Category: ⓏⒺⓇⓄ
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It’s easy to pick out the “best” thing in Copycat because it’s almost entirely atrocious. Christopher Young’s highly derivative score is lovely—it’s a mix between John Williams and then Aliens whenever Sigourney Weaver is in thriller danger. Thanks to the score, Copycat makes some interesting swings, like emotive, romantic music during the most inappropriate sequences.…
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It’s so easy to pick on A Fantastic Fear of Everything there’s basically no fun in it. The only thing worse than co-director Crispian Mills’s script is his and Chris Hopewell’s direction. For the first half of the movie, when Simon Pegg’s basically all by himself making a mocking impression of someone with paranoia, the…
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Right up until the end, it seems like Annette will maintain some level of success solely due to the audacity of the project. It’s a musical set in Hollywood, where an edge lord white male comedian (Adam Driver) marries a beloved singer (Marion Cotillard). Only he’s got a shelf life because he’s always trying to…
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I did give Reminiscence a fair shake. I really did. It’s not my fault it opens with an all-CGI “helicopter” shot introducing the setting—a future, flooded Miami—and a terrible voice-over from star Hugh Jackman. It’s writer and director Joy’s fault. And her producers. And whoever thought doing low-to-middling CGI on a fake helicopter shot was…
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I Come in Peace is a Dolph Lundgren versus alien movie. It’s from the period before Lundgren went to acting classes but had gotten rid of his Swedish accent, which ends up working against the picture. The terrible one-liners might have some personality if Lundgren had some accented inflection. Or if he just lost the…
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There’s not much good to say about The Ramen Girl, except the Japanese cast does pretty well. They don’t get actual story arcs, and they’re only around to service the vanity of narcissist protagonist Brittany Murphy. But their acting is good, even though director Ackerman is terrible with their scenes too. Murphy is a trust…
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The first act of Flight to Mars is quirky enough and soapy enough I had hopes for the finish. The film’s about the first crewed expedition to Mars, and I knew it had them landing there and meeting Martians, so I figured there’d be time for more quirkiness and soapiness at the end. It seemed…
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Joe is a story of white male friendship. The Joe in the title is Peter Boyle, a racist working-class Vietnam vet. The film doesn’t open with Boyle though, it begins with Susan Sarandon. She’s a rich girl turned hippie who’s slumming with a drug-dealing boyfriend (Patrick McDermott) in the Village. The “prologue” (for the entirety…
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Wouldn’t it be funny if Bob Odenkirk were an action movie hero? Like a kick-ass one who doesn’t just use machine guns, but also does a lot of hand-to-hand fighting? If you’re unfamiliar with Odenkirk, let’s just say it’s a “cast against type” situation to the extremis. Only it doesn’t matter because action movie special…
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I spent much of Flatliners’s first half trying to figure out if there was anything technically redeeming about Jan de Bont’s photography. While it’s easy to qualify certain failings—with Schumacher’s bad directing, with Eugenio Zanetti’s obnoxiously ostentatious production design, could de Bont actually shoot it well? No, he couldn’t. But it also doesn’t somehow excuse…
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The scary thing about Tango & Cash is its ability to improve. Not sure who wrote or directed the end of the second act, when Kurt Russell gets to act opposite people besides Sylvester Stallone and you remember it’s actually an achievement to make him so unlikable for so long, but it’s a lot better.…
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If you told me Room 237 exists because someone wanted to test out how far the “Fair Use” part of copyright exception went… well, okay, I wouldn’t believe it because obviously there’s the other terrible stuff going on and you’d do it better if you were just trying to bring “Fair Use” to the Supreme…
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Despite not watching the horror franchises of the eighties while growing up in the eighties, I was familiar enough with them to know most franchises—so long as they started with an A list cast—had a generally well-received first installment before going to heck. And I knew The Amityville Horror was an exception; no one thought…
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The Woman Between ought to be the most scandalous, salacious Pre-Code soap possible given the tawdry subject matter—trophy-ish wife Lili Damita (it’s complicated, she’s got her own business and she’s French) cheats on her husband on her latest voyage back from Europe and it turns out she’s shacked up with his son, Lester Vail. Now,…
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Kong vs. Godzilla is a rather bad film. Director Wingard is bad at every single thing the film tasks him with. Kong expert Rebecca Hall and adopted daughter Kaylee Hottle going to the Hollow Earth with pseudo-scientist burn-out Alexander Skarsgård? Terrible. Teens Millie Bobby Brown and Julian Dennison teaming up with kaiju conspiracy podcaster Brian…
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The Sicilian is based on a Mario Puzo novel about a real person and real events. The director’s cut runs about thirty minutes longer than the original theatrical version, which no doubt desperate distributors and financiers took away from director and co-producer Cimino in hopes of recouping some of their cost. Alas, no luck. It…
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Year of the Dragon is going to be so racist it opens with a disclaimer from the distributor, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, basically saying they didn’t realize how racist director Cimino and co-screenwriter Oliver Stone were going to get and they’re sorry. Please enjoy the film. It came out in 1985. Year of the Dragon was too racist…
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The absolute saddest part of Justice League: The Encore Edition is the new stuff’s not bad. It’s not great, but it’s not bad. You almost want to see the movie, which is basically Ben Affleck Batman teaming up the not even A-list for 2021 of DC Comics movies stars and roaming a post-apocalyptic wasteland. But…
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There are a number of scenes in Under the Rainbow you probably wouldn’t have imagined had been put on film. Starting with Billy Barty playing a Nazi spy who accidentally hits Hitler in the balls because he’s a little person. When that scene began, I was thinking about how you don’t see a lot of…
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Life is profoundly cheap in Ewoks: The Battle for Endor. The film’s ostensibly about little human orphan Aubree Miller’s adventure with her Ewok buddy Warwick Davis and the old man (Wilford Brimley) who takes care of them after a group of bad guys appear out of nowhere and destroy the Ewok village and pew pew…
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Most of The Bay is tolerably tedious and mediocre. Levinson’s doing a found footage documentary—he may also provide the voice of filmmaker—about a bunch of sea cockroaches eating its way through a little Maryland town. It plays like a combination low rent Michael Crichton adaptation—the action skips to various government agencies and their internal camera…
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There’s a funny moment in Ladies Should Listen. As in a singular one funny moment. I can’t remember the joke because it wasn’t very good and was too busy being shocked at something vaguely amusing in the film, especially coming from Rafael Corio, who has the distinguished honor of giving the worst performance in a…
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The Lady Refuses gets frustratingly close to making it to the finish. It collapses in its final moments, though it’s barely been keeping it together through the third act, when everything (by everything the main plot and the single directly related subplot) comes together and profoundly fizzles. The only reason it provides any tension at…
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There’s a point where Rami Malek gets exasperated at having to stake out suspected serial killer Jared Leto and it’s the most real moment of The Little Things because it’s been exasperating having to watch Malek stake out suspected serial killer Jared Leto. The scene’s somewhere near the end of the film’s second act but…
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If it weren’t for the “fallen woman” third act, Deluge would probably stay afloat at the end. Instead, it flops out in the really protracted finale, which involves a survivor camp deciding on a credit system in an effort to get capitalism back. It’s a real let down considering the second act is all about…
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“Death to 2020” has twenty credited writers. And its show creators aren’t among them. Twenty writers. It’s seventy minutes and the narration jokes either all flat or so many of them fall flat I can’t remember any not falling flat. Larry Fishburne is the narrator, it’s not his fault, they’re just not good jokes. They…
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When Leon Errol saves lead Jon Hall from drowning, even though they’ve previously established The Invisible Man’s Revenge takes place in England, I was sure they’d teleported to Australia. Errol is very Australian. Openly Australian. He’s also the closest thing to amusing as Revenge gets. Despite being the fourth in the series, starring the same…
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Just about an hour into Invisible Agent, Axis allies Cedric Hardwicke and Peter Lorre have a falling out. See, Lorre’s smart, actually, while Hardwicke’s just devious. The film had been establishing those traits from the first scene—when they try to strong-arm the Invisible Man formula out of Jon Hall—but what I didn’t realize was Lorre…
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It’s entirely possible The Invisible Woman’s concept is a good one—instead of a horror movie, doing a screwball comedy where the female lead is invisible most of the time. Woman is—at best—indifferently acted, poorly directed, atrociously written, without even reasonable special effects. But the idea itself isn’t necessarily bad. The film opens with suffering butler…
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The best thing about The Invisible Man Returns is quite obviously Cecil Kellaway. He’s a Scotland Yard inspector who’s spent the eight years since the last movie preparing for another invisible man attack, making sure the Yard’s ready to go technologically. Worst thing about The Invisible Man Returns? It’s a little long? There’s nothing really…
The Stop Button 