Due to unforeseen circumstances, I wound up watching The School for Good and Evil in two sections: the first hour and fifteen minutes in one go, the remaining hour and ten minutes a while later. After section one, I thought the negative critical reception seemed unfair. Sure, the CGI wolf heads attached to the guard […]
Rosaline, in every way, almost gets there. It almost pulls off an anachronistic attitude that feels sly and purposeful, rather than tonally muddled and wannabe-hip. It almost gives its heroine enough personality to evoke a whole human being. It almost indulges in a fun, twisty romantic sabotage plot; then, turning the tables, it almost makes […]
Every week 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: Jurassic World Dominion continues its franchise’s burning question of what happens in a version of the modern world where […]
Studio 4°C doesn’t have the same name recognition of the best-known and best-loved Japanese animation studios in the West, which I imagine is at least in part because its best and boldest work is at this point well over a decade in the past. But it have some irresistibly interesting credits to their name, with […]
The entity that is MTV has obviously changed considerably since the channel first killed the radio star in 1981. While anyone whose birth year starts with a “2” might only know it for reality series or teen soaps, MTV’s historical prominence as a conduit between music and mainstream culture cannot be overstated. While their previous […]
The biggest reason to be temperate in one’s praise of Belle, the newest film by the great animation director Hosoda Mamoru, is that this is extremely similar to a different film by the great animation director Hosoda Mamoru, 2009’s Summer Wars (and Summer Wars, in turn, has a reputation for being extremely similar to Hosoda’s […]
You wouldn’t notice it without looking at the poster, but the title of Hulu’s new teen romantic comedy Sex Appeal is meant to be a pun. Sex APPeal. Like… an app. About sex. It’s actually quite fitting, because the movie is exactly like its title, in that it’s something totally misguided and off-base that through […]
The new film adaptation of the 1957 stage musical West Side Story has an exceptionally high “why did you feel the need to make this” bar to clear. Because it’s also, in the public imagination if not in the most precisely literal sense, a remake of the 1961 film musical West Side Story, one of […]
West Side Story, the highest-grossing film of 1961 and the winner of that year’s Best Picture Oscar (one of a whopping ten awards it one at that ceremony; only three films have ever won more*), has been a duly-anointed classic for so long – pretty much since 1961, really – that it can be hard […]
The original Brodaway production of the musical Dear Evan Hansen won six Tonys off of nine nominations, making it the single most-awarded production of the 2016-’17 season. In some years this would mean very little, but that season was an atypically competitive one for critically-acclaimed new musicals, meaning that there had to be some actual […]
I have never read Patrick Ness’s 2008 YA novel The Knife of Never Letting Go, the source material for the feature film Chaos Walking (the movie takes its title form the overall series of which the book was the first part). Indeed, until a day ago, I had never heard of The Knife of Never […]
There is certainly a very good film within Better Days. Arguably, in fact, there are three: a story about high school bullying, a story about the high pressure put upon teenagers to perform well academically, and a love story about two teenaged outsiders finding strength in each other’s presence. It’s not very hard to see […]
