Film critics watch hundreds of movies every year, and invariably get a little cranky when they hit a patch of lousy movies. So it is occasionally therapeutic to take out one's frustrations on a film that is egregiously putrid — particularly if that film is from a serial befouler of movie theaters (I think I logged 12 blissfully uninterrupted hours of sleep after filing my pan of Paul W.S. Anderson's "Death Race").
Scathingly negative reviews are not often illuminating, but when written by masters of the craft, they can be immensely satisfying reads. When The New Yorker's Pauline Kael got a burr in her saddle, she could inveigh at length or fire off a one-sentence kill-shot (her full review of Herbert Ross' "Steel Magnolias" was published as follows: "Chalk scraping across a chalkboard for two hours"). Roger Ebert was also practiced in the skill of invective, as he demonstrated in his...
Scathingly negative reviews are not often illuminating, but when written by masters of the craft, they can be immensely satisfying reads. When The New Yorker's Pauline Kael got a burr in her saddle, she could inveigh at length or fire off a one-sentence kill-shot (her full review of Herbert Ross' "Steel Magnolias" was published as follows: "Chalk scraping across a chalkboard for two hours"). Roger Ebert was also practiced in the skill of invective, as he demonstrated in his...
- 7/14/2025
- by Jeremy Smith
- Slash Film
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