Bassem Youssef, the focus of Sara Taksler’s Tickling Giants, is an essential figure to know nowadays (talk about taking real artistic risks), and he kind of makes the documentary a must-see…but it would’ve been more compelling with some semblance of objectivity; not a single competing perspective is presented.
The craziest creature design this side of Guillermo del Toro can be found in Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski’s The Void, but it fails to overcome the worst attributes of the horror genre that pervade the rest: on-the-nose dialogue, cardboard-cutout characters, canned overacting, a bafflingly overcomplicated plot that’s incoherently told, beaten-to-death aesthetics, an overwhelming feeling of apathy regarding what’s going to happen and who it’s going to happen to, and heavily-borrowed mythology.
Continue reading “THE VOID (Jeremy Gillespie, Steven Kostanski)”
I’m well-aware that James Foley’s Fifty Shades Darker is objectively terrible, but that still doesn’t diminish the unspeakable joy I derive from sex-filled mainstream releases.
I could write a dissertation on the layered complexity of Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper, one of 2017’s absolute best.
Julia Ducournau’s Raw is a sensationalist and sensational allegory for mankind and womankind’s tenuous relationship with their ever-present animalism.
Ritesh Batra’s The Sense of an Ending adheres to The Lady in the Van’s (2015) artistic model, somewhat for better but mostly for worse.
James Franco rocks one of the all-time worst accents in Werner Herzog’s Queen Of The Desert.
Elisabeth Subrin’s A Woman, a Part is an all-too-rare showcase for Maggie Siff wrapped in all-too-common pedestrian packaging.
Whereas the John Wick franchise stylishly parodies B-movie revenge-thrillers, Walter Hill’s The Assignment IS a B-movie revenge-thriller. Continue reading “THE ASSIGNMENT (Walter Hill)”
Write All Nite 