Category: 1 Star
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Damien Chazelle’s Babylon is not very loving, as love letters go
Like most filmmakers and movie buffs, Babylon director Damien Chazelle would appear to have mixed feelings about Hollywood.
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The long-forgotten comic book villain Black Adam makes for a quickly-forgotten movie
Jaume Collet-Serra’s dreadful Black Adam is damning evidence that Hollywood has forgotten why kids like superheroes in the first place.
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Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore torches the legacy of Harry Potter
I worked at Warner Bros. throughout the original run of Harry Potter movies. In case that sounds exciting, I assure you it wasn’t; it was an extremely minor role in a vast corporation, that involved selling t-shirts, iPhone cases, and battery-powered toy wands online. But it was very easy for us all — a bunch […]
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Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone is bad and bonkers, but never boring
Lamont Johnson’s Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone is definitely a bad movie, but also definitely not a boring movie. Possessed of a slightly bonkers energy, the plot races from one crazy incident to the next. I’m not sure if today’s action movies have this many — or this varied — set pieces: a wild […]
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Kids gone wild in Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers
Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers was hotly buzzed about on release, but eventually settled down to a 63 on Metacritic and 3-stars-out-of-five on Letterboxd. Both of which aren’t great, but a lot higher than my personal estimation. This would be certainly not the first time my personal reaction to a movie has been against the consensus, […]
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Battle Beyond the Stars is Star Wars gone wrong
Battle Beyond the Stars is the rare bad movie worth experiencing. How can you not be at least a little curious about a Roger Corman-produced Star Wars pastiche, starring John-Boy from The Waltons, Hannibal from The A-Team, and The Man From U.N.C.L.E., with a screenplay by John Sayles and special effects by James Cameron? Like […]
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The dreadful Jack the Giant Slayer is soullessly engineered escapism
Director Bryan Singer‘s Jack the Giant Slayer is almost unbearably dreadful. It continues a recent trend in the fantasy genre: fairy tails used as raw material for soullessly engineered all-ages escapism. See also: Snow White and The Huntsman and Tim Burton’s appalling Alice in Wonderland. It’s hard to understand how Singer could demonstrate the ability […]
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Every line must rhyme in Les Misérables
Les Misérables left me coldNothing shown and everything told All that hollering and shriekingLeaves my head aching Every line must rhymeAcross its excessive running time No subtlety of emotionThe screen filled with commotion Eddie Redmayne sings a song atop a pile of doorsMy god what a bore Hugh Jackman sheathes his clawsTo grimace and overemote […]
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People Are Vectors: George A. Romero’s The Crazies
George A. Romero practically invented the lucrative zombie subgenre with Night of the Living Dead in 1968, simultaneously trapping himself within it for most of his subsequent career. Romero’s zombies served him well enough for six films and counting, at least two of which transcended the genre and are still discussed in serious terms. His […]
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Rewind & Reboot: X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Much of what’s wrong with X-Men Origins: Wolverine can be traced right back to its confused conception, indeed beginning with its clumsy title. The ungainly prefix is clumsily bolted on solely for it to alphabetize adjacent to the three previous X-Men films on Walmart shelves, iTunes, Pay-Per-View, and torrent trackers. The two halves split by […]