The Goods: Film Reviews
If teen love triangles, bland protagonists, and half-assed Italian travelogue footage sound like a good time to you, then you probably still won’t like Love & Gelato, because it is not a good movie.
Into the Spider-Verse is the best-animated CGI movie ever made as of mid-2022, which is not the same thing as the best CGI-animated movie ever made.
A skilled but unlucky detective, Hae-joon (Park Hae-il), becomes obsessed with the case of man who fell to his death.
I can’t help but feel They Live, while solid and intermittently great, is a bit overrated thanks to the blunt effectiveness of its aggressive political satire.
In the late ‘70s, Isao Takahata was tapped to lead the TV adaptation of the 1908 Canadian novel Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery.
When I started watching Marmaduke, I thought it was one of those Ratatoing-type cheap knockoffs.
Minions 2, officially Minions: The Rise of Gru, is not truly a Minions movie the way the 2015 original was.
Most large publications have avoided reviewing What is a Woman?, and with good reason: It is very clearly a piece of hate-fomenting and fearmongering propaganda against transgender people.
I’m not sure why I watched it (rest assured I found a way to view it without putting a penny in its creators’ pockets), but since I did, I have the choice between ignoring it or condemning it. I’m not going to write a full review of it or put it on the site’s front page, but I do want to notate that it is the worst and most angering film I’ve seen all year. It fails to achieve any rhetorical goals. It is not intellectually curious. It does not raise thought-provoking points. It simply rehashes hate speech and misinformation we’ve seen a million times. This is no Riefenstahl situation where there’s cinematic genius leveraged by a hateful political mission. It’s just a bad film, a nutjob’s YouTube video essay with a budget. No more sophisticated than that.
There are challenging, complicated questions to answer in a world where definitions and perceptions of gender are rapidly changing. And there are affirming ways to ask and answer these questions without dehumanizing trans and nonbinary people. This so-called documentary is not interested in doing so. It just provides an echo-chamber to make it easier for bigots to stay bigoted. And, worse, it might discourage people who might genuinely want to understand these concepts better from confronting their own biases and preconceptions.
Don’t make the mistake I did and give it any of your spare time or brainwaves.
Maybe I’m too streaming TV-brained, but something about Metal Lords’ structure just feels wrong.
X feels like a reaction to the horror movie trend of having the spooky stuff be an artful metaphor for Serious Issues