If you have set yourself the task of making a movie prequel to probably Roald Dahl’s best-known children’s book, 1964’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (and what you are actually doing is making a prequel to the 1971 film based on that book, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, but six of one, half-dozen of […]
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is a little bit sloppy and narratively cluttered, it has unexceptional visuals, I didn’t buy either of its lead characters as written and only one of them as performed, and its modestly diverting action setpieces are hindered by how weightless the wall-to-wall CGI bringing them to life is. It is […]
If all you know about heavy metal icon Rob Zombie is his directorial filmography, you would still have absolutely no doubt that here is a man who adores horror cinema. His first seven theatrical features all have the unmistakable energy of somebody who has seen all the movies and knows them inside and out, and […]
There should never have been any sequels to the 1960 film Psycho, of course. It is not at all a perfect film (that godawful psychiatrist scene at the end is more than sufficient to guarantee that), but it is a fully-realized film, and one whose profound impact of the movie landscape is maybe literally impossible […]
If you had asked me at the start of 2022 if I thought that 2009’s Orphan had lived on as a classic of modern horror, I’d have looked sort of through you for an awkward moment in a confused, glassy-eyed way before tentatively replying “the J.A. Bayona film?” And we’d have had a beat before […]
There’s no reason for a film as flat and uninspired as Leatherface to have taken such a painful path into the world as it did. The short version: Lionsgate and Millennium Films acquired the rights to make several Texas Chainsaw Massacre sequels, but ended up dawdling so long on releasing the two it actually paid […]
In the very first scene of Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, screenwriters J.K. Rowling and Steven Kloves make “Dumbledore is gay” canonical in the Harry Potter universe. At the far side of 142 impossibly unhurried minutes, this will turn out to have been the most consequential narrative development of the film. After three films, […]
The Many Saints of Newark is the kind of project that often gets described in a certain kind of news article or film review as “the feature fans have been waiting on for fourteen years”, before going on to talk about whether or not the wait has been rewarded. I have only this to say: […]
Black Widow is, on balance, a largely blank experience: devoid of anything particularly obnoxious other than a 133-minute running time that it seems to view as an obligation rather than an opportunity for expansive storytelling, pretty formulaic in every single element of its storytelling, packed with hollow action scenes that don’t hurt to watch, nor […]
I genuinely cannot think of any way in which humanity is advanced by taking an all-time magnificent psychopathic comic villain like Cruella De Vil, raving madwoman of the 1961 Walt Disney animated feature One Hundred and One Dalmatians, and giving her a sympathetic origin story. But then, I cannot think of any reason to have […]
The films of Don Bluth have been a much more reliable source of franchise than I would have ever imagined. The Secret of NIMH got a sequel, though it took 16 years; An American Tail got three sequels, one of which played theaters; All Dogs Go to Heaven, despite being wildly perceived as a failure, […]
Intermittently this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: in Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, Dwayne Johnson plays a character who was introduced as a villain in […]
