Matthew Shepherd revisits Susanne Bier’s Serena starring Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence… Bradley Cooper rarely talks about Serena. Jennifer Lawrence does not either. This felt odd until learning more about it, now it makes a lore more sense. In early 2012, the two of them filmed a Depression-era period drama in the Czech Republic directed […]
Suburbicon: When Even the Coen Brothers Can’t Save Your Movie
Matthew Shepherd on where it went wrong for Suburbicon… Hollywood disasters feel almost common these days. A production that loses its director, a star who drops out, a release date colliding with an unmovable franchise behemoth. These are all normal. Suburbicon though, the George Clooney 2017 dark comedy, is not normal. It is much stranger […]
The Counselor: When an All-Star Cast Couldn’t Deliver a Hit
Matthew Shepherd looks back at Ridley Scott’s forgotten star-studded crime thriller The Counselor… Ridley Scott does not often admit when he thinks he has been wronged. The man who made Alien, Blade Runner, and Gladiator has a strong confidence in his own judgement that borders on geological. So when he told the Toronto Sun, years […]
A Cast Too Good For A Film This Bad: Collateral Beauty
Matthew Shepherd revisit’s 2016’s Collateral Beauty… Hollywood humiliations are both rare and fascinating occurrences. Unlike other examples, this isn’t a quiet burial of a cheap production nobody believed in, but the very public implosion of a film that had everything — a-list cast, optimal release slot, financially bolstered awards campaign and an intriguing trailer that […]
A Cinematic Anomaly: Serenity
Matthew Shepherd on 2019’s Serenity… There is a very specific kind of Hollywood film that defies all logic. Not a film that was always destined to fail — a cheap production with no names attached, quietly shelved and forgotten — but one that arrives with every conceivable advantage and still manages to vanish without trace. […]
