They have different approaches and concerns, and are both quality in their own right. Battle Royale is a satire of the Japanese education system and childhood generally, viewing it as a time when kids lack agency and are at the mercy of adults' whims (Ender's Game, which I read around the same time, operates…

"He just makes you angry because the end goal of his movies is not to make people feel comfortable and entertained, but to confront them with some unpleasant ideas….people get hung up on it, because it toys with the prickly idea that all people have voyeuristic and sadistic sides to them and nobody wants to think that…

I can see that - and I appreciate Dowd's point about the movie as a counter-point to saintly, sugar-coated depictions of death and decline - but for me beginning at the end serves to further homogenize the film's singular negativity. There's not false hope, but there's also not many shades of emotion, either. I…

My points are certainly arguable, and I'll fully admit that my idea of any Hanecke film is colored by my perceptions of the director's overall oeuvre and public persona. Though I would also note that reading Amour as empathetic towards its characters isn't necessarily the same as reading it as empathetic towards its…

I feel like the tide has turned against this movie before its had its moment, but I love the all-out batshittery of the ending (especially the exploding heads), and feel like its a bit more nuanced than Ignatiy is giving it credit for (or at least, its muddle allows for a more diverse reading). Ideologically: the…

I hate this movie. I fucking hate this movie, in a way I've hated few movies ever.

And I'm from small town Iowa - nice to meet you! I think there are certainly folk there that look like they stepped out of a country music video, they're an accepted part of the landscape, but not the 'only' people there. And I'm not suggesting that's an accurate picture of 300-some million Americans, but rather as an…

I prefer to see the first two acts of Fury as a self-contained movie with an ending where the soldiers continue on, their souls that much more scarred, to even more indefinite fighting.

In all the recent think-pieces on based-on-a-true-story movies, this is one of the best condensation I've seen of good principles re: filmmakers' duty to reality. I've got nothing to add, just thought I'd say that.

I think it would have been just as easy to make a movie in which Chris Kyle so internalized his identity as a righteous killer that he became a right-wing media personality who made up stories about murdering Americans to the back-patting of small town sheriffs.

To add to that: Fury (final scenes aside) surprised the heck out of me for how much it sought to de-idealize WWII and the Americans who fought it. And I think there was a critique there about more recent conflicts and America's relationship to war more generally, in that it took the war whose broad goals were the…

My reading (now that I've watched AS) aligns pretty closely with IV's reading of the film: that it best uses Kyle as less a 'depiction of the man' than as a symbol of a particular kind of Americana, a sort of 'best of all worlds' version of the Good Man Trying to Do the Right Thing violently, at personal cost. I think…

Having arrived to the battlefield a few days late (like the pinko libtard pansy-man that I am), I was surprised at how hard it was to tell if some comments were actual right-wing bile or parodies of right-wing bilious comments.

Eh. I haven't seen the movie yet, but from everything I've read, it glossed off the more complicated / hateful aspects of Chris Kyle's personality (notably, all those brags he made about killin' people, even the ones he didn't kill), probably with the aim of attracting people to the theater who might be positively…

I'd say the line between 'doc' and 'crock' here is a legal one: does actively cultivating an atmosphere of ignorance (enough that one may plausibly said to believe one's own bullshit) protect from libel charges?

My memories of seeing it in the the theater are:

Odd story - I just read an article about how that's standard practice in dispatch centers (in 1990s Sweden, at least) - that the dispatcher receiving the call would attempt to draw more information out of the caller while simultaneously reiterating the relevant parts to colleagues. I think if what the caller is saying…

To Event Horizon's credit, I don't care how stupid it is: its an amusingly diverting Alien rip-off with the sensibilities of a cheesy metal album cover (gateways to hell and all), if it were made of actual rusting metal.

OK, I'm going to announce it just once: outside the AV Club, I actually am Johnny. Johnny Depp. The actor.

I do respect that it - and Legend of Zelda 2 - were from an era where sequels tried to do something radically different from the original.