There are a few constants in Guillermo del Toro films: beautiful set and costume designs, stunning cinematography and colorful characters. There is no denying that the set and costume design in Crimson Peak is breath-taking but unfortunately those are the high points that come from this film. Good news for those that love a good costume drama, bad…
Good-bad movies are a kind of accidental art form. It’s almost impossible to intentionally create a good-bad film; to really work, it’s got to be the result of bad luck, undeserved ego and a complete lack of ability, usually combined with a low budget and pathetically good…
Eventually, there will come a point when Nicolas Cage will no longer disappoint us. The Oscar-winner, whose previous work includes Adaptation, Leaving Las Vegas and…Con Air, has now seemingly committed himself to starring in some of the most incompetent…
The last eleven years have not been particularly kind to M. Night Shyamalan. Once he was a wunderkind, proclaimed to be the heir to the throne of Spielberg, but then he bought into his own press and turned back to what made him famous, the “twist” ending, and…
When high schooler Charlie (Joséphine Japy) meets charismatic new student Sarah (Lou de Laâge), she’s immediately taken with her worldliness, exuberance and charm. The pair become inseparable, and Charlie’s best friend Victoire (Roxane Duran) is relegated to…
The life of a corporate cubicle drone is hell. In Bloodsucking Bastards, this Hell is a vague and timeless eternal torment, one with magnificent moustaches from the 1970s, adorable 1950s sweater sets with Peter Pan collars, technology from the 1990s, and wood paneling from what surely must be Satan’s own “Bourgeois Banality” line of office décor…
I was a freshman in high school when Saw II hit theaters. Everyone was talking about it, but their focus wasn’t on what I expected. Yes, the blood and gore was a focus, but what really captured the minds of my classmates was the film’s mythology. Jigsaw was a fascinating anti-hero to them, and I was privy to dozens of conversations about the ways in which he involved himself in people’s lives and dispensed what he felt in his mind to be justice. It would ultimately take …
It’s easy to spend a great deal of the running time of Six-Year Plan imagining how fine a horror film its director Santiago Candejas might make before realising that he has. Cannily crafted with minimum resources and maximum effect, this is as attention-grabbing a debut as any filmmaker could hope to make, stunningly singling out its multi-hyphenate helmer—he…
Far be it from me to perpetuate that gloomy trend of click-bait criticism dubiously dubbed the “expert review”, but it’s my combined duty as honest critic and sleep paralysis veteran to let you know that Rodney Ascher’s The Nightmare is a well-mounted load of old bollocks. It ought to be noted that that’s not necessarily analogous to it being a bad film, rather that the questionable content Ascher expertly …
Green Room, written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier, is a revenge thriller set at a rock venue where a hardcore punk band is trapped in a Green Room facing off neo-Nazis after witnessing a murder at the club. With its one-location setting and the constant Nazi threat, Saulnier’s follow-up to Blue Ruin is intense, bloody and also quite dark-humored. It’s a…