Also check out my review of the American cut As most everyone with even a passing interest in horror or indie movies knows, in 1968, young George A. Romero made Night of the Living Dead with the thinnest of budgets and an ungodly amount of creativity, and triggered a seismic event in the genre’s history; […]
I have no idea why it surprises me, but there’s another goddamn J-horror remake. Except this one is actually a remake of a Thai film, but it’s pretty much just a Thai rip-off of the J-horror style, and it’s set in Japan (the remake, not the original), and there’s not such a thing as T-horror, […]
I am unnaturally obsessed with the filmmaking family of producer Judd Apatow. Probably because the producer as selling point is such a rare occurrence, all things considered; my immediate sense is that it hasn’t happened since the reign of David O. Selznick (there are other classic examples, like Val Lewton’s horror film unit at RKO […]
David Gordon Green’s incredibly gentle decline continues apace. Eight years ago, he made his feature debut (at a ripe old 25) with George Washington, one of the great American films of the decade; now more than a year after its Sundance debut, his fourth feature Snow Angels is making the rounds, and I must conclude […]
How do you solve a problem like John Boorman? A director who flips from flat-out masterpiece to incoherent wreck like you or I walk out the front door, his career has been a sort of ping-pong match, with early classics like Point Break giving way to later missteps like Beyond Rangoon, or that delightful moment […]
Ken Loach, a filmmaker much underappreciated in the United States, is known for making gritty (so, so gritty) movies that address the unpleasant (so, so unpleasant) face of social injustice and unrest. Thus, when I learned that It’s a Free World…, the director’s latest, was about the exploitation of illegal workers in English factories, it […]
By the time we get to the scene where a wealthy widower has drugged his niece, a nun-in-training wearing his dead wife’s bridal grown, and is nuzzling her breasts with his face while she lies as still as a corpse, it’s pretty clear that Viridiana is a sort of unique movie. By the time, about […]
First, the caveat: I go through exactly the same process with every Gus Van Sant film I’ve ever seen. Immediately after it’s over, there’s a state of bliss brought on by the director’s exceptionally idiosyncratic style. After a few hours, that fades into a serious appreciation of what he achieves with his technique, coupled with […]
It was bound to happen: after coming out of nowhere with two of the best horror films of the decade, British filmmaker Neil Marshall has stumbled with his latest. I’d not quite call it a near miss, let us say instead that it is nearly a miss. The only thing that keeps Doomsday from total […]
The short version is: no, Michael Haneke’s new version of Funny Games does not need to exist. Regardless of its inherent quality or lack thereof, it serves essentially no useful purpose. As to the useless purposes it serves, well, that’s the long version. In 1997, the German director made his first major international splash with […]
Nobody can take this away from Blue Sky Animation Studios: their new version of Horton Hears a Who! is far and away the best of the decade’s three Dr. Seuss adaptations, although neither How the Grinch Stole Christmas – a vile film – nor The Cat in the Hat – a loathsome and vile film […]
In 1921, one of the biggest movie stars in the world made his first feature-length picture, a 68-minute, 6-reel epic that traded on his familiar persona and added a new style of dramatic pathos to his beloved slapstick. By that point, Charles Chaplin was already a bona fide auteur, decades before that word would be […]
