The omnibus film! That most difficult, maddening, precious attempt to gather the best and the brightest of international cinema into one place, the genre that peaked and fizzled in a roughly 3 year span in the 1960s and has never taken off since! A full year after its 2006 Cannes premiere, the United States gets […]
A touch of theory: in general, no film comedy should be longer than 105 minutes, no action movie should be longer than 135 minutes, no children’s movie should be longer than 90 minutes, and no film with the word “Pirates” in the title should be longer than two hours. In general. Pirates of the Caribbean: […]
It is 1984. The first major wave of American slasher films is just about spent. In Britain, the “Video Nasties” panic in Great Britain was codified into law in that year, and in the United States, family groups were openly questioning whether the genre was actively immoral. Not an unusual environment for Hollywood to find […]
I would like to share a bit of received wisdom with you all: you can’t tell somebody that what they’re laughing at isn’t funny. Thankfully, nobody in the theater where I saw Shrek the Third was laughing very much at all, so I don’t have to pretend that it was anything other than a complete […]
Ah, the centenary! Such a sacral observance for beings such as we, that are hard-wired to think in tens. And this month witnesses two that are not so important in the great scheme of things, but mean quite a lot to me: Katharine Hepburn’s 100th on May 12, and John Wayne’s on May 26. Being […]
It seems likely that we are on the cusp of a new wave in three-dimensional cinema. The usual suspects (soulless technocrat George Lucas; the marketing genii at Disney; Zemeckis and Spielberg and their descendents) are convinced that this will give them new licence to create beautiful, immersive worlds, expand the limits of storytelling, and release […]
If I were to ask of you: “Jane Fonda, Lindsay Lohan and Felicity Huffman are starring in a film together, whom do you think gave the most memorable performance,” you would not likely answer, “Obviously, Lindsay Lohan, that high-talent little spitfire,” and that is where you would be wrong. For it is indeed Ms. Lohan […]
I promised myself, before ever sitting down to watch Waitress, that I would not talk about The Murder. As I left the theater, I thought about how great it was that I had plenty to discuss using only the film itself, and not The Murder. So here I am, in front of the computer, and […]
My hopes were much higher than my expectations concerning 28 Weeks Later, which I figured would be somewhere between “tepid cash-in” and “almost as good as the first one.” On balance, I think it’s not entirely fair to compare this film with 28 Days Later, for they seek to do different things, but if I […]
Thanks be to Criterion’s “Eclipse” line, and its stated mission of bringing lost films back to light! For without it, I would never have heard of, let alone seen, Phantom India, Louis Malle’s six-hour French television documentary from 1969. Yes, I mean this in a positive way. The backstory: in 1967, Malle was sent by […]
There have always been sequels to horror movies. But once upon a time, there was not such a thing as the de facto sequel, the sequel which is justified simply because the original film exists. A story had to be truly special, or inordinately successful at the box office to earn a continuation. That changed […]
It’s not at all a great film, but in one respect at least I feel the need to salute the makers of The Flying Scotsman for doing something that I’ve never seen a movie do before: combine the inspirational underdog sports movie with a fairly honest (for the movies) and kind of unpleasant exploration of […]
