“‘Happiest Season’s Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis Bolster Christmas Pap with Queer Identity

Kristen Stewart is gay. Clea Duvall is gay. Mackenzie Davis is, uh, not, but she plays gay well. Christmas is now gay. You are gay. Continue reading →

“In Charlie’s Angels the Cast Is Having More Fun than You Will”

This is a movie, but also the epitome of a blockbusting year spent making overdetermined, obnoxious , totally disingenuous proclamations of feminine heroism. Continue reading →

Review: Love, Antosha, 2019, dir. Garret Price

I’m not the kind of guy who speaks ill of the dead, but that doesn’t mean I’m crazy about films made in their honor, either. Continue reading →

“How ‘Twilight’ Sparked A YA Craze It Then Helped Destroy”

I wonder if I’m being overly critical of Twilight here, suggesting that it’s Twilight‘s fault YA has apparently moved on from genre to more reality-based material; I do very much loathe Twilight, because I love hewing to popular opinion, but at the same time I’m grateful for it as a basis for the careers of Robert Pattinson … Continue reading →

Review: Lizzie, 2018, dir. Craig William Macneill

Nothing clever here: Just a blunt-ass takedown of a really, really bad movie. I’m not sure if Lizzie thinks it’s higher class than it is, or…wait, yes I am. It’s a Lizzie Borden biopic that skimps way the hell out on murder, saving the best known part of the Borden legend until somewhere close to the … Continue reading →

Paste Magazine’s 20 Best Movie Performances of 2017

I’m a Daniel Day-Lewis partisan, I guess, because I can’t accept the idea that any actor in any movie in 2017 performs better than he does in Phantom Thread, but I can’t complain about Saoirse Ronan taking the top spot for her work in Lady Bird.  …oh, right, sorry, forgot to start this off by saying that … Continue reading →

Best of Criterion’s New Releases, June 2016

You can probably guess, based on the header, that Fantastic Planet is my favorite release from The Criterion Collection’s June slate, but it’s so hard to choose: Everything this month is great, though my compadres at Paste Magazine and I were only able to get through four of them. Just four! That’s a fraction of the slate’s … Continue reading →

Review: American Ultra

“Like the protagonist of his film, Nima Nourizadeh’s American Ultra suffers from an identity crisis. The package sounds great on paper: A stoner targeted for elimination by the CIA learns he’s a highly trained government superspy of the Jason Bourne persuasion who gets reactivated in the face of imminent death and becomes a very, very … Continue reading →

Go, See, Talk! Review: Snow White and the Huntsman, 2012, dir. Rupert Sanders

Swords, sorcery, and…Stewart. The idea of making a fairy tale “dark” isn’t so ridiculous in retrospect– the Disney versions of these stories are like toothpaste commercials compared to what the Brothers Grimm jotted down so long ago. But “dark” doesn’t mean “good”, and Snow White and the Huntsman proves that quite ably. Continue reading →

K-Stew, Thor, and the Seven Dwarves: Snow White & the Huntsman Trailer

Well, that changed my mind significantly. My wariness of and distaste toward the upcoming fantasy epic, Snow White and the Huntsman, isn’t exactly a well-kept secret. As with most properties, I’m put off at the idea that something as innocent as a children’s fairy tale needs to be doused in a grim and gritty sheen to … Continue reading →

Review: The Runaways, 2010, dir. Floria Sigismondi

I didn’t know a whole lot about Joan Jett, Cherie Currie, Kim Fowley, or, well, any character involved when going into Floria Sigismondi’s biopic about the 1970s all-girl punk rock band, The Runaways. Unfortunately, I didn’t know much more about them coming out of it, either. Films in general, and biopics and documentaries in particular, … Continue reading →