BEST SHOT: BRIGHT STAR

Sometimes, in choosing candidates for Hit Me with Your Best Shot, Nathaniel decides to just give all of us a present. And so it was this week, with the selection of Jane Campion's 2009 feature Bright Star (her last film, which reminds me that I still need to catch up with Top of the Lake). Do you know what the best shot is in Bright Star? Trick question, it's all of them. This is one of the loveliest movies of the 2000s, the film where we all got...

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THE BLART OF WAR

By no reasonable standard is Paul Blart: Mall Cop a good movie. It is perhaps even a very bad movie, and a largely unamusing comedy. That's even adjusting for the already questionable comic standards of the "fatty fall down" genre, one of the loudest and most obnoxious of all possible subgenres.So it is bizarre to say, and even more bizarre to think, but I am genuinely horrified by the things that Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 does to the original film,...

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MAY 2015 MOVIE PREVIEW

Sumer is icumen in! A summer that is surely going to be a Much Bigger Deal than last year, and probably Not As Good, though the latter point is of course subjective. But seriously, it was terrific few months, and 2015 looks to be... franchisey. Even by normal standards.1.5.2015And what could be more franchisey than a new Marvel film that's pretty much earmarked to sail to some of the biggest box-office numbers ever? Here comes Avengers: Age of Ultron, Film #11 in a franchise also including five short films and three televisions series, and at a...

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INTO THE WOODS, AND OUT OF THE WOODS

A review requested by a contributor who wishes to remain anonymous, with thanks for donating to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.As I write these words in the spring of 2015, the 2012 French animated feature The Day of the Crows has no distribution plans in North America, nor even an announced distributor (and that despite being a Canadian co-production, and based on an award-winning book by Québécois author Jean-François...

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ADALINE'S LAMENT

Adaline Bowman deserves a better movie than The Age of Adaline. And she probably deserves a better actor than Blake Lively, though this is vastly better work than Lively has done anywhere else in her career.Adaline, as we are told by the authoritative, detached narrator (Hugh Ross, who filled the same role, and with much the same tone of educated boredom, in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) was born on 1 January, 1908 in...

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I AM JACK'S MOVIE REVIEW

A review requested by Alex D, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.More than a decade and a half after its underwhelming theatrical performance that sneakily begot one of the most omnipresent movie cults of the early '00s (I was in college in those days; the film was inescapable), I have to admit that I really have no damn clue what to make of Fight Club. It would be an insane thing to deny...

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JUST REMEMBER THE UNCANNY VALLEY

A review requested by Ben Verschoor, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.The 2001 video game adaptation Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is a bad movie. I apologise for the redundancy. But it's not just bad, the way that other entries in its peculiarly benighted subgenre are, like Lara Croft: Tomb Raider or BloodRayne. Or Street Fighter or Wing Commander. Or Super Mario Bros. It is a bad...

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DON'T PLAY WITH YOUR FOOD

A review requested by John Grimes, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.Scout's honor, I'll get to the review part of the review in a minute, but I can't go into without getting something off my chest, which is that Foodfight! is monstrously unattractive. I would swear at The Hague that this is the absolute ugliest bastard of an animated feature that has ever been released by something resembling...

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GREAT WORKS OF CLASSIC SCI-FI

In the very small hours of the morning - so small that I failed to notice it -a new group Top 10 went up at The Film Experience: the eleven-including-a-tie best science-fiction films prior to 1977.As always, lists are a fun and contentious thing to talk about, so head over there and do so. But for the curious, my abnormally on-consensus ballot went like this:1. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) - #1 on the TFE list2. Solaris (1972) - on the TFE list3. The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) - on the TFE list4. Fantastic Planet (1973)5. Metropolis (1927) -...

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BEST SHOT: NINE TO FIVE

Forgive me, dear readers, but I have to make my contribution to this week's edition of Hit Me with Your Best Shot a short one. It's One Of Those Days.Our subject, selected as always by the kind and good Nathaniel R, is the classic anarcho-feminist comedy Nine to Five (or 9 to 5, I'm never clear which is the more "official" title), in which three hard working women played by the once-in-a-lifetime trio of Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, and Dolly Parton...

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BULLY PULPIT

All due respect to the recent spate of high-profile horror movies to be critically fêted on account of being actually good, but one of the things that The Babadook and It Follows have in common is that they're both immensely well-made versions of something that's already been done. Now, quite unexpectedly, we have the opposite, in the form of Unfriended (which premiered under the name Cybernatural, which simply doesn't do for something made later...

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DOWN ONCE MORE TO THE DUNGEON OF MY BLACK DESPAIR

A second review requested by K. Wild, with thanks for contributing twice to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.Like just about anyone born after 1970 who loves musical theater, I had my Phantom of the Opera phase. I'm not sure when or how it ended, exactly, but it was well before December, 2004, when at long last The Phantom of the Opera The Movie bombasted its way into theaters, 18 years after the musical had premiered....

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