Post-apocalyptic adventure pulp on a vast scale. This is imaginative world-building on par with Robert E Howard or Edgar Rice Burroughs. More than just a great revenge story, along with Fury Road it actually has (pulpy) thoughts about morality and responsibility in a lawless world.

Chris Hemsworth gives a wonderfully dark comic performance. Anya Taylor-Joy is more restrained. She’s good, but doesn’t have the pure star-power wattage of Charlize Theron (just like Tom Hardy is no Mel Gibson). Like Hardy…

*Updated some of my thoughts*

Epic fantasy filmmaking made with real vision and craft, and a sense of strange otherworldliness that stays with you. On its own terms it succeeds marvellously. Time may recognize it as a classic of the genre. But there are bumps.

Villeneuve’s meticulous, stripped-down visuals are a welcome corrective to the CG slurry that’s dominated screens for most of the past 20 years. And his and Spaihts' wrangling and clarification of the plot is a model…

Somehow, this is even more effective than The Irishman as a late-career re-evaluation, or corrective, to Scorsese's earlier work. It's also political in a way that so few American films have ever been, subverting style and audience expectation to careful analysis and a reflexive stance not just towards the story being told but the making of the film itself.

As a study of evil, I think it's Scorsese's most insightful: evil is not just banal, but stupid; brazen acts are…

This has grown in my esteem with each of 10 or so watches over 40+ years. It’s the greatest achievement of studio/backlot world-building since Metropolis or Faust. Along with Legend, Blade Runner seems in direct continuity with the fantasy masterpieces of the late silent era. But unlike Legend, the script has something to say about the world that’s been so meticulously crafted; it captures both the allure and nihilism of postmodernism, while depicting the dehumanizing cruelty of technological advancement in…

*Really, just go ahead and read Angelica Jade Bastién’s review on Vulture. She says it all!* 

My review:

Retrograde Freudianism-infused misogyny mixed with laboured strangeness to unsavory effect. Just in case the fractured dialogue, CG pig-ducks and steampunk carriages didn’t signal “weird” clearly enough, the fish-eye lens and tangy guitar music make sure you don’t miss the obvious. 

I’d swear the script is one of those “women written by men” takedowns. It starts as Bride of Frankenstein (good) but somewhere…

Poor Carrie White, horror cinema's greatest victim-monster. Sissy Spacek, all thin, sharp angles and giant eyes, drenched in pig's blood, hands contorted into claws, is every bit the iconic marriage of actor and role as Max Schreck or Boris Karloff. For my money, her performance is the most affecting in any horror movie.

De Palma serves up sequences charged with primal psychological impact: bloody Carrie wreathed first by water, then flame. Yes, De Palma's camera is often literally the embodiment…

As satire it’s facile, superficial and misogynistic, a tired retread of Neon Demon and Death Becomes Her. The endless quoting of other movies is tiresome. What have The Shining, A Clockwork Orange, The Fly, Vertigo or Society got to do with this movie?

As a grotesquerie it has some merit. The final thirty minutes abandon all pretence of being anything other than a shitstorm of latex and red-dyed corn syrup, and I respect that. If only the two hours before…