It’s no revelation that some old timey songs can have a sinister subtext. One of my many issues with Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling, a predictable and ultimately pedestrian mystery, is ...
https://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2022/10/26/best-thing-youll-see-all-week-gods-country/
Director Jaume Collet-Serra gave the original Orphan the Hitchcockian touches it needed to be more than just a throwaway evil kid movie. And it had a great cast. Peter Sarsgaard and Vera Farmiga ...
https://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2022/08/20/orphan-first-kill-if-you-thoughts-hobbits-were-awkward/
Hmm, something called Interceptor on Netflix. Here we go again, another half-assed action movie for their roster. I’m sure I’ll have completely forgotten about by the time it’s over, if not...
https://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2022/06/04/the-best-bad-movie-youll-see-all-week-interceptor/
The wrong way to watch Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of the 1946 novel Nightmare Alley is by reading the book first. Because then you’ll be one of those tedious “the book was better…!�...
When David Cronenberg adapted James Ballard’s car crash fetish novel, Crash, he made a movie about a bunch of weirdos I couldn’t possibly understand. Mainly because they seemed like nonsense ...
https://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2021/11/01/the-best-fast-and-furious-youll-see-all-week-titane/
I’ve spent decades denigrating the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre as artless trash. I’m not sure when I first saw it. Probably in college, sometime around 1990. That was also the las...
We can’t be letting city-slicker criminals murder kids out in the woods. It’s just not right. Fortunately, there are salt-of-the-earth outdoorsman types doing their part, some of whom are...
https://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2021/05/25/worst-thing-youll-see-all-week-those-who-wish-me-dead/
I don’t mean to belittle dumb movies. Some of my favorite movies are dumb. But Godzilla vs. Kong is steeped in a special kind of concentrated studio inanity. It stinks of dumb. It is th...
Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A haunted older cop on the verge of retirement teams up with a hot-tempered young detective to hunt down a creepy celebrity playing a serial killer who lik...
https://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2021/01/31/worst-thing-youll-see-all-week-the-little-things/
The premise of Emerald Fennell’s #MeToo era power fantasy is that all men are rapers. Hardly a provocative statement these days, and certainly one women have earned the right to indulge. Bu...
I’m Your Woman and Shadow in the Cloud are both fantastic genre movies, but they’re also special for how they’re uniquely about a woman’s perspective on the frustrating limitations of a m...
Did no one explain to Christopher Nolan that the premise for Tenet is absurd? I don’t mean that as a criticism. I’m just being descriptive. Plenty of solid sci-fi works from an absurd p...
https://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2020/12/17/the-most-palindrome-thing-youll-see-all-week-tenet/
I have a soft spot for fat Russell Crowe. The younger slimmer Russell Crowe was a total badass, but now that he’s older, bigger, and more sedate, he’s sporting an avuncular gruffness. Ins...
https://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2020/10/20/worst-thing-youll-see-during-trumps-term-unhinged/
Greyhound, a Tom Hanks movie about an ill-fated destroyer captain trying to protect merchant ships from German U-boats in World War II, isn’t terrible because it’s historically loose and absu...
https://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2020/07/10/worst-thing-youll-see-all-week-greyhound/
You’d think Jon Stewart would know better. But then you watch Irresistible and you realize he doesn’t. As a director and writer, Stewart seems sadly out of his depth in this facile misgui...
https://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2020/06/27/worst-thing-youll-see-all-election-year-irresistible/
There’s a point in these movies, usually fairly early, when the protagonist should really just call the police. You know the movies I’m talking about. The ones where a bad decision leads ...
My concern about any follow-up to Turbo Killer, Seth Ickerman’s music video for Carpenter Brut’s song Turbo Killer, is that it will include people talking. At which point, it might collapse...
Look, I’m not necessarily recommending that you watch The Happening again. I wouldn’t do that to you. But I am saying the basic story, which I’ve always thought was intriguing, is especiall...
You don’t see enough Greek choruses anymore. At some point during the last few millennia, the Greek chorus fell out of favor. So one of the first delights in Blow the Man Down is realizing ...
https://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2020/03/24/best-thing-youll-see-all-week-blow-the-man-down/
Warning: if you haven’t seen Color Out of Space, this review is basically one big spoiler. Colour Out of Space is an odd fit among H.P. Lovecraft’s works. It’s about ordinary people — f...
There were at least three major animated versions of Christmas Carol made during the sixties and seventies, from the Mister Magoo adaptation to the half-hour production that won an Emmy for anima...
In the mid-1990s, Sir Patrick Stewart (taking a break from his Captain Picard duties on film) embarked on a successful run on Broadway performing a one-man stage version of “A Christmas Carol�...
https://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2019/12/23/christmas-carol-movies-stave-vi-a-christmas-carol-1999/
By the fall of 1984, the CBS television network’s golden years were starting to fade. Norman Lear was out, and Falcon Crest, Knot’s Landing, Airwolf and Dukes of Hazzard were in. Oscar-winn...
https://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2019/12/21/christmas-carol-movies-stave-v-a-christmas-carol-1984/
There are two ways to look at Scrooge, the 1970 Christmas Carol adaptation that recast the Dickens classic as a musical. One view is to wonder why in the world this classic story needs choreogr...
https://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2019/12/20/christmas-carol-movies-stave-iv-scrooge-1970/
Charles Dickens is something of a national treasure in the UK, an artist with words whose prose manages who manages the neat trick of being respected academically while remaining popular with the...
My own natural inclination in film appreciation is an almost knee-jerk mistrust of mainstream Hollywood. I associate the movie business – particularly when the studio system reigned supreme –...
https://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2019/12/16/christmas-carol-movies-stave-ii-a-christmas/
If “A Christmas Carol” movies have become part of a worldwide seasonal ritual these days, the first “talkie” version of the Dickens book is an inauspicious beginning. Watching it today, i...
https://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2019/12/14/christmas-carol-movies-stave-i-scrooge-1935/
It’s nice to see there are still angles to explore in the “rogue AI” genre. As well as the “people in a bunker” genre. I Am Mother straddles both by suggesting a maternal robot — that...
https://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2019/06/16/best-thing-youll-see-all-week-i-am-mother/
Brightburn isn’t Brightburn enough. Early on, it suggests some truly freaky angles to the familiar Superman story. We all know the Superman story. An alien child comes to Earth, is adopted ...
https://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2019/05/26/worst-thing-youll-see-all-week-brightburn/
The Perfection is a duet played out in the twisting relationship between two women, intersecting and overlapping in ways that make no sense. Until the script provides that key piece of informat...
https://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2019/05/25/not-the-worst-thing-youll-see-all-week-the-perfection/
You know the scene when a movie reveals the obsessed detective’s yarn wall? He’s put up clippings of all the serial killer’s murders and drawn circles on maps and then poked thumbtacks in...
https://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2019/05/01/worst-thing-youll-see-all-week-i-trapped-the-devil/
Thelma would have you think it’s about a young woman breaking free of her restrictive religious upbringing. It would have you think it’s a coming of age story about empowerment and independ...
https://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2019/04/25/the-best-thing-tom-chick-saw-all-2018-thelma/
The Head Hunter is pretty modest. But within the confines of what it’s trying to do, it’s entirely competent and even a bit haunting. It’s certainly better than director Jordan Downey’s T...
Sure, we went nuts over Conan: The Barbarian, but it got less cool once all the dumbass jocks discovered Schwarzenegger action movies and lumped Conan in with that stuff. The Terminator didn’...
Craig Zahler has no one to blame but himself for what will probably be a career of making movies that aren’t as good as Bone Tomahawk. He got off to a solid start with a formulaic, uneven, an...
Movies are uniquely suited to building worlds by letting you listen and watch. Traditional exposition is a crutch. Wasted time that could be spent showing me something, letting me catch somethi...
https://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2019/03/14/best-thing-youll-see-all-week-prospect/
Although the 1977 horror movie The Car belongs in the killer car genre, the template was Jaws. Move Amity from a coastal town into the desert. Change the shark to a demonic driverless car. Othe...
Judy Greer’s initial appeal was her girl-next-door beauty, straight out of Central Casting into the fantasy waitress role in Adaptation. But as she’s segued from girl-next-door to soccer-mom-...
If you come to this movie expecting something from the director of Blue Ruin and Green Room, and from the writer of I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore, you will be bitterly disappointed...
https://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2018/09/28/most-awkward-thing-youll-see-all-week-hold-the-dark/
Baoz Yakin’s last movie, Max, was about Kate Mara saving a disabled dog. When the name of the movie is also the name of the dog, you know what you’re getting. Fun for the whole family, assumi...
https://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2018/09/05/best-thing-youll-see-all-week-boarding-school/
Extinction starts out as an alien invasion movie. As one of the invadees, Michael Pena plays a family everyman. It’s nice to see him as something other than a Hispanic sidekick, comic relief, o...
https://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2018/07/28/worst-thing-youll-stream-all-week-extinction/
If a movie can’t be good, at least it should be pretty. And if it can’t be pretty, at least it should be memorably gaudy. That’s where Terminal lives. This trite flash of neon noir plays li...
https://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2018/07/25/best-bad-thing-youll-see-all-week-terminal/
I wear glasses. I would not survive in the wild. I would be one of the last to see a predator coming. My weak eyes would be culled from the genetic pool. Humanity would be stronger for it. But th...
https://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2018/06/20/best-thing-youll-see-all-week-the-rider/
Whenever a teacher is giving a lecture in a movie, you can bet the subject of the lecture is relevant to the movie. No writer or director worth his salt is going to have someone droning on in fro...
https://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2018/06/08/best-thing-youll-see-since-poltergeist-hereditary/