Good taste is better than bad taste, but bad taste is better than none
EDWARD SCISSORHANDS 1990 Directed by Tim Burton Written by Caroline Thompson and Tim Burton Spoilers: severe Edward Scissorhands is the kind of movie you get to make after you made Batman , and probably only after you made Batman , or the equivalent of Batman , the kind of weird and alienating and personal and incredibly creative film that is hard to call "a true original" in the strictest, most…
PEE-WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE 1985 Directed by Tim Burton Written by Phil Hartman, Michael Varhol, and Paul Reubens Spoilers: high Pee-wee's Big Adventure — a precious bauble even if it weren't so surprisingly important to the intertwined histories of film and television — probably shouldn't exist, and only does because of a series of accidents. The least accidental, which is not to say it was…
THE DRAMA 2026 Written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli Spoilers: would be a complete waste of time at anything lower than "high," so high The Drama made a moderate-sized splash during its release back in the spring — it's not the most challenging bar for a movie to clear, but I'll give it its due, it's one of 2026's highest-grossing "movies for grown-ups," as the saying goes — and if it got…
I WANT YOUR SEX 2026 Directed by Gregg Araki Written by Karley Sciortino and Gregg Araki Spoilers: moderate Maybe it would have happened more gradually for someone who hadn't just caught up with the last of his so-called "Teenage Apocalypse" trilogy the night before they saw his new movie, and hadn't seen any of the (comparatively few) features he'd made in between, but somewhere inside there…
CORPSE BRIDE 2005 Directed by Mike Johnson and Tim Burton Written by John August, Caroline Thompson, Pamela Pettler, and Tim Burton Spoilers: highish When the Golden Age of Tim Burton ended is a matter of debate, with some unwilling to consider it even lasted beyond his 1994 magnum opus, Ed Wood , but most would agree that it could not have still been happening by the time of his logy remake of…
WINNIE THE POOH 2011 Directed by Stephen Anderson and Don Hall Written by a bunch Spoilers: More-or-less inapplicable, as I'm sure you could guess Only eight months earlier, Disney had released Tangled , their 50th "canonical" animated feature, a film understood to be of sufficient importance to its animation studio that its numbered "canon" only exists because of it, and which we can, from our…
THE INVITE 2026 Directed by Olivia Wilde Written by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones (based on the movie Sentimental by Cesc Gay) Spoilers: moderate I could be accused — I would welcome the accusation — of being a much bigger-than-average fan of Olivia Wilde's career as a director, which hasn't been the smoothest sailing for her, kicking off with the sleeper hit (though it made a much bigger…
TANGLED 2010 Directed by Byron Howard and Nathan Greno Written by Dan Fogelman, plus innumerable others, over more than a decade Spoilers: severe As I've made it clear that I date Disney's Second Renaissance back to 2008 and the ever-underrated Bolt (which has the benefit of encompassing the following year's hoped-for rebirth of hand-drawn animation at Disney, The Princess and the Frog ), I would…
SUPERGIRL 2026 Directed by Craig Gillespie Written by Ana Nogueira and Jeremy Slater (based on the comic book Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow by Tom King and Bilquis Evely) Spoilers: moderate Of the many angles from which one could approach Supergirl , probably the most unavoidable is as a post mortem, this film, like many before it, having called into question the whole enterprise (DC superheroes,…
THE DEATH OF ROBIN HOOD 2026 Written and directed by Michael Sarnoski Spoilers: moderate The Death of Robin Hood would have it — or at least star and executive producer Hugh Jackman would have it, as he's explained it thus in a whole trailer for his film, so it must be a sentiment shared by its writer and director Michael Sarnoski — that it is closer to the source of its legend than usual, and…
ROBIN HOOD 2018 Directed by Otto Bathurst Written by Ben Chandler and David James Kelly Spoilers: moderate In the mid-10s, Hollywood had no fewer than three Robin Hood s in development, and that's mysterious to me, given that only a few years earlier, Ridley Scott's Robin Hood had posted losses measured in ten figures; I suppose the thought process was that Scott's film made a good gross, so if…
ROBIN HOOD 2010 Directed by Ridley Scott Written by Ethan Reiff, Cyrus Voris, and Brian Helgeland Spoilers: moderate, but higher than you'd think possible in a movie described as "the origin of Robin Hood" You can't say that the 2010 film bearing the simple title Robin Hood isn't doing something novel with the legend, to the extent that its simple title is basically a lie, and the only way to…
ROBIN HOOD: MEN IN TIGHTS 1993 Directed by Mel Brooks Written by Evan Chandler, J. David Shapiro, and Mel Brooks Spoilers: still inapplicable As hard as it might be to comprehend today, for I do not comprehend it myself, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves really was a big deal; and, were we chasing down a different path, what that would lead us to instead is the 90s' burgeoning phenomenon of…
HOPPERS 2026 Directed by Daniel Chong Written by Jesse Andrews and Daniel Chong Spoilers: moderate The only way out is through, they sometimes say, and such is the case with Pixar and that studio's most recently-released film, Hoppers , which did the estimable work of reversing the trend of every original cartoon they've released in the last six years by actually making a profit (or, in fairness…
I LOVE BOOSTERS 2026 Written and directed by Boots Riley Spoilers: moderate Whatever else, you gotta be a little amazed that in A.D. 2026 you can go out to your regular old AMC multiplex in Pennsylvania and watch some genuine communist propaganda — explicitly so, and Marxist propaganda, at that. Less amazing, maybe, is that I don't know how entirely fulfilled your expectations would be if you were…
DISCLOSURE DAY 2026 Directed by Steven Spielberg Written by David Koepp and Steven Spielberg Spoilers: moderate The last several years of Steven Spielberg's career, as many as eight years and three movies by my count, have been devoted to either tying up his loose ends, scratching entries off his bucket list, or both, starting with Ready Player One which, while opinions clearly vary, seemed to me…
HARRY AND THE HENDERSONS 1987 Directed by William Dear Written by William E. Martin, Ezra D. Rappaport, and William Dear Spoilers: high In 1980 Steven Spielberg (plus Frank Marshall plus Kathleen Kennedy) founded Amblin Entertainment, partly just to serve as a production company for his own films, but by the mid-80s, what Amblin's purpose appeared to be was to provide a venue by which films of a…
ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THIEVES 1991 Directed by Kevin Reynolds Written by Pen Densham and John Watson Spoilers: inapplicable, really Robin Hood's theatrical appearances died back during the 70s, following a period of thirty-odd years where his story was told just an unbelievable number of times, in pursuit of reminding people that, back in 1938, Errol Flynn was in a popular film ; presumably this…
ROBIN AND MARIAN 1976 Directed by Richard Lester Written by James Goldman Spoilers: moderate shifting pretty immediately into severe, and I guess you could feel deceived that I said it was ever "moderate" The ending of Robin and Marian is not, in broad strokes, a surprise, or at least it would not be if you knew the title its screenwriter William Goldman, its director Richard Lester, and even its…
THE BANDIT OF SHERWOOD FOREST 1946 Directed by Henry Levin and George Sherman Written by Wilfred H. Pettitt and Melvin Levy THE SON OF ROBIN HOOD 1958 Directed by George Sherman Written by George S. Slavin and George W. George (no, really) Spoilers for either: moderate So when one sets their mind to a retrospective of Robin Hood on film, one would likely start with Douglas Fairbanks's 1922 Robin…
MORTAL KOMBAT II 2026 Directed by Simon McQuoid Written by Jeremy Slater (actually based, remarkably enough, more than anything else on the video game Mortal Kombat II by Ed Boon and John Tobias) Spoilers: moderate Behold: Mortal Kombat II , the fourth theatrically-released, live-action* Mortal Kombat film, is actually good , the very first time in that many tries and thirty-one blasted years that…
MORTAL KOMBAT: ANNIHILATION 1997 Directed by John R. Leonetti Written by Lawrence Kasanoff, Joshua Wexler, John Tobias, Brent Friedman, and Bryan Zabel (based on the video game Mortal Kombat 3 by Ed Boon and John Tobias) Spoilers: moderate As we discussed, 1995's Mortal Kombat was that rarest of things in its day: the video game adaptation that people basically liked, and on the back of being…
MORTAL KOMBAT 1995 Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson Written by Kevin Droney (based on the video game by Ed Boon and John Tobias) Spoilers: moderate Once upon a time, video game movies were not a major pillar of the global film box office, and in fact were pretty widely-shunned, in part because, once upon a time, people actually cared whether the movies they paid to see were good. By 1995, there…
THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD 1938 Directed by Michael Curtiz and William Keighley Written by Rowland Leigh, Norman Reilly Raine, and Seton I. Miller Spoilers: N/A The Adventures of Robin Hood can feel downright inevitable: Erroll Flynn as Robin Hood is just one of those incredibly natural castings, whilst reuniting Flynn with so many personnel from his 1935 blockbuster swashbuckling debut, Captain…
MOTHER MARY 2026 Written and directed by David Lowery Spoilers: moderate Going into this present decade, David Lowery would've been on a sufficiently long list of new filmmakers that I felt genuinely excited about; though in the meantime, his star had fallen somewhat for me. Part of that is just how he's heretofore spent the present decade: The Green Knight certainly had no shortage of admirers in…