
6 Underground
It becomes repetitive, nonsensical, and just loud after everyone gets an origin story and we're left with nothing to do but go boom.
It becomes repetitive, nonsensical, and just loud after everyone gets an origin story and we're left with nothing to do but go boom.
Bombshell is both light on its feet and a punch in the gut.
Roger Ebert on James Ivory's "Howards End".
"The Ballad of Narayama" is a Japanese film of great beauty and elegant artifice, telling a story of startling cruelty. What a space it opens…
An article about today's noon premiere of a new movie about architect Benjamin Marshall at the Gene Siskel Film Center.
An article about the screening of Horace Jenkins' "Cane River" on Friday, November 1st, at the Academy Film Archive in Los Angeles.
Scout Tafoya's video essay series about maligned masterpieces celebrates Steven Soderbergh's Solaris.
An article about today's noon premiere of a new movie about architect Benjamin Marshall at the Gene Siskel Film Center.
An FFC on Gavin Hood's Official Secrets.
A celebration of Yasujiro Ozu, as written by a Far Flung Correspondent from Egypt.
An article about the International Beethoven Project's 10th annual Beethoven Birthday Bash, celebrating Beethoven's 249th birthday, which will honor Chaz Ebert with the Spirit Laureate…
The best films of 2019, as chosen by the staff of RogerEbert.com.
Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine, the creator of many video essays about film history and style, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism, and the author of The Wes Anderson Collection. His writing on film and TV has appeared in The New York Times, Salon, New York Press, The Star-Ledger and Dallas Observer. (Banner illustration by Max Dalton)
Bryan Singer, TJ Miller, Kevin Hart, Johnny Depp, Mark Wahlberg, Rob Schneider. What do these problematic famous people have in common? They're all people Olivia Munn has worked with in an effort to have the film career she deserves. Every attempt to forge an interesting path has left her with a trail of bloated corpses in her wake, each belonging to careers Hollywood has refused to fully end despite a history of abusive or vile behavior, while Munn has showed up to work and not really been rewarded for her hard work and for having a functioning conscience. When the controversy behind "The Predator" broke, I felt like someone handed me a pile of bricks and said, "11th floor, elevator's broken." How does she keep getting shortchanged like this? She ought to be Scarlett Johansson (minus the recent cluelessness, obviously—Jesus is everyone trying to get cancelled now? What the hell happened?)
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Anyway, I loved 95% of “The Predator.” I bought tickets to see it. Then I watched a bad camera rip of “The Predator,” and then I bought “The Predator.” I've already covered Shane Black and Fred Dekker's "The Monster Squad" for this column so perhaps it's not news that I loved “The Predator,” but the toxic press did make it seem like a sure thing all of a sudden. And yeah, I see where the studio and reshoots maimed it. I see the strings, the cracks, the flaws, the bad. And you know what? I don't care. This is a Shane Black monster movie and that's the kind of movie I'm going to hold onto forever. His writing, this setting, the cast, and Olivia Munn in the part she was born to play. This essay gets at the issues with “The Predator,” textual and extra-textual, and yes, there's a lot to talk about. Let's dive in.
To watch previous video essays from Scout Tafoya's "Unloved" series, click here
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A review of the newest film by Quentin Tarantino.
The top 50 shows of the 2010s.
This message came to me from a reader named Peter Svensland. He and a fr...
A Far Flung Correspondent weighs in on the MCU controversy.