#film criticism

#film criticism

Tom Mauser, whose son Daniel was among 13 students killed at the Columbine shooting, feels that leveraging such subject matter for a romantic comedy is awful.

War of the Worlds won five Razzies in total: worst remake, worst actor, worst screenplay, worst director, and worst picture. Critics panned the movie; it scored abysmally low ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. Members of the Golden Raspberry Foundation described the direct-to-video War of Worlds remake as a 'cult hate-watch classic' and 'a near sweeper of our $4.97 trophy.'

From its opening scene-a shakedown of Armando Solimões (Wagner Moura) by local authorities at a rural gas station-Kleber Mendonça Filho immerses viewers in a world of casual corruption and clandestine violence endemic to authoritarian rule.

James Lorimer, writing in the North British Review, promised that the novel would 'never be generally read.' Nearly two centuries later, it's regarded as one of the great works of English literature.

In the Netflix series, three longtime Belfast friends must revisit their childhood trauma to unravel the mystery of a fourth friend's disappearance- raucous Northern Irish hijinks ensue.

When a woman directs boldly, it's trashy. When a man does, it's visionary

Remember when "Wuthering Heights" first screened and all those glowing early reactions flooded social media-with even one "critic" calling it a "God-tier classic"? It turns out that was a carefully calibrated mirage concocted by Warner Bros. A report claims that "Wuthering Heights" had "one of the biggest global marketing juggernauts the world has ever seen." Hyperbole? Maybe. But what do you make of the claim that "almost 2,000 social media influencers were paid by Warners to post nice things about the film"?

Shuffling under the mortal coil this week (aka hosting the Gabfest), it's our OG players Steve, Dana, and Julia. Like a morose Danish prince contemplating a human skull, they gaze upon the Oscar nominated , based on the novel by Maggie O'Farrell inspired by William Shakespeare's life. Directed by Chloé Zhao and starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, Hamnet has brought some critics to tears and left others cold. Our hosts share where they landed.

There's a mildly amusing on-paper joke at the centre of manic art world comedy The Gallerist: what if someone was accidentally impaled on an exhibit but rather than report it, the corpse became part of the artwork? Sure, poking fun at the absurdity of modern art might seem a little dated and definitely a little too easy but maybe with a packed cast including Oscar winners Natalie Portman, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Da'Vine Joy Randolph, there could be a fun, fast-paced caper here?

Grief-porn, in relation to cinema, would suggest that the film in question is emotionally manipulative, formulaic; grief-art would suggest the film unleashes feelings both universal and true. It's curiously circular. In a film about grief, the valorised quality is depth of feeling; it stands or falls by how profoundly the hero(ine) experiences emotion, and the audience proves its acuity, buys itself into the imaginative contract, by its ability to mirror that profundity.

Fraser plays Phillip, a hapless unemployed actor from the US who a few years previously came to Tokyo to do a goofy TV ad for toothpaste and, having no friends or family back home, simply stayed on. He lucks into a weird new source of income: working for a rental family, based on firms in Japan which really do offer bespoke therapeutic role-play services, such as errant spouses, deceased

Something has happened to Netflix's Christmas movies this year. Historically, they've unfolded like lucid dreams one might have when waking up from general anesthesia in an Arizona strip mall. They're like Twin Peaks for people who have been locked out of their Facebook for too many incorrect password attempts. Their plots make little to no sense, they're lit like a Soviet prison, their characters speak to one another like they've been bonked on the head by falling pianos.

Five Nights at Freddy's 2 is the follow-up to 2023's Five Nights at Freddy's and, like that movie, is a live-action adaptation of the popular horror game franchise that features a lot of evil animatronic figures and tons of confusing and bizarre lore. The original film was a big hit at the box office, but took a beating from critics and ended up with an abysmal 33% on Rotten Tomatoes. I bet Blumhouse and Universal would love for the newly released sequel to have that score. Instead, critics seem to hate this new entry even more, with Freddy's 2 sitting at a truly awful 12% on the review aggregate site. Ouch.

Eternity doesn't rank among them, though director David Freyne and his co-writer Pat Cunnane deserve some credit for setting their sights so high. They have built an entire vision of the afterlife to serve as the setting for their otherwise modest romantic comedy. Okay, some credit ... and maybe also some blame. The beyond that they've conjured up is so ridiculously specific that we can't help but start poking holes in it.

Oliver Laxe leads his audience into a wilderness of non-meaning in this strange and unrewardingly oppressive film that was the joint jury prize winner at Cannes this year and the recipient of all sorts of critical superlatives. For me, Sirat is the most overpraised movie of the year exasperating and bizarre in ways that become less and less interesting and more and more ridiculous as the film wears on.