Four degenerate and very powerful officials in Fascist Italy abduct a handful of teenage boys and girls, holding them prisoner in a remote castle, and subject them to all forms of unspeakable abuse, from rape to torture to forced scatological consumption before taking the final, odious step. Nauseating, despicable, and shocking even by today's standards, Pier Paolo Pasolini's notorious Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom is also dull and boorish although its biggest impropriety may be the fact that the filmmaker believed he was creating a scathing indictment on fascism, corruption, and depravity, a flawed notion that many of the film's champions have adopted. Thanks to its deserved nefarious reputation and content, Salo has the car crash affect where feel you have to look and, after doing so, you find yourself unable to avert your eyes. In hindsight, I wish I would have trusted my initial instincts and avoided this exploitative refuse.

zero stars out of ****

A boozy widowed attorney (Kevin Costner) enters into a custody battle for his biracial granddaugter with the girl's ne'er-do-well father (Andre Holland) and his strong-willed mother (Octavia Spencer). Black or White is moralizing, wrongheaded, cliched, cloying tripe that written with the emotional sensibilities of an adolescent. As much as I appreciate Costner and writer/director Mike Binder, they totally miss the boat on this one.

0 stars out of ****

In 1920s Copenhagen, an artist (Eddie Redmayne) dresses in women's clothing while posing for his artist wife (Alicia Vikander in a strong performance), discovers he is a woman, and signs on for the world's first sex change operation. I wanted to use this opportunity to discuss the Oscarssowhite controversy, a controversy I shrugged off as another unwarranted Al Sharpton/Spike Lee entitlement cry until I saw Tom Hooper's The Danish Girl, some glossy, barely thought out topical tripe boasting a truly pathetic performance from Redmayne which recently garnered him another Oscar nomination (not to mention his win last year for another pitiable Oscar bait performance). Now I feel Redmayne's placement would have been held better by a Creed's charismatic Michael B. Jordan or even Will Smith and his earnest turn in Concussion (I should also mention Idris Elba's great disregarded supporting performance in Beasts of No Nation). But does this mean that the Academy is racist? I think all this tells us is that the industry doesn't make enough strong roles for minorities of all persuasions and that the Academy is (as it always was) incredibly finicky, voting how they're told by studios, managers, and friends or for every undeserving, political movie to come down the pike.

0 stars out of ****

A bounty hunter (Kurt Russell) travels Wyoming mountain territory by stage chained to a valuable and deadly quarry (Jennifer Jason Leigh) he treats as a virtual punching bag. Along the way to Red Rocks where his target awaits hanging, he hesitantly picks up a fellow head hunter (Samuel L. Jackson) and an ex-Confederate (Walton Goggins) and a blizzard forces the group to hole up for the night at a remote outpost where one or all of its visitors (Tim Roth, Bruce Dern, Michael Madsen, Demian Bechir) may be in on an ambush. After spending a career addressing high expectations and criticism simply by crafting excellent, particular, stylish, violent, and outlandish films, Quentin Tarantino finally hits a major stumbling block with The Hateful Eight, completely playing into the critics’ hands with a self-important pretentious, trashy, violent for violence’s sake, stupid, and uninspired, schlocked out quasi-Western that feels like a gross imitation of his own work (this would have been a good one for Eli Roth to direct). The cast, which has some strong points in support (particularly Goggins and Dern), is marred by an utterly lost Russell playing a lead, Jennifer Jason Leigh as a seriously confused character, and Jackson is employed again to do the same old tired thing he usually does in these movies which is to yell and intimidate. The Hateful Eight is a major disappointment that sees Tarantino losing control (if you listen closely you can actually hear him drooling over the script and reciting the words) and seems like something made in the wake of Reservoir Dogs, instead of progressing into the great filmmaker that he is.

0 stars out of ****

A would be musician (Domhnall Gleeson) rescues a suicidal keyboardist and falls in with the band, led by an inscrutable vocalist (Michael Fassbender) who never removes his oversized paper mache mask. Frank is yet another sterile little indie exercise, an excruciating, painfully unfunny film providing putrid performances (Fassbender and Maggie Gyllenhaal included) and headache inducing songs, all the while purporting itself as a brilliant satire on the creative process.

No Stars out of ****

The brother (Tom Burke) of a mentally disturbed Bangkok drug lord (Ryan Gosling) is brutally murdered in retaliation for the rape and murder of a 16-year old girl. In flies their malignant, icy mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) to collect her son's body and exact revenge on the warrior-like police captain (Vithaya Pansringarm) who approved the murder. Is there a worse kind of movie than a plotless, humorless slog with haughty intentions and a complete self-seriousness, and furthermore one that exists only for the purpose of its scenes of extreme punctuating violence? Nicolas Winding Refn's follow-up to Drive, which reteams him with an ever glaring Gosling (this time to the point of ludicrousness), feels like it was made by a third grader on steroids with art school aspirations and with a glacial pace that, although the move is only 90 minutes long, would make Berlin Alexanderplatz glide by with the alacrity of a Little Rascals short. Only God Forgives is an ugly, vile mess that shows both how quickly a positive collaboration can turn sour and how two talents can wind up with their heads up their asses without even knowing so.

So I walked into Pacific Rim during the previews, amid the next big budget debacles that Hollywood was promoting. Then one ran for this flashy, sophomoric, and ludicrously overblown blockbuster involving soldiers inhabiting gargantuan robot suits and fighting off Godzilla like invaders, the kind of film that I would have sopped up as a twelve year old and avoid like the plague now. After nearly five minutes went by, I realized it wasn't a trailer but the feature itself, with over two hours yet to come of that infernal inanity. Pacific Rim is an almost complete abomination, especially coming from someone held in such high regard as Guillermo del Toro, who shows no visual flair and presents a repugnant digitized film from a screenplay that seems like it was written by James Cameron's half-witted younger brother. The acting is atrocious (Sons of Anarchy costars Charlie Hunnam and Ron Perlman are the biggest culprits) and talented performers like Idris Elba and Rinko Kikuchi can do nothing to right this mess. Between the inept action sequences, artless set design, putrid dialogue, and abysmal acting,  I couldn't tell if this movie was to be taken seriously or if this was all one big 190 million dollar joke. 

After becoming unusually taken by the video below, I was drawn even closer to the flame when I decided to watch the dreadful Deadfall, a ponderously horrid debacle that figures prominently in the clip reel ("WELL VIVRE LA FUCKIN' FRANCE MAN!!!") that is even worse than one would initially presume. It stars Nicholas Cage in a performance that is out of control even by his standards, was funded by his uncle Francis Ford Coppola, and directed by his brother Christopher Coppola, presumably to pay off gambling debts. The likes of James Coburn, Charlie Sheen, and Peter Fonda are also part of this godforsaken nightmare which does carry camp value when Cage is present but turns into a total slog upon his swift exit.

After sharing a moment with an alluring man (Luke Kirby) on a plane, a writer (Michelle Williams) is dismayed to find he lives across the street from her and her happily married cookbook writing husband (Seth Rogen), and finds it increasingly difficult to suppress her attraction to him. Take This Waltz is flighty and fanciful nonsense, that is shameful in so many ways, that would make even Diablo Cody nauseous. In the proud new tradition of feminist movies, here were see women on the toilet, women wetting themselves, full frontal old lady nudity, fairly graphic sex scenes, and male characters who represent nothing more than female fantasies. The movie was made by Sarah Polley, who made a good film before in Away from Her and whose bio-doc Stories We Tell is being received well now, along with Michelle Williams who has been excellent in almost everything I've seen her in makes me wonder what the hell they're doing in this baffling, odious, idiotic movie. 

An ex-soldier turned hitman, reeling from a recently botched job, takes on a new assignment at the insistence of his partner. Hired by a mysterious businessman, the 3 charges promise a big payoff but instead lead the two men down a dark and deadly path. Ben Wheatley's "Kill List" is a vile, senseless, and witless movie lacking any sense of style and storytelling technique. I am not resistant to violence in the movies, but rather towards violence for violence sake, and watching this reprehensible rubbish made me physically sick. This is the kind of film where brain dead burnouts walk out of it exclaiming, "Whoa, my favorite part was when that dude got his head bashed in with a hammer!"

A law enforcement official climbs out of the trunk of car, breaks the fourth wall, and tells us that we are about to witness an homage to "no reason". For the following 80 minutes we watch a tire, realizing its power of telekinesis, rolling around the desert causing head explosions of everyone it comes across. Looking over the most detestable films I have ever seen, I have determined that I would rather sit through a marathon screening of "The Happening", Tony Scott's "Domino", "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", "Smokin' Aces", "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me", and "Ali G Indahouse" than be subjected to this putrid inanity again.

Dogtooth tells the story of three grown children who are confined to their parents' Greek manor. With lies spun by their mother and father in order to keep them from leaving the property, the three still operate in an infantile manner. When the father brings home a blindfolded female security guard from the factory he works in, in order to fulfill his son's needs, things start to get even stranger as the "children" begin to rebel. Dogtooth is an absurdly bizarre film that is content with being that and nothing else. For 93 minutes, all we get are strange vignettes that add up to very little, though I did find the scene where the family listens to Sinatra's Fly Me to the Moon and the father says that is their grandfather and offers a personal translation of the lyrics. On the whole however, this movie offers nearly nothing and expects you to wade in its depravity.