Critics reviews

As always with Dante, there’s a lot more going on beneath the (admittedly wonderful) surface. And somehow it makes perfect sense that this paean to glorious, innocent trash would come out in the trashiest movie month of the year.

As much as [Matinee] pokes fun at classic B-movie dreck, the finale upholds the genre as a means not only of tackling subjects largely barred from mainstream, “respectable” cinema of the era but also providing a sense of release from the anxieties of the age.

Dante's 1993 film Matinee, a celebration of art over war, movies over Armageddon, is the closest thing the Gremlins director has to a lost masterpiece... [It's the director's] most personal film... and you might as well go up in a mushroom cloud if you don’t get a kick out of movie-within-a-movie Mant.

Even the most vicious of Dante's satires have a light touch, but none so light as the one he brings to his shamelessly nostalgic tribute to B-movie gimmick master William Castle. So dedicated to reproducing the charms of the golden age of shlock, the director goes so far as to create an entire creature feature within the movie that perfectly nails the chewy pulp and abysmal effects of 50s no-budget sci-fi.

Here, the director celebrates the inventive and delirious joy of cinema, in its lowliest yet most audacious forms, against the threat of nuclear annihilation. Dante distils the love that literally changed his life into a liberatory poem on the euphoric and therefore uncontrollable energy that cinema can exert on its audience. Matinee is, and will forever be, one of the most authentic renditions of what it actually means to believe in cinema.

[Matinee's] thin plot never detracts from the quaint charm of the production, which like Woolsey’s Mant, is escapist cinema at its best: entertaining, ephemeral, and just a little bit frightening.

Goodman's schlock merchant displays just the right mix of con-man materialism and childlike glee at his own bogus movie magic; the customary in-jokes and cameos reinforce the mood of loving, wryly amused hommage, and the kids' stuff never cloys. Inspired chaos, and for anyone into the delirious absurdities of '50s sci-fi, a must.

[Matinee] is likely to appeal to 50s horror movie anoraks and nostalgia freaks, though the pastiche black-and-white Mant footage and spoof trailers should tickle even those unaware of what they're meant to be parodying.

Haas and inspired director Joe Dante have effortlessly condensed about a decade's worth of academic cultural studies into an often hilarious conceit... Matinee is a winning piece of pop whimsy.

[Matinee] is a tender paean to growing up in the early 1960s, with the twin backdrops of nuclear bomb paranoia and "Atom Age" monster flicks... It's the contrast between fake movie scares and real-life ones that makes Dante's nostalgic inferno such an engaging delight.

It's extremely funny, charming, and entertaining, the way movies are supposed to be but seldom are nowadays. To assume that anything that's so much fun is also telling us something about how we behave both as film spectators and as warmongers, not only three decades ago but right this minute, is to grant a seriousness to our amusement obviously greater than the culture can bear.

[Matinee] is a ticklish nut-brain romp--a crazy quilt of grade-Z horror spoofs... [Dante] pulls out his bag of tricks and even puts in an animated doodle; he’s reaching not only for the flagrant awfulness of movies like “MANT” but also for the zippy ardor of the classic Warner Bros. cartoons.