reviews

Battle for Terra (review)

17 comments

A beautiful jewel of a planet. Alien invaders swooping down to steal precious resources and wipe out the natives. Oh, but look at that: it’s humans as the bad guys, as the alien invaders…

Obsessed (review)

30 comments

I cannot tell you how ineptly hilarious this ‘thriller’ is, from its weirdly retro vibe — as if the feminism of the 1970s, 80s, 90s and 2000s had not come between manhunting women and the poor saps they prey on — to its outrageous telegraphing of its “big’ finale.

Fighting (review)

2 comments

The first rule of *Fighting* is: You don’t talk about *Fighting.* So please just pretend you can hear me giggling derisively instead.

Earth (review)

5 comments

It’s not that this lovely-to-look-at nature documentary is bad: it’s just that it’s completely redundant as a film. Adapted from the 11-part BBC nature series Planet Earth — which has been available on DVD for eons — it feels as truncated as it is, cut down in an unforgivable fashion from the grand, sweeping story … more…

Crank: High Voltage (review)

10 comments

Take a look back at everything I wrote about the first *Crank,* and how wrong and evil and amoral and filthy and sordid that flick was, and double it. No, quintuple it. Also: quintuple how much I laughed.

American Violet (review)

3 comments

Lest we forget, the slide into a fascism in America didn’t begin with George W. Bush: it was well underway in the 1990s, when our police went paramilitary in the “war on drugs” and new federal incentives for local communities to get drug convictions — however they could — led to a huge increase in … more…

17 Again (review)

3 comments

The best thing that can be said about this gender-swapped trifle of a riff on *Freaky Friday* is that it’s entirely inoffensive…