonishly monstrous; he’s the kind of basic controlling arsehole, with that straight-out-of-the-misogynist’s-manual negging shit, that most women lured into such situations would recognise, so I expect that to resonate. But it makes for a film with little in the way of story or drama to sustain feature length. More…
###
Baby Cronenberg’s most derivative flick yet. What if Sundown were crossed with Us, with a twist of A Serbian Film? The answer is this mess, I guess. Meanwhile, Mia Goth is well on the way to overexposure à la Freddy in the ’80s. More…
###
This would be a four-star movie if it had leaned right into the socio-cultural send-ups and dropped the pretensions of verisimilitude. As it is, it doesn’t quite work as either the horror or comedy part of ‘horror comedy’, so we’re left with a drama that’s more along the lines of what the kids today mean by that word. More…
###
Despite what the opening on-screen text might lead you to believe, this is firmly for those who are already boned up on the story of King Crimson, its many faceted iterations and the legend of Robert Fripp. It doesn’t bother to explain such details as why KC transmogrified from flute-laden balladry to muscular hard rock to sinewy new wave to industrial-tinged metal, or extrapolate on the enmity between Fripp and the many, many other musicians who have created and performed with him under the moniker. It doesn’t tell us anything about why Fripp is so important within and without the band: there’s nothing about Bowie, Daryl Hall, Guitar Craft. But in fairness, what (former MTV Alternative Nation host) Toby Amies’ doc is about is in the title, no more and no less. More…
###
This is OK, I guess, but it’s up to Brian Chase of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs to point out that the scene this ostensibly surveys was bigger than The Strokes and included plenty of popular-on-Pitchfork bands like Oneida and even outliers like Sightings and Black Dice, none of whom get a look-in here beyond a name on a flyer. More…
###
Netflix are making quite the name for themselves for big-name, medium-buzz winter holiday comedies that fall completely fucking flat. I have no time for tired social satire and even more so when it’s told with this kind of self-satisfied, forced whimsy. It gets two stars only because it commits to the bit, despite the bit being on the level of an average New Yorker cartoon. No I have not read the novel but I have read DeLillo and anyway the book is nearly 40 years old and when you take it out of that context without any real effort at recontextualisation, then what are we even doing here? More…
###
The self-referential nod-wink side-talk comes off as kind of smug, if I’m honest. Like, we’re nine films deep now and things got sillier than ’70s Bond a long time ago; it’s too late for breaking kayfabe now. Also, Letty shouldn’t have stuck her chopsticks in her ramen like that. Just saying. More…
###
It doesn’t hang around, does it? Nearly every scene has something to make you pop at either its ridiculousness or its astounding creativity. And it ends way harder than expected, to boot. I also note this was Michelle Yeoh’s third film and Cynthia Rothrock’s first yet both look like they’ve been doing it for years. Credit to all involved. More…
###
This film has something interesting to say about society’s obsession with witnessing tragedy, and how we really view mental illness, beyond the platitudes and lip service, which is refreshing considering how the subject is normally treated. It’s also a story that struggles for a sensible ending, and that’s told via by-now well-worn horror mystery tropes, from the inverted aerial shots to the sympathetic cop to the copious jump scares, which I think does it a disservice, even if it evokes an effectively harrowing, skin-crawling mood. More…
###
I appreciate the passion of a project like this, though that same passion is what persuades them to include every talking-head clip and non-sequitur anecdote they could get their hands on. I’m just saying, this could’ve been edited into a less meandering and far more engaging two hours, perhaps. More…
###
It’s this close to saying something about the rot at the heart of the American dream. But it settles for being just a movie about an asshole who only looks sympathetic in light of someone far worse than him. More…
###
Really enjoyed this one. It’s as uneven as any horror anthology but has a sense of fun (rather than revolting mean-spiritedness) that appeals to me. More…
###
What kind of backwoods bullshit is this? Indeed. More…
###
As a contemporary folk horror, it’s more effective than Alex Garland’s facile Men. But it’s still predicated on the notion of the child’s original debt to their parents. That cycle can be broken without the kind of sacrifice this story suggests. More…
###
[chews and spits] “Town’s cursed.” More…
###
It’s got all the issues inherent in trying to ‘elevate’ horror by trying to make it ‘about things’ in the most facile manner possible, but this Hellraiser reboot (and it is a reboot, as it reimagines enough to set it in a separate dimension from the 1987 original) has got another problem that’s more annoying to me. More…
###
A boring parade of nerds, too many of whom say “vinyls” without a hint of irony. More…
###
The prequel I can’t imagine anyone really wanted but is actually worth a gander, as it leans just on the right side of stupid to justify its existence. (Except for that parting shot. You know what I mean.) More…
###
It’s a plastic pastiche of Romancing the Stone, weighed down by its compulsion for ironic detachment. But we knew all that. What I didn’t expect was more than one smug, vaguely mean-spirited linguistic gag, a flourish of self-satisfaction for a film that’s nowhere close to as amusing as it thinks it is. More…
###
The combination of a fairly dull story, a miscast lead/sidekick pairing and that contemporary trend for wildly uncanny previz-dictated action set-pieces means this one washed right over me. More…
###
Fine, but I wish it had been more of a “fucked-up horror picture”. More…
###
Damn this movie, making me pop for the Akira motorbike slide. More…
###
This flick was very obviously assembled in a hurry and on the cheap. More…
###