‘Hateful’ Dead: The Eighth-Best Film By Quentin Tarantino

I’m not a total Tarantino fanboy, because I’m not generally a fan of any filmmaker who keeps making different variations of the same movie. (I have this problem with Wes Anderson, too.) Some people just love a particular filmmaker’s obsessive patterns, and love returning to that same formula again and again. I don’t. After a […]

Pretty As A Picture: ‘Big Eyes’ & ‘Ida’ Provide A Visual Feast

Art is subjective. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. A picture is worth a thousand words. And everybody — I mean everybody — is a critic.

‘Django’ Fuck Yourself: Oscar’s Also-Rans

Well, I finally saw Django Unchained, and where to begin? I avoided it for quite some time because it seemed most everyone had already seen it, and a Tarantino film is not a thing I like to embark on alone. For one, I’d heard about the over-the-top violence, which seemed like a thing best taken […]

Baby Did A Bad, Bad Thing: ‘Poetry’ & ‘Carnage’

Ah, bad kids. Where would the movies be without them? From ghostly dead youngsters in The Ring and The Shining to the bloodthirsty (but still breathing) tykes of The Bad Seed and The Good Son, there’s a long-standing storytelling tradition in Hollywood to use sinister children as the Ultimate Evildoers — the juxtaposition between innocent […]