Tits & Gore

(Note: List updated 6/18/10) It’s that time of year again, when I join my cineaste brethren for some list-making goodness! As always, my ground rule: I only listed films that received a theatrical release in their country of origin during 2009. While there are still a few films that I haven’t seen, I’m confident that [...]

Let me cut straight to the point – Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea is phenomenal. It is a ceaselessly gorgeous showcase for Miyazaki’s unmistakeable cinematic genius. It is potentially his finest film since 1997′s Mononoke Hime, and perhaps the most joyful motion picture to be made by any director since his [...]

Less about baseball and more about the difficulties inherent in being Chinese and bi/homosexual, City Without Baseball has received no small amount of press in Hong Kong. This is, without question, the most mainstream, high-profile film yet from HK addressing one of China’s great unspoken taboos. It’s also a fascinating exercise in creative casting: all [...]

Moon is an auspicious debut from Duncan Jones (née Zowie Bowie), a talented new director who happens to be the son of David Bowie (let me officially be the first person to predict that every review of this film in the mainstream press will have the tagline “SPACE ODDITY!”). Sam Rockwell gives a truly remarkable [...]

I was blown away by this debut feature from Lucrecia Martel, an Argentine director who had previously worked in television. Translated as “The Swamp” or “The Bog”, La Ciénaga explores the relationship between two cousins: Mecha, a bourgeois alcoholic drinking herself to death in the shadow of the mountains; and Tali, a harried city-dweller looking [...]

Mark Neale’s unusual biopic of William Gibson is a strange and polarizing film. Neale placed Gibson in a limousine wired for sound, equipped with several video cameras and outfitted with a laptop and cell phone (no mean feat for 2000) and sent him on a cross-country trip from California to New York, supplying him with [...]

Why is writing “The Watchmen Review” proving to be so difficult? I’ve had no less than 7 lengthy conversations at this point with various respected human sounding-boards detailing my issues with the film, and started many a draft. Yet still the issue is complicated, in ways I could not have foreseen when I skeptically entered [...]

Yes, Slumdog. I agree with the consensus complaint that it is completely contrived that Jamal knows the answers to every question because something happened in his past that informs every answer, but let me add to that by saying that the questions are all common knowledge in the first place, and it drives me insane [...]

It is time for a less-shitty-looking T&G; please be patient while I fuck around. Update: Ha ha ha! And by “fuck around”, I mean “try and create a script that tells you what movies all the header images are from when you rollover them and accidentally destroy the entire site and have to reinstall from [...]

Mirrors started off really creepy, but even though I had taken an ambien after several drinks when I decided to start watching the movie, it still seemed really dumb at times. I had expected improvisational drug and alcohol abuse to really help this type of flick. Oh well. Now, I totally adore Alexandre Aja, mostly [...]

1. The Dark Knight: (Nolan) 2. Synecdoche, NY: (Kaufman) Shall I project a world? An uneven film from first time director Charlie Kaufman about creation, solipsism and empathy. Arbitrary bruises along with green poo and brown pee pee make this one of the few movies to really grab the strangeness of personal suffering. Arbitrary time [...]

Whenever someone lets me in on their love for—or honestly even mere interest in—horror, I get butterflies in my belly and immediately forget the names of all the movies I would like to encourage them to watch. So when I told my husband I wanted to do a top ten horror movie post, he freaked [...]

First the films, then the yattering. 1. A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin, France) 2. Let The Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, Sweden) 3. Fine, Totally Fine (Yosuke Fujita, Japan) 4. JCVD (Mabrouk El Mechri, France) 5. Be Kind, Rewind (Michel Gondry, USA) 6. Sparrow (Johnnie To, Hong Kong) 7. The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, USA) [...]

Our ratings may seem to follow a relatively uniform pattern, but it’s because we have very specific evaluation criteria! Here are the details of the rating system that we use, for handy future reference! 1 Star – Unwatchable in all respects, lacking even unintentional comedy. 2 Stars – Awful, but you could watch it once. [...]

The siren song of my film-blogging peeps has sucked me once again into listville, and this time the subject is being left to the discretion of the individual. Some folks are doing their favorite movie theaters (I don’t have 10 of those), some are doing their favorite movies of the year thus far (I don’t [...]

It’s kind of hard to explain to the public why I made this list, but let’s just say it’s mostly due to my husband’s lack of ability to focus. There are many mid-year top ten lists, created by our peers, going up today about top ten actors, top ten movies so far this year, etc. [...]

If ’78 is often considered the Year of the Vietnam War Movie because of the box-office and awards-season battle between Coming Home and The Deer Hunter, it’s informative that there is comparatively little critical work involving Coming Home, whereas The Deer Hunter has graduated to the pantheon of the classics. And I am not the [...]

Honestly, I didn’t expect much from The Ruins. I didn’t expect to be scared or even freaked out. But there was something about this flick. Maybe it’s that the characters don’t really make any mistakes. Usually, in what Mike has coined “The Don’t Go On Vacation” flick, you have stupid Americans who ultimately possess no [...]

Oh, Jean Rollin… What does it even mean when I say that this is probably my favorite Rollin film? As with his contemporaries Joe D’Amato and Jess Franco, you don’t go into a Rollin film expecting excellence – you expect abstract, face-melting sleaze! If you are like me, you will struggle through vast fields of [...]

We went to see the remake of Halloween, and this is the first time I’ve seen the original. So yeah, I’m that person. I’m that sixteen-year-old who thinks Sheryl Crow wrote “Sweet Child O’ Mine.” From Mike’s extensive disclaimer (about how lots of techniques and style choices would seem trite because they are everywhere in [...]

Before viewing Coming Home, I expected it to be a political and social commentary on the Vietnam War. But Coming Home presents an array of problems with American life generally—not just with war. From marriage to patriotism, this flick uses emotion to drive its thesis: that Americans should do a better job of questioning reality. [...]

I think this might be the first flick we’ve reviewed for the site so far that actually contains tits and gore in that fun filmic unit sort of way. And boy, the gore! Maybe it’s because these folks were French, and they can tolerate more gooey, stinky things than your average American, but this gore [...]

In John Carpenter’s classic Escape From New York, a military-type badass with an eyepatch infiltrates a quarantined area on a political mission for a government he doesn’t (and shouldn’t!) trust. In Neil Marshall’s new picture Doomsday, a military-type badass with an eyepatch infiltrates a quarantined area on a political mission for a government she doesn’t [...]

What I experienced tonight was truly amazing. Sure, Mike and I were both worried even before we decided to see it. We like Neil Marshall. We like Dog Soldiers. We really like The Descent. So, yeah, we were worried. It’s the same way pregnant women get excited but hope the kid’s not retarded or ugly. [...]

Okay, so honestly, I’ve never been the biggest fan of action, and martial arts rank right up there at the top of the list of what I don’t enjoy. That being said, since meeting Mike, I’ve reevaluated lots of things—from winter to the idea of spawning—and action flicks couldn’t be that far behind! So when [...]

I’m a Jackie Chan junkie, and so it was a pleasure to watch Drunken Master, the film that catapulted Jackie to stardom when it was released in Hong Kong in 1978. It takes the familiar martial arts story of Wong Fei Hung (a role also played by Jet Li during his early career in the [...]

It’s not my intention to be throwing around high-star ratings willy-nilly so early in our endeavor, but I would be remiss if I didn’t recognize what I believe are the best movies out there simply because I have this nagging feeling that there is some kind of predetermined allowance of nigh-perfect films that I can’t [...]

What do you say about The Deer Hunter? It’s just so good. I suppose the most striking aspect of the film for me was the Russian roulette theme. As metaphor for war, especially such a difficult and controversial war, Russian roulette is so perfect. Each time we go into war as a country, each time [...]

Debbie Does Dallas is one of those much-talked about porn classics that few people have actually taken the time to see. For my part, I’ve seen it about eight times over the course of the past decade and used it as a teaching tool. I’ve watched two different modern remakes and I even took in [...]

So these are the problems I have with porn: I’m unconvinced, and it’s not sexy. I understand that there are millions of people who disagree with me, including my husband. To these people, I say: whatever. I generally enjoy good acting and believable plot. This is not to say that I am incapable of willingly [...]

In Days of Heaven, writer and director Terrence Malick uses an essentially simple story to show viewers exactly how tied to the earth we are. Beautiful, captivating studies of the landscape are punctuated with shots of the farmer’s obnoxious and towering, vibrant and gaudy Victorian-style house. Malick really got this one right. This is what [...]

It seems difficult to write something new and exciting about a cinematic masterpiece that’s been studied and analyzed for thirty years, so you’ll excuse me if I abandon profundity in favor of enthusiasm. Days of Heaven is of course the second of Terrence Malick’s four film communiqués to the outside world, a beautiful stream-of-consciousness poem [...]

The Horror! The Horror! The Medusa Touch is just horrifying! Except that it’s just not. There was a time when I didn’t like horror at all. I thought it was a waste of my movie-watching energy. Then I met my wonderful husband, and many of my opinions changed. The problem, though, is that whereas pre-Mike, [...]

They certainly don’t make movies like Jack Gold’s The Medusa Touch these days, and that’s a crying shame. It’s wickedly clever and features a host of excellent performances, including wonderful turns by Richard Burton as John Morlar, a dying writer who may possess the ability to kill with his mind, and Lino Ventura as the [...]

From the Everyman-style naming of the characters to the ridiculous soundtrack, The Driver’s attempt at drama lands closer to farce, a wet dream for the TNT network weekend movie scheduling team. Softer cat and mouse parts of the final chase that would be naturally tense without a soundtrack are paired with apparently random jazzy trumpet [...]

Hot on the heels of our joint review of Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton, it’s time to take a look at an early work by another writer-turned-director, Walter Hill. Hill is an icon, writing or co-writing the first three Alien movies and Peckinpah’s excellent heist pic The Getaway, in addition to helming perennial underground favorite The [...]

Mike: I was really surprised by Michael Clayton, I have to admit. I was expecting a very by-the-numbers legal thriller, and instead it’s this very intimate character study. Maggie: I was expecting a very by-the-numbers legal thriller, and I thought it was. The Firm, The Pelican Brief… These have highly developed characters… Maybe not as [...]

Precious few exploitation films retain the power to shock and disturb as decades pass and audience tolerance evolves, making Meir Zarchi’s I Spit On Your Grave, the great-grandma of the rape/revenge genre, all the more impressive. By turns reviled or sheepishly apologized-for, the time is well-past due for a reevaluation of this picture. Grave’s dirty [...]

Within minutes of the start of the film our lady is skinny dipping in the river behind her newly rented summer house. There’s a very voyeuristic shot of her from across the lake, which feels even more so, since we’ve already seen her naked in close-up; the distance isn’t to spare her nudity, even in [...]

I am Mike, and my wife she is called Maggie. We are here to review films and make lists and burn a trail of utter destruction across your internets! We possess Master’s degrees in Cinema Studies from New York University and this public declaration of our credentials is intended to suggest to you that we [...]

Within minutes of the start of the film our lady is skinny dipping in the river behind her newly rented summer house. There’s a very voyeuristic shot of her from across the lake, which feels even more so, since we’ve already seen her naked in close-up; the distance isn’t to spare her nudity, even in [...]

Precious few exploitation films retain the power to shock and disturb as decades pass and audience tolerance evolves, making Meir Zarchi’s I Spit On Your Grave, the great-grandma of the rape/revenge genre, all the more impressive. By turns reviled or sheepishly apologized-for, the time is well-past due for a reevaluation of this picture. Grave’s dirty [...]

Hot on the heels of our joint review of Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton, it’s time to take a look at an early work by another writer-turned-director, Walter Hill. Hill is an icon, writing or co-writing the first three Alien movies and Peckinpah’s excellent heist pic The Getaway, in addition to helming perennial underground favorite The [...]

From the Everyman-style naming of the characters to the ridiculous soundtrack, The Driver’s attempt at drama lands closer to farce, a wet dream for the TNT network weekend movie scheduling team. Softer cat and mouse parts of the final chase that would be naturally tense without a soundtrack are paired with apparently random jazzy trumpet [...]

They certainly don’t make movies like Jack Gold’s The Medusa Touch these days, and that’s a crying shame. It’s wickedly clever and features a host of excellent performances, including wonderful turns by Richard Burton as John Morlar, a dying writer who may possess the ability to kill with his mind, and Lino Ventura as the [...]

The Horror! The Horror! The Medusa Touch is just horrifying! Except that it’s just not. There was a time when I didn’t like horror at all. I thought it was a waste of my movie-watching energy. Then I met my wonderful husband, and many of my opinions changed. The problem, though, is that whereas pre-Mike, [...]

It seems difficult to write something new and exciting about a cinematic masterpiece that’s been studied and analyzed for thirty years, so you’ll excuse me if I abandon profundity in favor of enthusiasm. Days of Heaven is of course the second of Terrence Malick’s four film communiqués to the outside world, a beautiful stream-of-consciousness poem [...]

In Days of Heaven, writer and director Terrence Malick uses an essentially simple story to show viewers exactly how tied to the earth we are. Beautiful, captivating studies of the landscape are punctuated with shots of the farmer’s obnoxious and towering, vibrant and gaudy Victorian-style house. Malick really got this one right. This is what [...]

So these are the problems I have with porn: I’m unconvinced, and it’s not sexy. I understand that there are millions of people who disagree with me, including my husband. To these people, I say: whatever. I generally enjoy good acting and believable plot. This is not to say that I am incapable of willingly [...]

Debbie Does Dallas is one of those much-talked about porn classics that few people have actually taken the time to see. For my part, I’ve seen it about eight times over the course of the past decade and used it as a teaching tool. I’ve watched two different modern remakes and I even took in [...]

What do you say about The Deer Hunter? It’s just so good. I suppose the most striking aspect of the film for me was the Russian roulette theme. As metaphor for war, especially such a difficult and controversial war, Russian roulette is so perfect. Each time we go into war as a country, each time [...]

It’s not my intention to be throwing around high-star ratings willy-nilly so early in our endeavor, but I would be remiss if I didn’t recognize what I believe are the best movies out there simply because I have this nagging feeling that there is some kind of predetermined allowance of nigh-perfect films that I can’t [...]

I’m a Jackie Chan junkie, and so it was a pleasure to watch Drunken Master, the film that catapulted Jackie to stardom when it was released in Hong Kong in 1978. It takes the familiar martial arts story of Wong Fei Hung (a role also played by Jet Li during his early career in the [...]

Okay, so honestly, I’ve never been the biggest fan of action, and martial arts rank right up there at the top of the list of what I don’t enjoy. That being said, since meeting Mike, I’ve reevaluated lots of things—from winter to the idea of spawning—and action flicks couldn’t be that far behind! So when [...]

I think this might be the first flick we’ve reviewed for the site so far that actually contains tits and gore in that fun filmic unit sort of way. And boy, the gore! Maybe it’s because these folks were French, and they can tolerate more gooey, stinky things than your average American, but this gore [...]

Before viewing Coming Home, I expected it to be a political and social commentary on the Vietnam War. But Coming Home presents an array of problems with American life generally—not just with war. From marriage to patriotism, this flick uses emotion to drive its thesis: that Americans should do a better job of questioning reality. [...]

We went to see the remake of Halloween, and this is the first time I’ve seen the original. So yeah, I’m that person. I’m that sixteen-year-old who thinks Sheryl Crow wrote “Sweet Child O’ Mine.” From Mike’s extensive disclaimer (about how lots of techniques and style choices would seem trite because they are everywhere in [...]

Oh, Jean Rollin… What does it even mean when I say that this is probably my favorite Rollin film? As with his contemporaries Joe D’Amato and Jess Franco, you don’t go into a Rollin film expecting excellence – you expect abstract, face-melting sleaze! If you are like me, you will struggle through vast fields of [...]

If ’78 is often considered the Year of the Vietnam War Movie because of the box-office and awards-season battle between Coming Home and The Deer Hunter, it’s informative that there is comparatively little critical work involving Coming Home, whereas The Deer Hunter has graduated to the pantheon of the classics. And I am not the [...]

Mark Neale’s unusual biopic of William Gibson is a strange and polarizing film. Neale placed Gibson in a limousine wired for sound, equipped with several video cameras and outfitted with a laptop and cell phone (no mean feat for 2000) and sent him on a cross-country trip from California to New York, supplying him with [...]

I was blown away by this debut feature from Lucrecia Martel, an Argentine director who had previously worked in television. Translated as “The Swamp” or “The Bog”, La Ciénaga explores the relationship between two cousins: Mecha, a bourgeois alcoholic drinking herself to death in the shadow of the mountains; and Tali, a harried city-dweller looking [...]

Mike: I was really surprised by Michael Clayton, I have to admit. I was expecting a very by-the-numbers legal thriller, and instead it’s this very intimate character study. Maggie: I was expecting a very by-the-numbers legal thriller, and I thought it was. The Firm, The Pelican Brief… These have highly developed characters… Maybe not as [...]

What I experienced tonight was truly amazing. Sure, Mike and I were both worried even before we decided to see it. We like Neil Marshall. We like Dog Soldiers. We really like The Descent. So, yeah, we were worried. It’s the same way pregnant women get excited but hope the kid’s not retarded or ugly. [...]

In John Carpenter’s classic Escape From New York, a military-type badass with an eyepatch infiltrates a quarantined area on a political mission for a government he doesn’t (and shouldn’t!) trust. In Neil Marshall’s new picture Doomsday, a military-type badass with an eyepatch infiltrates a quarantined area on a political mission for a government she doesn’t [...]

Honestly, I didn’t expect much from The Ruins. I didn’t expect to be scared or even freaked out. But there was something about this flick. Maybe it’s that the characters don’t really make any mistakes. Usually, in what Mike has coined “The Don’t Go On Vacation” flick, you have stupid Americans who ultimately possess no [...]

Mirrors started off really creepy, but even though I had taken an ambien after several drinks when I decided to start watching the movie, it still seemed really dumb at times. I had expected improvisational drug and alcohol abuse to really help this type of flick. Oh well. Now, I totally adore Alexandre Aja, mostly [...]

Yes, Slumdog. I agree with the consensus complaint that it is completely contrived that Jamal knows the answers to every question because something happened in his past that informs every answer, but let me add to that by saying that the questions are all common knowledge in the first place, and it drives me insane [...]

Less about baseball and more about the difficulties inherent in being Chinese and bi/homosexual, City Without Baseball has received no small amount of press in Hong Kong. This is, without question, the most mainstream, high-profile film yet from HK addressing one of China’s great unspoken taboos. It’s also a fascinating exercise in creative casting: all [...]

Let me cut straight to the point – Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea is phenomenal. It is a ceaselessly gorgeous showcase for Miyazaki’s unmistakeable cinematic genius. It is potentially his finest film since 1997′s Mononoke Hime, and perhaps the most joyful motion picture to be made by any director since his [...]

Why is writing “The Watchmen Review” proving to be so difficult? I’ve had no less than 7 lengthy conversations at this point with various respected human sounding-boards detailing my issues with the film, and started many a draft. Yet still the issue is complicated, in ways I could not have foreseen when I skeptically entered [...]

Moon is an auspicious debut from Duncan Jones (née Zowie Bowie), a talented new director who happens to be the son of David Bowie (let me officially be the first person to predict that every review of this film in the mainstream press will have the tagline “SPACE ODDITY!”). Sam Rockwell gives a truly remarkable [...]

Within minutes of the start of the film our lady is skinny dipping in the river behind her newly rented summer house. There’s a very voyeuristic shot of her from across the lake, which feels even more so, since we’ve already seen her naked in close-up; the distance isn’t to spare her nudity, even in [...]

Precious few exploitation films retain the power to shock and disturb as decades pass and audience tolerance evolves, making Meir Zarchi’s I Spit On Your Grave, the great-grandma of the rape/revenge genre, all the more impressive. By turns reviled or sheepishly apologized-for, the time is well-past due for a reevaluation of this picture. Grave’s dirty [...]

Mike: I was really surprised by Michael Clayton, I have to admit. I was expecting a very by-the-numbers legal thriller, and instead it’s this very intimate character study. Maggie: I was expecting a very by-the-numbers legal thriller, and I thought it was. The Firm, The Pelican Brief… These have highly developed characters… Maybe not as [...]

Hot on the heels of our joint review of Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton, it’s time to take a look at an early work by another writer-turned-director, Walter Hill. Hill is an icon, writing or co-writing the first three Alien movies and Peckinpah’s excellent heist pic The Getaway, in addition to helming perennial underground favorite The [...]

From the Everyman-style naming of the characters to the ridiculous soundtrack, The Driver’s attempt at drama lands closer to farce, a wet dream for the TNT network weekend movie scheduling team. Softer cat and mouse parts of the final chase that would be naturally tense without a soundtrack are paired with apparently random jazzy trumpet [...]

They certainly don’t make movies like Jack Gold’s The Medusa Touch these days, and that’s a crying shame. It’s wickedly clever and features a host of excellent performances, including wonderful turns by Richard Burton as John Morlar, a dying writer who may possess the ability to kill with his mind, and Lino Ventura as the [...]

The Horror! The Horror! The Medusa Touch is just horrifying! Except that it’s just not. There was a time when I didn’t like horror at all. I thought it was a waste of my movie-watching energy. Then I met my wonderful husband, and many of my opinions changed. The problem, though, is that whereas pre-Mike, [...]

It seems difficult to write something new and exciting about a cinematic masterpiece that’s been studied and analyzed for thirty years, so you’ll excuse me if I abandon profundity in favor of enthusiasm. Days of Heaven is of course the second of Terrence Malick’s four film communiqués to the outside world, a beautiful stream-of-consciousness poem [...]

In Days of Heaven, writer and director Terrence Malick uses an essentially simple story to show viewers exactly how tied to the earth we are. Beautiful, captivating studies of the landscape are punctuated with shots of the farmer’s obnoxious and towering, vibrant and gaudy Victorian-style house. Malick really got this one right. This is what [...]

So these are the problems I have with porn: I’m unconvinced, and it’s not sexy. I understand that there are millions of people who disagree with me, including my husband. To these people, I say: whatever. I generally enjoy good acting and believable plot. This is not to say that I am incapable of willingly [...]

Debbie Does Dallas is one of those much-talked about porn classics that few people have actually taken the time to see. For my part, I’ve seen it about eight times over the course of the past decade and used it as a teaching tool. I’ve watched two different modern remakes and I even took in [...]

What do you say about The Deer Hunter? It’s just so good. I suppose the most striking aspect of the film for me was the Russian roulette theme. As metaphor for war, especially such a difficult and controversial war, Russian roulette is so perfect. Each time we go into war as a country, each time [...]

It’s not my intention to be throwing around high-star ratings willy-nilly so early in our endeavor, but I would be remiss if I didn’t recognize what I believe are the best movies out there simply because I have this nagging feeling that there is some kind of predetermined allowance of nigh-perfect films that I can’t [...]

I’m a Jackie Chan junkie, and so it was a pleasure to watch Drunken Master, the film that catapulted Jackie to stardom when it was released in Hong Kong in 1978. It takes the familiar martial arts story of Wong Fei Hung (a role also played by Jet Li during his early career in the [...]

Okay, so honestly, I’ve never been the biggest fan of action, and martial arts rank right up there at the top of the list of what I don’t enjoy. That being said, since meeting Mike, I’ve reevaluated lots of things—from winter to the idea of spawning—and action flicks couldn’t be that far behind! So when [...]

What I experienced tonight was truly amazing. Sure, Mike and I were both worried even before we decided to see it. We like Neil Marshall. We like Dog Soldiers. We really like The Descent. So, yeah, we were worried. It’s the same way pregnant women get excited but hope the kid’s not retarded or ugly. [...]

In John Carpenter’s classic Escape From New York, a military-type badass with an eyepatch infiltrates a quarantined area on a political mission for a government he doesn’t (and shouldn’t!) trust. In Neil Marshall’s new picture Doomsday, a military-type badass with an eyepatch infiltrates a quarantined area on a political mission for a government she doesn’t [...]

I think this might be the first flick we’ve reviewed for the site so far that actually contains tits and gore in that fun filmic unit sort of way. And boy, the gore! Maybe it’s because these folks were French, and they can tolerate more gooey, stinky things than your average American, but this gore [...]

Before viewing Coming Home, I expected it to be a political and social commentary on the Vietnam War. But Coming Home presents an array of problems with American life generally—not just with war. From marriage to patriotism, this flick uses emotion to drive its thesis: that Americans should do a better job of questioning reality. [...]

We went to see the remake of Halloween, and this is the first time I’ve seen the original. So yeah, I’m that person. I’m that sixteen-year-old who thinks Sheryl Crow wrote “Sweet Child O’ Mine.” From Mike’s extensive disclaimer (about how lots of techniques and style choices would seem trite because they are everywhere in [...]

Oh, Jean Rollin… What does it even mean when I say that this is probably my favorite Rollin film? As with his contemporaries Joe D’Amato and Jess Franco, you don’t go into a Rollin film expecting excellence – you expect abstract, face-melting sleaze! If you are like me, you will struggle through vast fields of [...]

Honestly, I didn’t expect much from The Ruins. I didn’t expect to be scared or even freaked out. But there was something about this flick. Maybe it’s that the characters don’t really make any mistakes. Usually, in what Mike has coined “The Don’t Go On Vacation” flick, you have stupid Americans who ultimately possess no [...]

If ’78 is often considered the Year of the Vietnam War Movie because of the box-office and awards-season battle between Coming Home and The Deer Hunter, it’s informative that there is comparatively little critical work involving Coming Home, whereas The Deer Hunter has graduated to the pantheon of the classics. And I am not the [...]

Mirrors started off really creepy, but even though I had taken an ambien after several drinks when I decided to start watching the movie, it still seemed really dumb at times. I had expected improvisational drug and alcohol abuse to really help this type of flick. Oh well. Now, I totally adore Alexandre Aja, mostly [...]

Yes, Slumdog. I agree with the consensus complaint that it is completely contrived that Jamal knows the answers to every question because something happened in his past that informs every answer, but let me add to that by saying that the questions are all common knowledge in the first place, and it drives me insane [...]

Why is writing “The Watchmen Review” proving to be so difficult? I’ve had no less than 7 lengthy conversations at this point with various respected human sounding-boards detailing my issues with the film, and started many a draft. Yet still the issue is complicated, in ways I could not have foreseen when I skeptically entered [...]

Mark Neale’s unusual biopic of William Gibson is a strange and polarizing film. Neale placed Gibson in a limousine wired for sound, equipped with several video cameras and outfitted with a laptop and cell phone (no mean feat for 2000) and sent him on a cross-country trip from California to New York, supplying him with [...]

I was blown away by this debut feature from Lucrecia Martel, an Argentine director who had previously worked in television. Translated as “The Swamp” or “The Bog”, La Ciénaga explores the relationship between two cousins: Mecha, a bourgeois alcoholic drinking herself to death in the shadow of the mountains; and Tali, a harried city-dweller looking [...]

Moon is an auspicious debut from Duncan Jones (née Zowie Bowie), a talented new director who happens to be the son of David Bowie (let me officially be the first person to predict that every review of this film in the mainstream press will have the tagline “SPACE ODDITY!”). Sam Rockwell gives a truly remarkable [...]

Less about baseball and more about the difficulties inherent in being Chinese and bi/homosexual, City Without Baseball has received no small amount of press in Hong Kong. This is, without question, the most mainstream, high-profile film yet from HK addressing one of China’s great unspoken taboos. It’s also a fascinating exercise in creative casting: all [...]

Let me cut straight to the point – Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea is phenomenal. It is a ceaselessly gorgeous showcase for Miyazaki’s unmistakeable cinematic genius. It is potentially his finest film since 1997′s Mononoke Hime, and perhaps the most joyful motion picture to be made by any director since his [...]

1. The Dark Knight: (Nolan) 2. Synecdoche, NY: (Kaufman) Shall I project a world? An uneven film from first time director Charlie Kaufman about creation, solipsism and empathy. Arbitrary bruises along with green poo and brown pee pee make this one of the few movies to really grab the strangeness of personal suffering. Arbitrary time [...]

It’s kind of hard to explain to the public why I made this list, but let’s just say it’s mostly due to my husband’s lack of ability to focus. There are many mid-year top ten lists, created by our peers, going up today about top ten actors, top ten movies so far this year, etc. [...]

The siren song of my film-blogging peeps has sucked me once again into listville, and this time the subject is being left to the discretion of the individual. Some folks are doing their favorite movie theaters (I don’t have 10 of those), some are doing their favorite movies of the year thus far (I don’t [...]

First the films, then the yattering. 1. A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin, France) 2. Let The Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, Sweden) 3. Fine, Totally Fine (Yosuke Fujita, Japan) 4. JCVD (Mabrouk El Mechri, France) 5. Be Kind, Rewind (Michel Gondry, USA) 6. Sparrow (Johnnie To, Hong Kong) 7. The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, USA) [...]

Whenever someone lets me in on their love for—or honestly even mere interest in—horror, I get butterflies in my belly and immediately forget the names of all the movies I would like to encourage them to watch. So when I told my husband I wanted to do a top ten horror movie post, he freaked [...]

(Note: List updated 6/18/10) It’s that time of year again, when I join my cineaste brethren for some list-making goodness! As always, my ground rule: I only listed films that received a theatrical release in their country of origin during 2009. While there are still a few films that I haven’t seen, I’m confident that [...]

I am Mike, and my wife she is called Maggie. We are here to review films and make lists and burn a trail of utter destruction across your internets! We possess Master’s degrees in Cinema Studies from New York University and this public declaration of our credentials is intended to suggest to you that we [...]

It is time for a less-shitty-looking T&G; please be patient while I fuck around. Update: Ha ha ha! And by “fuck around”, I mean “try and create a script that tells you what movies all the header images are from when you rollover them and accidentally destroy the entire site and have to reinstall from [...]

Our ratings may seem to follow a relatively uniform pattern, but it’s because we have very specific evaluation criteria! Here are the details of the rating system that we use, for handy future reference! 1 Star – Unwatchable in all respects, lacking even unintentional comedy. 2 Stars – Awful, but you could watch it once. [...]