One of the very first lines of dialogue spoken in the 1989 animated feature The Little Mermaid is “A fine strong wind and a following sea. King Triton must be in a friendly-type mood.” The approximately equivalent line of dialogue in the 2023 remake of that same film is “This is a dangerous time. Tonight’s […]
The sad thing about Evil Dead Rise is that it is so extremely happy to be an Evil Dead movie. Writer-director Lee Cronin is clearly a huge fan of the series, and has put great effort into making sure his movie evokes all sorts of specific lines and story beats and whatnot. One might say, […]
The best film of Disney’s ongoing, increasingly worn-out cycle of live-action (and/or photorealistic CGI that the studio stubbornly declares to be “live-action” as a marketing hook) remakes of its classic animated features is 2016’s Pete’s Dragon, which isn’t even a remake of an animated feature anyways, and that probably helped. It also helped that Pete’s […]
There’s always something fascinating and strange about when an established film property is given new life as a stage musical and that musical eventually wends its way back to the screen. We’re here to talk Matilda the Musical (with music and lyrics by Tim Minchin and book by Dennis Kelly, also on screenwriting duty) so obviously […]
I can hear you right now. You’re asking, “They made a remake of Terror Train?” That is, if you even remember the movie Terror Train existed in the first place. It’s a minor 1980 classic notable for its setting (a train), its holiday theme (New Year’s Eve), its star (Jamie Lee Curtis), and a couple notables […]
Being one of the best Hellraiser films released since 1988 is such a non-achievement that it’s a little discouraging that I can’t bring myself to say that the eleventh film in the series, simply titled Hellraiser, isn’t better than “one of” the best in that time span. This attempt by screenwriters Ben Collins & Luke […]
Hang around long enough as a cinephile and you’ll eventually watch significant filmmakers fade into irrelevance. If you’ve only gotten the bug sometime in the past 15 years, you may be largely unfamiliar with Neil LaBute, who’d once briefly appeared to be a major new filmmaker; after grabbing attention with 1997’s In the Company of […]
The 1940 feature-length animated adaptation of Pinocchio is one of the crown jewels of American cinema. It is perhaps the most lustrous, richly-colored and -textured of all hand-drawn and hand-painted animated films, as much an example of fine art given the illusion of life through 24 frames-per-second movement as it is just another cartoon – […]
The history of cinematic adaptions of Dangerous Liaisons is a strange one. The earliest, to my knowledge, is a French film from 1959 that took place in what was then the present day. This was apparently so misleading that it needed to be rechristened Les Liaisons dangereuses 1960. The next two adaptations were a pair […]
I think the fair thing to do is to regard Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank not with contempt that it exists, but with amazement that it survived to be released. Though I think you could temper that amazement with a little bit of contempt. That would be fair. Still, let’s not get too […]
Final Cut (the original French title is Coupez!) puts me in a bit of a sticky situation. The film—which opened this year’s Cannes Film Festival—is a remake of the 2017 Japanese film One Cut of the Dead (released in France as Ne coupez pas!), which achieved instant (and deserved) cult classic status. That movie tells […]
Sometimes, the peculiar alchemy of what makes a film click with an audience can never be fully understood, but merely accepted as what is, part of the ineffable magic of the movies. This is not the case with the six Leprechaun films that were released between 1993 and 2003. Every person who’s ever seen even […]
