I am not about to ask whether Francis Ford Coppola is actually a good director or just a hack who got lucky a few times in the 1970s. Even his worst films – which, admittedly, well outnumber his best films – are unmistakably the work of a man in possession of overwhelming creativity and skill. […]
Sometimes it all comes down to the basics: a simple script with all the frills removed, characters who are not in the least bit hip or witty or clever, brilliant actors to portray them, and a director with enough faith in her material that she never deigns to indulge in flashy stylistic whorls, using the […]
Three years ago, Jerry Bruckheimer, with his unfailing ability to produce movies that make endless amounts of money without filling any previously unfulfilled need, oversaw National Treasure, a moderately silly, moderately stupid and shockingly enjoyable matinee-style adventure yarn best described as “The Da Vinci Code but with American history.” Bruckheimer being Bruckheimer, it is deeply […]
The creators: Director Bob Clark, later of the slightly different holiday classic A Christmas Story and the slightly less classic Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2; screenwriter Roy Moore, of (Canadian!) television and the forgotten 1981 film The Last Chase. The plot: Shortly before Christmas break, the four girls remaining at Pi Kappa Sigma sorority house at […]
Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd. His skin was pale and his eye was odd. He shaved the faces of gentlemen Who never thereafter were heard of again. He trod a path that few have trod, Did Sweeney Todd, The demon barber of Fleet Street. I cannot pretend to naturally have the proper critical distance […]
The Kite Runner is everything that I think of when I haughtily trot out the phrase “middlebrow art film”. It is based on a popular book that is probably not quite good enough to justify its popularity. It is about Significant Themes That Matter Today. It is not very happy, but traditional morality is safely […]
The newest adaptation of Richard Matheson’s epoch-defining vampire novel I Am Legend has, perhaps surprisingly, quite a few things to recommend it, not least that it’s the first to actually take Matheson’s title. Which might give you at list a glimmer of hope that it would correspondingly be the first satisfying adaptation, which isn’t ultimately […]
A quintessential product of the early 1970s and the characteristic sci-fi of the era, the one thing that you can’t say about 1971’s The Omega Man is that it tries too hard to hew to the book. Except for the central concept – and that only vaguely – this film has essentially nothing in common […]
The first thing to note about 1964’s The Last Man on Earth, the first successful attempt to film Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (Hammer Films attempted to adapt the film only a couple of years after the novel was published, but their treatment proved too controversial even for that studio; thus was it passed on […]
The English language only has so much flexibility to it, and I do not think that the words exist to express just how deeply unsettling it is to see remarkably authentic-looking computer generated cartoon chipmunks interacting with live actors in a real-world setting. It’s the Uncanny Valley on steroids: from the neck down, these are […]
Full disclosure: I walked into Juno not expecting to like it very much. I was going to see right through its too-hip vernacular and faux-clever pop culture reference points, I was. And then I was going to write a review about how terribly pedestrian the whole thing felt. This isn’t that review, because I was […]
Don’t Open Till Christmas (1984, United Kingdom) The creators: Director Edmund Purdom, in his only behind-the camera gig, as his career consists of an extraordinary number of roles in Italian thrillers (and the lead role in this feature); writer Derek Ford, a sexploitation director and British TV vet. Additional material written and directed by “Al […]
