Watchmen is the greatest superhero movie of all time, and when it was released, its director Zack Snyder was poised to follow Christopher Nolan into the first rank of directors working today. But instead, he has directed an ever worsening series of turkeys: Sucker Punch, Man of Steel, Batman v Superman, and now Justice League,... Read More

Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) is commonly found on lists of the world’s greatest movies, and deservedly so. Rashomon features avant-garde narrative techniques (flashbacks, multiple points of view), dynamic black-and-white cinematography by Kazuo Miyagawa, compelling Ravel-like music by Fumio Hayasaka, subtle and intensely dramatic performances, and a complex but tightly edited script, all combined into a... Read More

It is dangerous work, making a sequel to a classic like Blade Runner, Ridley Scott’s 1982 magnum opus. French Canadian director Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 is a very good film, but it inevitably falls short of the original. I first discovered Villeneuve’s work with his 2016 science fiction film Arrival (discussed with John Morgan... Read More

Ridley Scott’s 1982 movie Blade Runner is a science fiction classic and surely the director’s finest work. Blade Runner excels on all levels. It is a highly imaginative vision of the future realized with a stunning visual style. The script is intelligent, even poetic. The cast is uniformly strong, with a number of powerful performances,... Read More

I remember the moment in 1996 when I first heard about David Cronenberg’s Crash on National Public Radio. I exploded in outrage. I thought the story of a group of people who made a sexual fetish of car crashes had to be the stupidest movie concept of all time. Not decadent or perverted, mind you—although... Read More

I saw Alien: Covenant on the big screen this summer in Budapest. I didn’t write a review then, because another reviewer had it covered. But having seen it for a second time, now on Blu-ray, I feel moved to comment. Covenant is an excellent film, indeed the best in the series since Scott started it... Read More

I feel like the skinhead who went to see Cats because he’d heard that T. S. Eliot was a fascist. Japanese cartoons are very popular in our circles. They have even been reviewed at Counter-Currents. The closest thing I had seen to a Japanese cartoon is Twilight of the Cockroaches. But that mixed animation and... Read More

Valerian? Isn’t that a root one chews to fall asleep? I saw Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element near the end of its run in the theaters, and it was love at first frame. I loved its Manichean/ancient astronauts plot, unique and dazzling visual style (imagine the Coen brothers remaking Barbarella), the madcap action, blond Bruce... Read More

Dunkirk is Christopher Nolan’s most emotionally powerful movie. It deals with the evacuation of 400,000 British, Canadian, and French troops trapped on the beach at Dunkirk after being defeated by the Germans in the Second World War. Dunkirk is a strange work, especially for Christopher Nolan, who typically directs long films with complex plots, extensive... Read More

When the Young Turk government dragged the Ottoman Empire into the First World War on the side of the Central Powers, their aim was to create a pan-Turkic empire incorporating Turkic lands that were part of the Russian Empire. A major impediment to these plans were the Christian minorities of Eastern Anatolia: the Armenians, Greeks,... Read More

Watchmen is one of the most thoroughly Right-wing, even fascistic works of recent popular culture, despite the right-thinking Leftism of the creators of the original graphic novel, Alan Moore, who wrote the story, and Dave Gibbons, who illustrated it—and of Zack Snyder, who directed the movie adaptation, which to my mind is the greatest superhero... Read More

Hidden Figures, a.k.a., We Wuz Astronautz, tells the story of three black women who worked at NASA in 1961 struggling for equal rights both as blacks and as women. The movie tells us that it is “based on true events,” and the three women — mathematician Katherine Johnson, computer programmer Dorothy Vaughan, and engineer Mary... Read More

Martin Scorsese’s Silence is a very fine film that seems to belong to an entirely different world. Imagine what American movies would be like if our film industry were not controlled by hostile and decadent aliens who have weaponized the medium against European man and culture. Silence is such a film. It is wholly untouched... Read More

Passengers, directed by the Norwegian Morten Tyldum, is the best science fiction movie of the current season, so if you have seen Rogue Oneor are simply skipping it, you have an even better option. Passengers is something quite rare: a science fiction film that is entirely fresh and new, not part of a series, and... Read More

Warning: a few minor spoilers Rogue One is quite simply one of the best Star Warsmovies ever. It has an interesting plot, a tight script, good pacing, uniformly good acting, excellent special effects, amazing sets, spectacular new worlds, and dazzling battle scenes. I really loved this movie. When I first saw the teaser trailer I... Read More

Denial is a very boring and deceptive movie about a legal case, David Irving v Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt, in which British World War II historian David Irving sued American Jewish historian Deborah Lipstadt and her British publisher for libel over allegations made in her 1993 book Denying the Holocaust, in which she accused... Read More

I have seen a lot of Star Trek on the big and small screens, and from the perspective of middle age, it seems like an appalling waste of time. Recently, I watched a number of episodes from the original series, which I had not seen since childhood, and found them quite creaky and often laughable.... Read More

Disney’s Zootopia is cute, clever, and entertaining. But in terms of its message, it is pure evil. The Angry Birds Movie is plausibly interpreted as a pro-nationalist, anti-immigration, anti-Muslim allegory, whether that was the intended meaning or not. Zootopia, however, clearly intended as pro-diversity, anti-nationalist propaganda. But worse than that, Zootopia is basically a syringe... Read More

In any matchup between Batman and Superman, I side with Batman. I’ve never liked the character of Superman, because he is not a man at all. He’s basically a god. He’s not a human being who has raised himself to the pinnacles of human excellence. He’s an alien who is simply endowed with superior abilities.... Read More

Ridley Scott’s The Martian is a superb movie: suspenseful, inspiring, and deeply moving, with an excellent plot, fine performances, compelling pacing, and completely believable special effects. The Martian in set in the near future when space exploration is once again a national priority and manned Mars missions are regular undertakings. On one such mission a... Read More

The new Star Wars movie is exactly what I deduced it would be from the trailers and the fact that it was directed by J. J. Abrams, a filmmaker so vulgar and artless that he makes Jerry Bruckheimer seem like Ingmar Bergman. The Force Awakens is not an homage but a ripoff. It is not... Read More

Warning: spoilers ahead I’m feeling a quantum of disappointment with the latest James Bond movie Spectre. But maybe my expectations were unreasonably high. The last Bond movie, Skyfall, was one of the very best. And Spectrehas two of the most artful and enticing trailers ever produced (here and here). With such a buildup, maybe I... Read More

I was a dinosaur kid, and it does not take much to reawaken the wonder. Thus I enjoyed 1993’s Jurassic Park a good deal, although I thought it much inferior to Michael Crichton’s book. The best thing about it, frankly, is John Williams’ wonderful music. That, and a droll little detail: “Objects in mirror are... Read More

Miller’s Crossing (1990) is the third Coen brothers movie, and in my eyes, it remains their best. Miller’s Crossing is set in an unnamed Midwestern city during the 1920s. (It was primarily filmed in New Orleans.) It tells the story of Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne), who serves as advisor to two warring gangsters, Leo O’Bannon... Read More

Good Kill is an OK movie starring Ethan Hawke and directed by New Zealander Andrew Niccol, who also directed Hawke in Gattaca, the dumbest anti-eugenics movie ever made (beautiful but dumb). Hawke plays Major Thomas Egan, an Air Force pilot assigned to pilot drones in the “war on terror.” (Can we have the word “terrorism”... Read More