Honestly, there doesn’t seem to be any reason to dogpile on the summer’s first outright flop, Evan Almighty, any more than has already been done. I don’t know what I could add, anyway: every single review has already mentioned that the film sucks because Evan Baxter (Steve Carell) has been twisted from the smug asshole […]
Perhaps you, like myself, made the assumption that a 12-years-later sequel to an action series noted for its significant fluctuations in quality and the PG-13 sequel to an action series noted for its violence and rough language, would be a feeble excuse for anything other than assuaging its over-the-hill star’s ego, and ultimately a fair […]
Okay, I’ll admit: I didn’t do my due diligence for this review and watch Napoleon Dynamite, a film that I have not seen and doubt very strongly that I would enjoy even a little bit. Particularly because nearly everyone is claiming that the sour New Zealand indie Eagle vs Shark is very much like Napoleon […]
A little while ago, I briefly touched upon the three great Japanese master filmmakers of the mid-twentieth century. At the time, my goal was to provide some small context for the oldest, most prolific, and now the most obscure of the three, Mizoguchi Kenji; now, let me turn to the second, both in age and […]
Quite the checklist: the writers of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe team up with the director of Joy Ride and The Great Raid to bring us a trendily dark indie featuring the comic stylings of Sir Ben Kingsley. I know, you can hardly keep from running right out to see it, yeah? Well, […]
The first wave of American slashers began quite distinctly in 1979, when Friday the 13th was released, spawning dozens upon dozens of imitators; it peaked around 1983 and should have been dead by the end of 1984. However, then as now, there was an unaccountable amount of money to be made from a very small […]
After my brief fling with the world of middlebrow American cinema, it’s time to return to what I do best: impenetrable French movies. If you think about it, though, Alain Resnais is totally the sort of filmmaker that the AFI would love. After all, he made a movie about the Holocaust, just like #8,Schindler’s List. […]
The sequel to the worst film in the current superhero movie wave has an exceedingly low bar to clear, so the mere statement, “Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer is one hell of a lot better than Fantastic Four” is actually kind of value-free. Lung surgery is also better than Fantastic Four, and given […]
By custom, this is where I put a little parable about the historical development of the Friday the 13th film series, explaining where the film of the day fit into the series and the greater whole of the 1980s slasher film. I don’t know how to do that here. Because by Friday the 13th, Part […]
It’s received wisdom that there is no such thing as an anti-war movie, because movies make everything exciting, although like much received wisdom, that’s a lie. I think that this has seemed to be the case at least in part precisely because the films we allow to tell us about warfare are made by well-meaning […]
I’m not really up on anime as much as I probably should be, and that is why I’ve never seen Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, or the other films that comprise Kon Satoshi’s body of work. Having now seen Paprika, his fifth project as director, I’m prepared to admit that this was inexcusably short-sighted of me. […]
Luc Besson is usually a pretty decent box office draw amongst the art house crowd in this country, which leaves me wondering why it took a year and a half for us to get Angel-A, purportedly his final live-action movie (which I’ll believe when he’s dead, and not a moment sooner), during which time the […]
