Saying that If I Stay, adapted from Gayle Forman’s blockbuster young adult novel, is bad because it’s overwrought and pretentious is to dismiss a crucial stage of growing up when you yourself are overwrought and pretentious by no real fault of your own. The entire young adult experience is completely unfair. You’re long on feelings […]
Get On Up is the best possible film of an inherently mediocre genre: the biopic. Most biopics render themselves obsolete by failing to admit that when a person is famous, we almost always know the most interesting thing about them because that thing is the reason they’re famous in the first place. Whether the subject […]
It may seem nitpicky in this era of movies about radioactive spider bites and ancient alien stud-gods to take issue with a premise that is basically an excuse for inventive set pieces, but there’s something so incredibly lazy and pointless about the way Luc Besson plays with the old (and false) “Did you know that […]
Anyone who has been to an underground or independent film festival is no doubt familiar with a very specific genre of DIY “woods” movies where dudes with guns creep through a forest, talk an awful lot for people trying to remain undetected, and get into strangely choreographed shoot-outs at odd intervals. These movies are made […]
Confession time: My favorite movie of all time is the original 1968 Planet of the Apes, and it breaks my heart that it doesn’t appear on more Best Of lists. Boasting a script from the eternally relevant Rod Serling, it channels the best aspects of “The Twilight Zone” into a feature-length idea. PotA has it all: […]
A lack of new ideas and a surplus of sincerity are not typically good qualities in a comedy. Just think of how forced and unearned the last 20 minutes of any Happy Madison movie are: “I know I’m a slob who screwed everything up while being distractingly racist and homophobic along the way. But I […]