film critics Archives - Desperate Living

Family Values: David Cronenberg’s The Brood

Perhaps David Cronenberg’s most personal and unnerving film, a tale of marital strife, bad science and killer kids.

Richard Roundtree And The Critical Dismissal Of Black Action Cinema

Looking back at the iconic star of Shaft and how the cinematic movement that film helped spawn was (and is) ghettoised by an elitist movie establishment.

Sight And Sound’s Greatest Films – The Next Batch

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The Greatest Films Of All Time saga rumbles on with the release of the full top 250 titles.

Why the Sight and Sound Poll Doesn’t Matter – And Why It Does

Thoughts from 2012 on ‘the greatest films of all time’ and the odd outliers of the Sight and Sound poll that year as we await the 2022 results.

In Defence Of… Fierce Creatures

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The much-maligned British 1997 comedy farce is a lot more fun than humourless film critics would like you to think.

Movie 43 – Was It Really That Bad?

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The most hated film of the 2010s now feels even more out of time than ever – but was it actually as awful as you have been told?

Noirvember: An Introduction

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Setting the scene for our month of Film Noir reviews – and explaining why we are refusing to take a narrow view of just what ‘noir’ is.

Negative Reactions

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The compelling awfulness of the YouTube Reaction Video.

Pulped Friction: Learning To Live With The World’s Most Over-Hyped Movie

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Almost three decades on, Pulp Fiction remains the go-to Cool Movie for people who aren’t cool.

An Unlimited Supply: The EMI Video Catalogues

The pioneering home video offerings from one of Britain’s biggest entertainment companies.

Puncturing The American Dream: Honky Tonk Freeway Reconsidered

John Schlesinger’s notorious flop is a fascinatingly cynical – if heavily flawed – look at American culture.