No one advanced that argument, and there's plenty of middle ground - besides, it is possible for the depiction of violence to actually be gratuitous.

Bad bad episode. Nothing makes sense, characterisation is completely inconsistent, and the rushed pace means pretty much every event has no emotional impact.

Well that's a bit of a false dichotomy, isn't it?

There's been a lot of complaints with the way the revival has treated women, the most common are: sexual objectification, protracted brutalisation for horror/shock value, moralistic Madonna/Whore binaries (that's baked right into the premise with Laura Palmer), Lynch's own tendency to keep writing himself in as a…

Dany: I'm not like Cersei
*30 seconds later*
Dany: Join me or die by dragonfire

I don't like how the show is never content to just let Rick be wrong. I actually rolled my eyes when they revealed the superheroes blew up a whole planet, because of course, Rick can never just be the bad guy here, the people he hurts have to have "deserved it" in some way by being just as shitty as he says they are.…

Massive props for getting Christian Slater on the show and then doing the whole episode as a whole plot homage to the movie Mind Hunters, which is also about a team of heroes getting picked off in death traps one by one by someone inside (with Slater playing basically an identical role in that) - someone on the…

It changes from scene to scene. I don't even understand how people differentiate the episodes as the whole thing is transparently culled from a very long script and cut into hour-long fragments with no regard for conventional episodic pacing. That's not even a bad thing necessarily, but it does mean I'm more likely to…

Having only just caught up after the past 12 weeks, this whole Return has been incredibly disappointing. Lynch has never exactly been a "methodical" or hyper-rationalist director/storyteller but everything about the series so far smacks of him trying to push all his pet projects (e.g. Ronnie Rocket, the Mulholland…

I enjoyed Force Majeure, yeah, so maybe the film will be actually quite good but the description of the tone here gave me quite a different impression.

I gotta be honest, that write-up of The Square makes it sound thoroughly unlikable but maybe that's just because I think contemporary art jokes coupled with liberal pretensions are among the cheapest and most uninspired gags anyone could pick for satire these days.

I understand why people like it because its about the wonder of cinema and all, but I just thought it was the most blandly faceless "kid on a mission" movie I'd ever seen. Almost nothing in that movie stood out to me. I watched it as a teen so I guess I was a bit above the age range, but reading the description for…

Uhhh sorry, what exactly in this movie (or trailer) is about the evil of "genetic engineering"? I got literally none of that from the trailer.

Hugo really was such a bad movie that I'm kinda worried about all these comparisons but I'm sure Haynes will find a way to make it work.

Yup, same thing with Memento. It doesn't really matter who ended up being the killer all along or who was lying or not. The point was that Pearce's character would never ever reach closure, was stuck in a purgatorial loop of revenge over and over. Once you're at that point you can say goodbye to "the truth".

How is "I'm a whole town!" somehow not a classic Twin Peaks quote on the level of any of Cole's lines?

Like every other Villeneuve film, it's going to be a competent but safe movie that'll firmly allay the fears of fans of the original but not really be all that memorable in itself.

"Free Fire might work as a scathing satire of gun culture, of overgrown children abusing their smoking barrels, if its feature-length shoot-out didn’t seem a half step removed from the consequence-free mayhem of Looney Tunes."

It seems to me that there's some resentment from people who wanted Wheatley to "transcend" his genre roots and then got disappointed when it became apparent that wasn't really his ambition. I'm not saying that's necessarily a motivating factor for all of his critics but I have been surprised how much condescension and…

You've hit on what's pretty much the fatal flaw in all this superhero fiction that tries to make concern over super-heroism a plot point. It can't ever seriously challenge the heroes because that would undermine the whole point of the story. That's why you've got Civil War trying to make an even-handed argument for…