Current Attractions: Criticising the critics, Z-grade action, and favourite movies to re-watch

There’s so many great stories on movies online nowadays that you can’t possibly read them all. Save yourself the time and simply read our regular round-up of what’s making us think, laugh, or scratch our heads.

Discredit Where Discredit is Due

As web series like Honest Trailers and Everything Wrong With… get huge hits for exposing Hollywood’s cinematic ‘crimes’, The Dissolve’s Matt Singer takes to Nitpicking the Nitpickers and ponders why these folks prefer to kneecap successful blockbusters over truly woeful movies like The Internship and R.I.P.D.

Another bite of The Apple

Nick Pinkerton from Film Comment spotlights the “moral and aesthetic confusion” of 1979’s campy box office bomb The Apple in the wake of the passing of Menahem Golan, the infamous studio head and focus of Mark Hartley’s new documentary, Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films.

Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, BEETLEJUICE!... Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice...

Movie Mezzanine’s Jake Pitre shares what he re-watches over and over, in 7 Movies I’ve Seen More Than I Can Count. The list touches on various genres across the decades, beginning with Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice, which opened his mind to “genuinely considering the afterlife and what will happen to me after I die”.

So Bad, He's Back

The midnight movies circuit has found a new hero thanks to Cinema Epoch’s “reclamation” of the works of the late Amir Shervan, an Iranian director behind several terrible, US-based action flicks from the ‘80s and ‘90s. Dennis Harvey over at Fandor breaks down his bizarre career in all its gaudy glory.

Once Again From the Top

Indiewire's Anne Thompson looks at the announcement from Harvey Weinstein that he's re-releasing Begin Again in American cinemas in an obvious attempt to score a Best Song nomination from the Academy. The Oscar veteran – and well-known shenanigan puller – also handled Once, winner of the award in 2007.